Are we really anxious all the time?

I still remember it like it was happening to me in this moment. It started off as a feeling. Feeling a little foggy, mostly lost. Always feeling the rush. It was like a nagging sound that was constantly ringing in my ear and I could not shake it off. It forced me to listen, pay attention. And listen well!

“What will people think? Am I looking fine? Will this sound fine? They are watching me. I don’t make sense at all.”

I have spent so much time living a regular life with moderate amounts of anxiety that visit me from time to time. It feels almost natural; as if I was born with it.

It starts from a very young age, maybe. Where you are asked to rise up and answer a few simple questions in class or recite something in front of an audience (peers mostly). Some people kill it. They are intensely good. Like speaking publicly was something that has been passed on to them over generations. I was a decent speaker. But I can never quite forget the rush I felt, the shaking of my arms and knees and all the time it took me to calm down after that moment had passed. But in this anecdote from my childhood, it is more of nervousness, less of anxiety.

And then I grew up. And anxiety visited me with a generous dose of depression. Yes, the D-word is indeed as heavy as it feels. Crippling, disturbing and comfortably settling into the mind. It shuts you down. It makes you look at things only from other people’s eyes. I spent 2 years of my life looking at myself through someone else’s eyes. That someone else being the vicious little voice in my head.

However, things changed. I took help. I worked on myself and things became better.

But in the recent times, my work place was my biggest source of anxiety. During the pandemic, things got worse. I would dread checking messages or even looking at my phone. It always made me super jumpy and suddenly nervous. I would even wake up to messages from work almost everyday. And that automatically set a very sad tone to my day. It felt like everything was doomed.

I worked at a high pace environment that demanded people to give their best, always be on top of things, constantly be on the move, constantly deliver. And too many things went wrong almost too many times in a week. Or at-least it felt more like that. And every such instance made me feel scared. Just as scared as when I was 7 and knew my homework was incomplete and my teacher would scold me.

The fear was crazy. The frenzy was real.

Recently, I took a step back and realised how common the word “anxiety” has become. Everybody has been going through a trauma of their own. Especially in 2020. A lot of people have had first-hand instances with blues, anxiety and burnout. It really got me thinking, has it become so easy to get stressed and anxious. Are we constantly in extremely demanding situations?

Are we all really that anxious all the time? because that would be bad. Wouldn’t it?