Anxiety Is NOT What You Are Led To Believe - Sarah Wilson

Prior to 1980, anxiety was not a disorder as such. It entered the DSM, which is the main diagnostic tool used in the US, but also in Australia and the UK until 1980. And it happened to be, what do you know, six months after the first anti anxiety drug was invented. So prior to that, does that mean we weren't anxious? Of course we were, but we were anxious and it was one response to amongst a whole range of other kinds of responses that we would have. Anxiety and excitement actually are experienced in the same part of the brain and experienced as very much the same thing. So there's an opportunity to reframe anxiety as excitement. And studies have actually been done to show that even just saying the words I'm currently feeling excited is enough to shift your perspective. How can we then take agency in a productive way and even to the extent of using your anxiety as a superpower?

All right, Sarah, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How you doing today?

I'm great. It's great to see you. Flip side, I was interviewing you recently. Yeah, right.

The roles have reversed.

I'm bracing myself.

Yeah. Brace. Brace for impact. Right. Well, I've been looking forward to this interview and it was. We had a great conversation on your show. I really, I really enjoyed it. And while I feel like we come from different backgrounds, in many ways, I feel like we had some really good conversation in terms of what's happening in the world today. And so we're going to dive into a number of different pieces on today's show, but I think where I'd like to start is for you to tell us a little bit of a story. As I always start, all of my shows. Tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today. It can be any moment, but a defining moment.

Oh, that's an awesome question. I always think to the age of 8, 7 or 8. And I suppose my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I told her I wanted to be either the first female Prime Minister of Australia that was still attainable when I was seven, or a nun. And apparently Mum asked me, well, why is that? And I answered that I figured that that was the best way that I could go about having a full life without being held back by a husband. So I think, though, off the back of that, I. I think that I've. I've kind of gone ahead. I've been interested in politics, I've been interested in spirituality, so certainly some of those tropes have played out. But I Think I've always had a sort of idea that I was going to do work that communicated and maybe had some impact on people and in some way might lead people. Yeah, that could be one such defining moment. Had many when I was growing up. I was a strange child.

Well, that's a. I mean, that's a good one. That's an interesting one. It's very different. Prime minister and a nun.

Are worlds, worlds apart. And yeah, it's interesting. Like Catholic, Christian nun.

Well, I grew up a Catholic. I didn't go to a Catholic school. We lived way out in the country, in the bush, as we like to say. And so, you know, we used to drive into town to church each Sunday and yeah, I just used to see these nuns and they seemed to be having a pretty good life. I don't know, who knows what was going through my head, but I used to spend a lot of time sitting up in a tree and I would dream of my, my life. And I remember doing that from a very, very young age. And I think, yeah, I would just pick up on cues. Who knows where from? Because literally went into town, into civilization once a week. We had no other contact with the outside world. So I really, I really don't know. And I've missed the boat. On becoming the first female prime minister of Australia, a woman called Julia Gillard took that gig. The poor woman, she, you may have caught the misogyny speech that she, she made a number of years ago, went viral, which gives an indication of what experience you have as a female prime minister of Australia. However, there's still scope for me to become a nun. The average, I think age these days in these states for entering the nunnery is 82. So I've got a few years.

Oh my gosh.

I know the average.

The very end. I could, I could see my mom, I could see my mother in law doing that. I was gonna make some. I'm, I'm terrible at jokes, but I was gonna make some type of joke and comment about how you were worried about being restricted by men that you would be mar to. But then you gave your life to Jesus. And so that is a bit of a, an ironic, you know, a bit of an ironic bent. It's like I want to be free from the shackles of, of men, but I'm going to give my life to, to one man. And so it's, it's, it's an interesting one and we could psychoanalyze that, but I think we'll, we'll leave it alone. What are we going to take a hard right turn. Are you ready for this?

Yeah.

Right turn from, from being married to Jesus to what are diseases of despair? Talk to us about, about diseases of despair.

