guilty or shamed sufferers, as an illness close to madness: the result of a mysterious

chemically-based flaw in the brain that severs us from reality and normalcy. The suggested

treatment is therefore medical, involving forceful attempts to dampen and anaesthetise

parts of the misfiring mind.

Yet such an interpretation - however kind in its intentions - depends on the assumption:

that the normal response to the conditions of existence should be calm.

But why should it be, given the obvious insanity of the world?

The root cause of an anxiety attack is unusual sensitivity to a madness in the world most

people dampen out.

Of course, once you think about it, it’s entirely understandable one might have an

anxiety attack at a party, when talking to a colleague or on a crowded train. There is

genuine terror beneath the surface of such things.

In her great novel Middlemarch, the 19th century English writer George Eliot, a deeply self-aware

but also painfully self-conscious and anxious figure, reflected on what it would be like

if we were truly sensitive, open to the world and felt the implications of everything

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like

hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar

which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well

wadded with stupidity.”

It is, as Eliot recognises, both a privilege and a profound nightmare to hear that grass

growing and that squirrel’s heart beating - and, also, by extension to feel everything

deeply. We might well, as she sometimes did, long for a little more ‘well-wadded stupidity’

to block it all out.

Nevertheless, Eliot’s lines offer us a way to reinterpret our anxiety with greater dignity

and benevolence. It emerges from a dose of clarity that is (currently) too powerful for

us to cope with - but isn’t for that matter wrong. We panic because we rightly feel how

thin the veneer of civilisation is, how mysterious other people are, how improbable it is that

we exist at all, how everything that seems to matter now will eventually be annihilated,

how random many of the turnings of our lives are, how prey we are to accident.

Anxiety is simply insight that we haven’t yet found a productive use for, that hasn’t

yet made its way into art or philosophy. It’s a mad world that insists that the anxious

are the crazy ones.

We are in such a hurry to see anxiety as a sickness, we fail to notice its health and

wisdom. It is a legitimate, constant response to the oddity of going to parties, riding

public transport or more widely, of being alive.

We should never exacerbate our suffering by trying to push our disquiet aggressively away.

Our lack of calm isn’t deplorable or a sign of weakness. It is simply the justifiable

expression of our mysterious participation in a disordered, uncertain world.

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