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Anxiety attacks are sometimes interpreted, by society at large but also by their confused,
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guilty or shamed sufferers, as an illness close to madness: the result of a mysterious
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chemically-based flaw in the brain that severs us from reality and normalcy. The suggested
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treatment is therefore medical, involving forceful attempts to dampen and anaesthetise
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parts of the misfiring mind.
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Yet such an interpretation - however kind in its intentions - depends on the assumption:
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that the normal response to the conditions of existence should be calm.
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But why should it be, given the obvious insanity of the world?
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The root cause of an anxiety attack is unusual sensitivity to a madness in the world most
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people dampen out.
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Of course, once you think about it, it’s entirely understandable one might have an
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anxiety attack at a party, when talking to a colleague or on a crowded train. There is
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genuine terror beneath the surface of such things.
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In her great novel Middlemarch, the 19th century English writer George Eliot, a deeply self-aware
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but also painfully self-conscious and anxious figure, reflected on what it would be like
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if we were truly sensitive, open to the world and felt the implications of everything
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“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like
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hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar
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which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well
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wadded with stupidity.”
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It is, as Eliot recognises, both a privilege and a profound nightmare to hear that grass
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growing and that squirrel’s heart beating - and, also, by extension to feel everything
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deeply. We might well, as she sometimes did, long for a little more ‘well-wadded stupidity’
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to block it all out.
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Nevertheless, Eliot’s lines offer us a way to reinterpret our anxiety with greater dignity
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and benevolence. It emerges from a dose of clarity that is (currently) too powerful for
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us to cope with - but isn’t for that matter wrong. We panic because we rightly feel how
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thin the veneer of civilisation is, how mysterious other people are, how improbable it is that
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we exist at all, how everything that seems to matter now will eventually be annihilated,
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how random many of the turnings of our lives are, how prey we are to accident.
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Anxiety is simply insight that we haven’t yet found a productive use for, that hasn’t
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yet made its way into art or philosophy. It’s a mad world that insists that the anxious
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are the crazy ones.
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We are in such a hurry to see anxiety as a sickness, we fail to notice its health and
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wisdom. It is a legitimate, constant response to the oddity of going to parties, riding
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public transport or more widely, of being alive.
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We should never exacerbate our suffering by trying to push our disquiet aggressively away.
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Our lack of calm isn’t deplorable or a sign of weakness. It is simply the justifiable
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expression of our mysterious participation in a disordered, uncertain world.
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