That's a right angle turn. The diseases of despair, I think in the US It's a term that's sort of been used in, over the last five years. And I came across it when I was writing my most recent book, this one, Wild and Precious Life. And a number of commentators, including the former Surgeon General was talking about it, Dr. Vivek Murthy. And it's, it's this idea that the life expectancy in the US has decreased, and it's decreased for the first time since, since recorded history, which is very, very unusual. The rest of the world, the trajectory is going ever upwards. The US however, has been going in the opposite direction for about six years now. From what I understand when I was writing the book, it had been about three years. So it'd been three years of decreasing due to these diseases of despair. They're predominantly suicide, opioid use and alcohol abuse. And they tend to affect men more than women. They also tend to obviously affect lower socioeconomic people, but also the middle class, to the point that it is actually decreasing the life expectancy of Americans. Now, what I've learned recently, and there's a bunch of commentators talking about this, is that gun deaths of children is also bringing that figure down in the last two years. So it's contributing as well. It's a major contributor. So gun deaths of children, I mean, it's, it's really hard to fathom. I've also found out that the UK is also replicating this pattern. So alcohol opioid use and suicide. And so the life expectancy in the UK has dropped for the first time just recently in the last 18 months. So I wonder if this pattern is going to play out around the Western world. But the US it seems to be a very steady decline.

Yeah, it's interesting because a big study came out recently and I just pulled it up while we were talking that showed that the life expectancy of the US for men dropped to 76.1 years from 78.8 in 2019. And so it's gone down a couple years within the span of just a couple years. That's pretty dramatic. And one of the things that the study looked into is pretty much aligned with what you're talking about, that the rise of deaths of despair, things like suicide, drug use disorders, because the opioid epidemic is massive in America. Alcohol, you know, Alcoholism, liver disease, et cetera, depression, are all significantly on the rise, which is, is pretty wild. And it's what's what I found fascinating, I think we kind of touched on this before we got on to recording is that when, when we talk about how men are, are suffering within our modern culture, it's almost like that's seen as an anti feminist rhetoric or approach to signal like, hey, men are struggling. It's so interesting to see in the comments section sometimes of like, well, this is the patriarchy's fault. And they're sort of like more putting it back on the shoulders of men. And I wonder, you know, one, I've never felt like that's really helped the equation. But two, what in your perspective, because you've traveled the world, you know, you've done a lot of research around anxiety and depression and these sort of areas. What are some of the main contributing factors in your perspective that are causing these.

Sort of deaths and diseases of despair?

Well, I mentioned Dr. Vivek Murthy. He's also written a book that came out just as Covid hit and it turned out to be very, very prescient. It was all about, I think it's called Together. But he puts it down to sort of this loneliness epidemic.

And I think that's got a big part to play in it. The neoliberal setup has, you know, created these fractured communities. And what used to keep us together were things that David Brooks, the commentator, the New York Times commentator, he called them sort of a moral guardrails. There were these moral guardrails that existed for thousands of years that stopped us becoming too selfish and ensured that we, this pendulum swung towards the collective because as human beings, we don't have fangs, we can't run particularly fast. We're not, we don't have claws. And so what has actually seen us rise to the top of the food chain is our ability to cooperate and form communities. That is our superpower. And so whether it's been the church, the scout movement, even trade unions, various community groups, they've all existed to ensure that we don't get too out of control selfish, which is also our tendency. And the pendulum, as I say, swings back to community now since about the 1960s, 70s and then heightened during the 80s, during the Reagan and Thatcher years, those institutions were dismantled because it was all about the market system. We didn't need these things interfering in our lives. And you know, even government institutions that, you know, kept, I guess, moral law and order and that kind of thing in check were also removed. So what that's done is actually sent us into these isolated, individualistic silos, and that's essentially caused this loneliness epidemic. It's playing out right now. And there's all kinds of figures that talk about how trust in America has declined rapidly. So only as recently as 1997, Trust in America, you know, about two thirds of Americans felt that they could trust the institutions that governed them. Today, it's, on average, under a third of Americans trust government institutions. And among young people, it's around about 10 to 15% of young people trust the institutions that are meant to keep them safe and, you know, and. And to progress their lives. So trust is a huge one, but also the number of friends, and I know that you speak about this a lot, Connor. The number of friends that men in particular have, I can't remember the statistics, but it's only about what a quarter of men can cite a friend that they can call on when they're in trouble. For women, it's less so, but again, that downwards trajectory. So I think they're a big part of. To play in all of this. And I, I wrote about this in my most recent book. We talk about loneliness as though it's loneliness from each other, and that's certainly part of it. But I think many people listening would feel like, my God, I've got more connects with people than I've ever had in my life. Right. You know, on social media and dating apps and all of this kind of thing. It's a lot. There's a lot of connected noise. But what I feel is more at play here. And the. The Greeks called it acedia. And acedia is this kind of disconnect more from the. The framework of life, kind of the fiber of life, and also from a relationship with ourselves. And that creates a far more profound sense of disconnect and loneliness. And I think that that really is the thing that's at the core of all of these diseases. It's not so much that we're disconnected from others, it's our connection to meaning and to these social structures, but also to ourselves. We don't have these dialogues with ourselves. And so emotionally we're feeling. We're feeling very homesick. I think that's probably the best word to describe it.

