Hit the pause button on your regularly scheduled life for a moment, and ask yourself: Am I spending a substantial part of my time feeling unusually stressed out and on edge or anxious about the future? Do I feel like I’m being bombarded with bad or alarming news or other people’s mercurial moods? Am I experiencing emotional whiplash as my feelings swing from sadness to fear to anger or hopelessness in the span of minutes or hours when I hear about the latest natural disaster, human rights crisis, or political debacle? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re hardly alone.
A rising number of adults in the US are troubled by a phenomenon they don’t know there’s a name for. It may be marked by a sense of agitation, foreboding, spiraling negative thoughts, sleep disturbances, and a sense of hardly recognizing the lighthearted, fun-loving people they used to be. It’s what I call “emotional inflammation,” and when I look around, hear the expressed thoughts of my patients, colleagues, and friends, and even consider times in my own life, it feels like we are in the midst of an epidemic of it. While life goes on, and many of us put on a happy face, our sense of well-being is still badly shaken. Some people suffer from symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—with worry, disturbing and intrusive thoughts, hyperreactivity, hypervigilance, grief, sleep problems, and nightmares—but in this case the symptoms stem not from a traumatic event or series of events but from how it feels to live in today’s world and from anxiety about what it could be like in the future.
The intention here is not to make you feel more demoralized or despondent than you do already but to validate your feelings and show you that you have plenty of company in your emotional unease. When people hear about the concept of emotional inflammation and its symptoms, they often have an “aha” moment of recognition and relatability, one that makes them feel understood and less alone. Knowing there’s a name for the way they’ve been feeling helps it feel less unsettling. And realizing that your distressing emotions are being triggered on a fairly regular basis by the turmoil in the world around you, rather than by something inside you, should provide some relief. That doesn’t mean you should simply accept your current emotional state as the new normal. On the contrary, you can consciously take steps to ease it and navigate toward steadier emotional ground.
The first step is to recognize emotional inflammation for what it is. Many of us are rattled by the political situations in the US and around the globe, the health of the planet, and even the state of humanity. With all the recent disasters in the natural world—the hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, searing heat, and bizarre weather—that are linked to the climate crisis, people are starting to wonder if Mother Nature’s patience has run out. The fear that no one is really in control in the government leaves us feeling deeply vulnerable. People are shaken by the unrelenting mass shootings, the rise of hate crimes, nuclear missile testing, the stream of sexual abuse or misconduct scandals, and general news about how our health and well-being are threatened by the increasingly degraded and depleted natural world.
Given this, it’s not surprising that the prevalence of major depression in the US has risen dramatically since 2005, with the most rapid rate of increase among teenagers and young adults. The World Health Organization reports that both depression and anxiety have risen to unprecedented levels—epidemic proportions—throughout the world. Depression is now especially high among women in North and South America, and anxiety disorders are higher among men and women in the US than anywhere else in the world. The use of antidepressants in the US has nearly doubled since 2000, and nine million people regularly use prescription sleeping pills.
The (mis)use of opioids has skyrocketed, too. Since 1999, opioid overdose deaths have increased fivefold among women in the US. In 2017 alone, opioid overdoses killed more than 47,000 people in the US. That’s more than six times the number of US military service members that were killed in the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. While some of the factors contributing to the opioid crisis are obvious—overprescribing by physicians and unconscionable and unlawful business practices of pharmaceutical companies and distributors—in my experience other questions beg to be asked, including, Why do so many people want them so badly?
One answer is obvious: People are hurting emotionally.
With the threats and worries swirling around us becoming so pervasive—overwhelming, really—our culture has recently coined terms for new forms of fatigue or depletion, including outrage fatigue, evacuation fatigue, scandal fatigue, compassion fatigue, racial battle fatigue, apocalypse fatigue, and eco-anxiety. Recently, the term solastalgia, coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress of seeing treasured land permanently damaged by industrial activity or extreme weather events, has entered the cultural lexicon, particularly in the mental health field and environmental activism community. This term “speaks to my changing experience in nature,” Mark Coleman, a mindfulness meditation teacher and nature guide, wrote in a 2019 issue of Mindful magazine. “In the past, nature had always been an unending source of nourishment, joy, wonder, and love. Now, it is often tinged with sadness, grief, or loss” over what is happening to diverse habitats, species, and bodies of water.
