How can I cope with a feeling the world is unrelentingly bad?
While existential threat is impossible to ignore, there are practical ways to mitigate it whilst maintaining healthy consciousness.
Hello again.
This week, a question from a few years ago soon after the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
At that time, people’s anxiety levels were going through the roof at the thought of global conflict and nuclear armageddon.
Some people. especially the young, wrote to me wondering if there was really any point in showing up to work anymore if we were all destined to die in mutually assured destruction.
Fast forward a few years and it’s hard to see any improvement. If anything, the political landscape has become more partisan and polarised.
When most people think of therapy they probably imagine someone coming to talk about the impact of very personal situations but existential threat shows up constantly, either in questions like this or even broader iterations where people are crippled by a seemingly immovable fear of dying or, more often, being dead and the ‘not existing’ that goes along with it.
Of course, there are no answers to these questions, and they are in a category of their own in the sense that, as therapists, we are experiencing them to some extent too.
In the midst of lockdown and the COVID pandemic we were not only dealing with the anxieties of our clients but balancing them with the fears that were rising up in us.
In such situations, our role as therapists is not to offer false hope and comfort, but to help clients reflect on their sphere of influence. When everything feels out of control it’s often because what you’re focusing on really is beyond control. The more you can draw the sphere of influence in to a tighter circle the more likely you are to find some semblance of peace.
Here’s this week’s question.
Question: I’m feeling increasingly anxious at the state of the world. I feel worried for myself and my children. What can I do to help myself feel more balanced?
Back a few months, when the conflict began in Ukraine, I had a lot of questions from people worried about the start of a third world war and feeling unrelentingly sad about the state of the world.
Long before that, people have been asking understandable questions about how they can soothe their anxiety around accelerating climate change.
In Europe, the latest issue raising anxiety levels is the financial crisis and people ask how they might pay their bills as housing and energy costs spiral exponentially.
Your question does, in a way, encompass all of these and more. It is about the fundamental uncertainty of life and the ease with which we can find unrelenting sadness and badness, the constant wondering about how we will cope, and the painful obscurity of the goodness that might balance things out.
Of the basic human needs we all share, perhaps ‘certainty’ is the one that trips us up more than any.
We all want to feel that we have some idea about what is coming next and that plans we make for next week, month and year will come to fruition. The reality though is that none of us can be sure they will because certainty does not exist. There isn’t any. The only thing we can be sure about is now, this moment, the breath you’re taking while you read this.
That may sound like a dispiriting and miserable state of affairs but there are more optimistic ways of thinking about it.
The first and most significant is that acceptance of perpetual uncertainty means we can live a more joyful and fulfilled life. Releasing the need for control allows us to exist in greater peace.
Recently, I heard that an old friend had died. It was sudden. A very aggressive abdominal cancer meant that he only lived for 29 days following his diagnosis.
If he had been forewarned of that scenario well ahead of time he would probably have been paralysed by the anxiety of it, unable to focus on any thought other than his imminent demise. As it was, he spent his final days doing the everyday things he had always done, the simple pursuits that gave him pleasure and which he could control in the depths of a situation over which he had no control at all.
Life doesn’t become easier when we try and predict what we can’t see, it only feels more manageable when we can focus on what’s in front of us and leave the rest alone.
When we are exposed to harrowing stories it’s easy to transpose that horror to thoughts about ourselves and our families experiencing something similar, but its likelihood doesn’t increase in line with our fears.
As our children grow up, we become increasingly aware that our ability to protect them is eroded by the passing of time, and our acceptance of this, paradoxically, helps us to enjoy our life with them.
There are other measures we can take too.
Limit your exposure to news and social media. (including ‘Doomscrolling)
This is not a suggestion to ignore what is happening in the world it but to be conscious of your needs. It’s easy to be drawn into a vortex of doom when global stability is on the slide. We check our phones on waking, on sleeping, and constantly in between, but it’s too much and makes us feel increasingly helpless whilst taking attention away from the simple acts of daily life we have at our fingertips.
Gratitude.
It’s easy to be cynical about gratitude but an effective way of balancing out negative feelings is to deliberately and consciously focus on what you feel happy to have in your life.
I’ve found that gratitude seems to grow stronger when we are finding it in increasingly mundane places.
A client, recently bereaved, once told me about how she’d seen a ladybird on the wheel of a tractor and had a sudden rush of gratitude. That’s when you know your gratitude muscle is flexing.
Developing an ongoing gratitude practice, either by writing down one or two things you feel grateful for at the end of the day, or by making a mental note of them as they arise, serves to open you up to gratitude. This is important because the constant onslaught of misery and terror is easily absorbed so requires conscious and repeated effort to balance it out with more positive and uplifting feelings.
Try keeping a gratitude diary for a week or two. Don’t write down what you think you SHOULD feel grateful for, only record what you DO feel happy about, however odd it might look to someone else. The more you do it the easier it will become, and you’ll soon find yourself noticing opportunities for gratitude everywhere.
We never know when gratitude will come but we have to be open to the possibility that life will show us something good at any moment.
We become what we focus on.
Making meaning.
Psychologist Viktor Frankl developed an approach called Logotherapy which helps people focus on finding meaning in their lives and escape from the vacuum of existential crisis. Frankl knew something about this because he was a Holocaust survivor who spent three years imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. (Read ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ for more on this)
Making meaning to mitigate the uncertainty of modern life might be illustrated in any number of different actions.
Volunteering, supporting friend’s and neighbours, community action.
Speaking up against discrimination and oppression.
Reframing an ability to cope with the unknown as a form of valuable courage.
Choosing to live fully in each moment as a result of recognising time is finite.
Being mindful of the quality and impact of simple daily interactions through showing patience and tolerance to others.
Releasing control.
Accepting the contrasts that exist in our lives and the absence of any sense of control over most of the things that happen is, as paradoxical as it sounds, a pretty solid route to a greater sense of peace and tranquillity. If you can take control of what you can influence and leave the rest to one side it's easier to find balance between the light and dark.
I don’t know if you have any pets or animals around you but they are expert at reminding us how to live in the moment. They’re interested only in what’s happening now and, whilst that might be a stretch for most humans, it is something to aspire to.
It’s easy to believe that the world is an increasingly awful, painful and exhausting place but we can resist that depiction more easily than we realise by controlling what we have within our influence and noticing all the beauty there is in the world that nobody is reminding us of.
How do you find balance when your anxiety is running out of control? Leave a comment and others might benefit from your experience.
Personally, I go for a walk with the dogs and, at any time of the year, nature unrelentingly comes up with something to smile about.