What dialogues do you mean when you say that we don't have these dialogues with ourselves? What are you referring to?

I mean, discerning moral discussions. So, you know, this, this was. And again, I'll, you know, present it in terms of the American experience, the education system up until about the 1960s, was geared towards what, you know, David Brooks calls moral formation. It was actually helping young people develop character so that they could deal with complex issues as they arose in adulthood. And then that shifted with this neoliberal shift that happened in the 60s, 70s and 80s, that shifted towards university scores and impressing your first boss. That became the educational imperative. And I think we've seen that play out. But, yeah, we used to have a culture where moral discussions, discussions about values were of the highest order. We used to talk philosophy in, you know, in America, in Australia and across Europe, that is what people did. There were books written about this kind of stuff, and people read these books that were mainstream books. We don't have these kinds of discussions anymore. And what's really interesting, I've been looking into, you know, collapse theory and all of these ideas around America, the American civilization undergoing sort of a societal collapse. And there's lots of books that have just come out in the last couple of months to this effect, and countless op eds and essays in the Atlantic, New York Times, etc. And in the heterodox community as well. And what I find is there's this patterning that occurs and, you know, the final stage of collapse of various societies throughout history features a rise of elites and a loneliness politicization taking the place of moral discussion, hedonism, narcissism and so on and so forth. I mean, it describes our culture in 2023, 2024. And.

It'S a framework that I find very, very interesting. But what's worth keeping in mind is that we think this is normal. It hasn't always been like this. Cultures for the bulk of their lifespan have valued deeper discussions around stuff that matters because we as humans need that to feel like we're connected into the matrix and then to feel like we're having a meaningful life.

Yeah, I was going to say if.

Again, I was going to make a terrible joke about Andrew Tate being on our conversation, you know, railing against the Matrix and plugging into it. But I think what you're saying is quite interesting because I agree that it does seem like there's been a dispersing of conversations surrounding morality and surrounding meaning, and that these conversations, or just the sort of philosophical nature of existence and how we find a sense of coherence as a society and as a world. And I think that we've undergone in the last three, four decades this radical, radical shift where we're plugged into the psyche and the consciousness and the cultures of everybody, you know, of. Of Just everybody on the planet you can access, you know, the, the majority of people. And I think that that level of access to the sort of collective conscious, if we could call it that, as Jung would have called it, is disorienting. You know, it's very disorienting because suddenly it's not just your small community and your family and your friends that you're having these moral conversations with. It's somebody in China or India or the UK or Brazil who. Their cultures and the systems that they operate under and the institutions that they operate under are largely fundamentally different. And so there's sort of been this like, disintegration of localized moral conversations that used to happen into a much broader global conversation, which I think has left a lot of people quite disoriented in terms of how, you know, how to then have that conversation. And you know, the US is, is a very interesting beast. I know Ray Dalio has been talking extensively about. Yes, you know, the, the cycles that basically like lead to the rise and the collapse of EMP and how, you know, the American empire is collapsing. And I think I'm always a little weary of the doomers, to be honest. You know, of like, should be the doomsday, you know, catastrophe narrative. It's like the world, I think when you look back, when I look back, at least historically, it does appear that, you know, there's always some existential threat on the horizon. That seems to be a common theme, you know, throughout human history. Like there's some existential threat, whether it's the Black Plague or famine or, you know, an asteroid or it's just a never ending cycle of, you know, things that could be catastrophic. And so what's your take? Because it, it does feel like to me, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but it does seem like there has been an exponential rise in catastrophic thinking in sort of doomer narratives on, on all sides of the political spectrum and, and largely everywhere. And so what's your take on that? And how does that play into. Maybe we'll wrap it back around to how does that play into our individual mental health and the social fabric of our societies? Big question.

Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think the reason we're talking about collapse, you know, is because a lot of data is pointing towards it. So various people like Jared Diamond, Joseph Painter, Tainter, I should say they've written about this, that all societies that have collapsed throughout history, there's generally been a climate precipitator. However, that doesn't necessarily determine where the society collapsed. Just like a new technology doesn't necessarily need to spell the end of a society. So AI doesn't have to destroy us. What actually ends up destroying us is generally some extra factor. Either an inability of the governing institutions to make the right decisions, so to pivot away from a climate problem and adapt in time and in an appropriate way, or some people are saying, and I think Peter Church, and who's a sort of polyamath who's written a book about this just recently, he points to this, but so do other commentators. It's the rise of an elite, of the elites. So, and not just the rise of elites, but a huge growth in the number of people who are highly educated, highly politicized, intellectual, and there's not enough jobs for them and they get dissatisfied. So it's not so much. I agree with you. There's been, you know, the end of the world is nigh declarations for many, many years. And, you know, I grew up in the wake of sort of the nuclear threat. And that was something that, you know, really hung over me as a small child. And so I've been aware of these kinds of things. But I think there's these extra factors, factors now and I would also add to it globalization. So the complexity of our world today. So basically the societies that have collapsed throughout history. So over the last 5,000 years in which they've been able to record these civilizations, there's been about 30, I think there's a 20 to 30 civilizations that have been tracked. And the other common factor, there's usually a climate catalyst, but it's the fact that the society has become so complex, so the complexity is what is a society's downfall. And our world has become particularly complex because of, and in part because of globalization. And so every single system is connected to every everything else. So if there is a, I don't know, an asteroid, you know, falls on part of the world and it shuts down the energy systems in that part of the world, then that shuts off the trade routes. And so China, that relies on a particular rare Earth mineral to create solar panels or to power its, you know, its energy grid. It shuts down and then blah, blah, blah, blah. Add to that the fact that. And this comes back to, I think you want me to do a full circle with this, our incapacity to deal with the complexity. And so because we are so fractured, because our society has become so individualized and we're operating as these kind of selfish individual units trying to do our best, you know, floating about the planet we have very little capacity to actually deal with things when they hit and solve them and hopefully ward off, you know, civilizational collapse. We're not cooperating. We are fragmented. These are the worst conditions for a society that is very fragile as it is. So all of these conditions play into the situation. I think it's a very valid discussion to be having around collapse and certainly that, you know, I've been working in the climate space as an activist for almost 20 years and I can tell you, every scientist, climate scientist I speak to, they're now talking in very different language. It was always about hope. You know, there's hope, we can still make it in time. That is not the language being used any longer. We have missed the deadline. We are not going to keep things under 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre industrial temperatures. That ain't going to happen now. And that's something that, you know.