Many of these newly named conditions reflect a profound sense of helplessness, hopelessness, cynicism, apathy, or distraction—or a mixture of all of them. These fears and worries are superimposed upon our own personal, day-to-day challenges—coping with demanding jobs for which we may not be sufficiently compensated, the high cost of modern life, raising kids in a world with increasingly challenging obstacles, dangerous temptations, and the like.
If you don’t think you’re experiencing emotional inflammation, you’re probably not paying close enough attention to how you’re feeling. As a psychiatrist in Washington, DC, I am increasingly seeing the debilitating effects of emotional hyperreactivity in my patients, as well as in friends, climate activists, political insiders, and media professionals, and even in my own life. In my work with young people, I’m seeing an increase in anxiety and depression—more teens reaching for opioids, and college students showing up at student health centers in overwhelming numbers. They may come in complaining about stress that’s related to exams or social pressures, but these issues exist against a backdrop of news that the natural world may be on the verge of collapsing. Besides seeing and treating these variants of psychological and emotional distress on a regular basis, I have become a frequent commentator about anxiety and trauma for television, radio, print media, and other venues. My coauthor Stacey Colino is an award-winning writer specializing in health and psychology, and our combined expertise, perspectives, and experience, I can say with conviction, more than confirm the adage that two heads are better than one.
More and more these days, people are asking, What can I do about the psychological turmoil that I’m feeling? How can I feel safe and steady myself again? How can I respond to triggers more effectively? These questions reflect the deepening emotional toll of anxiety, fear, outrage, anger, and sorrow—of a society under stress. It doesn’t have to be this way. When we can name and better understand these emotions, some of the intensity of their grip will dissipate naturally. But not all of it will, which is why we have written this book.
Many of the issues triggering emotional inflammation—fear mongering and discord among politicians, extreme weather events, living with a mercurial leader, human rights abuses, natural disasters, and breaking news about widely used chemicals harming our health—feel largely outside of our control. Yet, we do have a degree of influence over these triggers because we can better understand how we respond to them and cultivate critical thinking skills and the emotional clarity to keep us from being at their mercy. We can quell our emotional hyperreactivity by creating lifestyles and rhythms that are in sync with the inherent needs of our bodies and minds, by exposing ourselves to the right types of stimulation in the right amounts, by grasping how and why our physical and mental health are affected by certain lifestyle choices, and by partaking of nature’s vast healing powers.
To be clear, the goal is not to stop feeling or to stop showing emotion. Feelings and emotions make us sentient beings and bring texture and richness to our lives. They bring valuable data that helps inform us about the choices we’re making, the way we’re living, and even what is healthy for us and could improve the state of our troubled and troubling world. It’s not in our best interest to suppress any of this data. It’s better to work with it and use it as motivation to take effective action, in one way or another.
With this book, we are popping the hood, so to speak, to see what’s underneath, so we can address the changes that need to be made to keep the engine (our minds) running more smoothly. In part 1, you will learn more about the various forces that are making us feel fearful, powerless, or even at times despondent, and the physiological, psychological, social, and spiritual ripple effects of living with emotional inflammation. You’ll be able to identify the form(s) of emotional inflammation that affects you most frequently. In part 2, what we call the “RESTORE plan” will help you figure out how you can reclaim your equilibrium and channel the distressing emotions you’ve been experiencing in constructive ways. As you’ll see, the basis for calming emotional inflammation is rooted in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, and it’s designed to lead to a deep, sustainable improvement in the way you feel and function. The book is designed to help you foster the resolve, courage, and wisdom that can allow you to live with vitality, engagement, and joy.
This is a prime opportunity for you to pivot or shift gears, to transform the distressing feelings you have been wrestling with into steady calm by taking matters into your own hands to improve your well-being and that of the world around you. Instead of feeling vulnerable and bewildered, you can work to change conditions that fuel your worries by redirecting your energy toward upstream solutions, finding kindred spirits to be at your side along the way. The power lies in your hands and mind—let’s put you in a position to wield that power effectually.