It'S hard to take. It's very, very hard to take. And the scientists are grappling with it and the discussion hasn't really seeped out into the mainstream because we're still operating to this notion of hope. So I think, I think there's a lot of validity to these discussions. However, I don't take a doomist approach. I still will fight and I will fight for the very things that I think are contributing to our downfall. And I think it's about building up this collective thinking, you know, and better ways of discussing things. But it's interesting, you started off this sort of spiel talking about how there's people who are wanting to discuss morality, philosophy, these kinds of things, but they're having to do it on a world stage. And so that is discombobulating, I think is the word you used. And I agree with you. But I think it's more to do with the case that there are small pockets wanting to discuss this kind of stuff, right? And we happen to be in those circles when we try to have these kinds of nuanced discussions that embrace and work with in sit in the discomfort of complexity in a world which is so politicized and as a result of being politicized, their mentality is tribal and two side ism and polarized and bifurcated. It's a very, very unhappy mix. And so it's really difficult to have these kinds of discussions. So if you're trying to talk about the Middle east and you, and you sit in the complexity of it and you acknowledge it and you try to understand what's going on from the, you know, from A historical point of view from the various, you know, sort of mindsets, religions, stakeholders point of view. It's a really difficult thing to do online. I don't know if you've tried it recently. It ends in disaster because the world is needing to go tribal to cope. The complexity means they're needing to create an enemy out there. That's what we do as humans. When there is a crisis, we will value the tribe and a sense of belonging over the truth. And again, Dr. Vivek Murthy writes about this. So we will, for instance, share a friend's Facebook post that has incorrect information in it, and we know it to be incorrect, but we'll do that to stay a member of that tribe, to feel the belonging, because that is more important when we're feeling like we're facing a threat. So I think that's a very important factor to bring in here. The tribalism makes nuanced moral discussion extremely difficult.

You used the word fracturing, which.

I've been playing around with a little bit as I've been writing more in the background. And I don't know what I'm going to do with some of the writing. I don't generally put out blog posts and I don't have a substack and stuff like that. But I've been writing a little bit about some of the things that have been happening within the field of psychology and in the sort of what I've referred to as the therapeutic industrial complex that there's. The therapeutic words and notions and constructs have become so pervasive within our society, you know, that the terminology and labels are being used by individuals that don't fully understand them and, you know, aren't educated to necessarily.

To utilize them in some ways, but they seem to be then diagnosing their partners and their friends. As you know, I'm convinced my husband's ADHD and I'm convinced my wife's a narcissist, and I'm convinced my father is this and my mother is that that. And I think that these tools have become almost a means of chiseling deeper ruts of division. And it's quite unfortunate. And I think that there's many things that are acting as tools of division and fracturing. And it does seem that in our culture, this capacity to stay regulated or grounded in a conversation of disagreement with somebody else has completely collapsed. And I find it so fascinating because for me, I. I fundamentally believe, like, I have people in my life that I fundamentally disagree with on a number of different things. And people in my life have asked me, like, why are you friends with that person? How come you're friends with that person? I've even got shit online for following certain people. And I'm like, I don't agree with them, but I'm interested in understanding their perspective. And in today's culture, it's become so. I think what is so brutally unhealthy is our individual capacity to disagree with somebody and still hold the relational tether with them. You know, to say, I actually disagree with you, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to unperson you from my life, that I'm going to cancel you and delete you from all of my, you know, social media platforms, and I'm going to pretend like you don't exist in the world because that actually reinforces the tribalism. And I think that in a time of crisis like this, one of the things that we can do is to be vessels or beacons of coherence. You know, it's like crisis happens internally from a psychological perspective because of incoherence and fracturing. That's what pretty much every. Every psychological disease is predicated on, right? Is like an internal psychological sense of fracturing. Whether you're fracturing yourself off from an emotion that you don't like or your sense of identity has become fractured. That's the underpinning and undergirding of almost every single psychological quote, unquote disease. And culturally, I don't know if it's much different that when we have that kind of fracturing.

It'S really unhealthy and unhelpful for our society. So I'm curious to. I'll just maybe pause there and get your sense on if you could say a little bit more about fracturing, how we deal with that culturally, socially, and even individually. Because I do think that it ties into things like dealing with anxiety, whether it's existential or personal.

Yeah, I think you make a great point. The dynamics that are happening to us internally are also playing out socially, and they're also playing out in intimate relationships as well. They're happening at all the levels. And I'm thinking of Esther Perel, who's always talked about the fact that it doesn't matter if you have an argument, you know, a relationship that has, you know, where you're. You have different opinions and you have arguments. It's about how you argue that will determine the health and longevity of a relationship. And I think that's very much the same in. In society. One thing I'll bring into that is the idea of being unable to sit in discomfort. And I think that that's really a key factor in all of this. We have a culture and technology has had a huge part to play in this where discomfort of any kind is not to be tolerated. It must be gotten rid of. We must mask it, we must cocoon ourselves. And you know, I looked into this when I was writing my book on anxiety. First we make the beast beautiful. That 70 to 90% of all technological innovation over the last 30 years has not been geared at, you know, solving world poverty or whatever. It's being geared at eradicating discomfort. So all of our apps are about making sure we don't have to wait, we don't have to sit in uncertainty. You know, we don't have to, we, we don't have to sit there wondering where our pizza is once we've ordered it online like we've had. We haven't had to leave the house and get uncomfortable, you know, in that respect. But we also don't have to sit there wondering when it's going to turn up because there's an orb that shows us where it is, you know, in, in the suburb making its way towards our front door. So that is something that I think is really worth bearing in mind. And I looked at this quite a lot in both my books actually. What is happening to a generation that is being cocooned, and I use this phrase, they've been cocooned from everything except for real life. What's actually happening is this generation is growing up and they're not getting their driver's license because that involves IRL experiences. You can't do it online, you can't do it on an app, you can't do it with mum sitting next to you. You've actually got to go out into the world and doing it and do it. And they're the first generation not to jump on that. Every other generation is being busting to get their driver's license because it spells freedom. Particularly in the US where it's such a car centric culture. They're unable to read long documents so they're really suffering with work contracts and leases on apartments, this kind of thing, because they're unable to sit in, the discomfort of reading along document is playing out in all kinds of ways. And I think what it's doing to us at a societal level is creating an outrage, you know, when things are uncomfortable. And the thing is the world is going to get more and more and more uncomfortable. The hot summers, the floods, you Know, the power outages, the. The cities that are just hot and to use your word, fractured. You know, this is going to dial up. It's not going to get better. We're not returning to some nice, comfortable normal again. And so we're very ill equipped for. For what's. What's ahead. And I looked at, actually a study that was done, what was looking at the resilience levels of children around the world and also the anxiety levels of children around the world, and it was really interesting. The Dutch have very, very high resilience and one of the lowest levels of anxiety amongst children in the oecd. And I actually looked at a couple of practices and I came across a New York Times article where it's New Yorker. This mother from New York came across to the. To the Netherlands to look at this practice called dropping. And it's kind of like the Scouts movement. It's something that all kids in the Netherlands do. And I've checked this out because I've spoken to a lot of Dutch people about this. Yeah, we did it. Oh, we did it. Everyone did it. Very much like the Scouts movement, what it entailed is these people dropping children off into the Dutch wilderness, which, granted, is probably, I don't know, a flat field, but they're dropped off and they have a weekend to find their way back home. They just got to find their own way back home. And they have no food, no water. They've got to sort it all out for themselves. And this New York Times journalist was absolutely horrified, and she said to one of the Dutch parents, well, you know, aren't you worried about them? You know? And parents went, no, no, we just sit on the couch. They'll. They'll make where they're home by Sunday afternoon. And I just found it very, very interesting that this is a culture that still had practices in place that built up resilience, exposed children to discomfort, and what do you know, they happen to have very low anxiety levels. Now, that's correlation, not causation. But I think there's a number of studies that actually make that correlation, and they feel that there's certainly a causational link. So I think that's really worth bringing into the discussion here. Fracturing is happening because we don't have a capacity to sit in the discomfort of having a differing opinion, as well as we're not able to sit in the. In the discomfort of complexity. And so we polarize and we grab onto identities and we say, I'm triggered. And I have this diagnosis that's why I can't do this or that. And so I see all these behaviors as part of the same thing, an inability to deal with discomfort.

You had a great quote. One of the things that we pulled from this one precious, this one wild and precious life. You said studies show young people now struggle to be able to read university texts as well as life affecting contracts and information relating to their political responsibilities. Brexit. In essence, skimming has made us sleepy with all, all the now familiar repercussions, as one researcher put it. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery. And I thought this was such a great piece because I think in many ways that is part of the essence of what we're talking about. And I love this notion of like, you know, dropping kids off in the forest and building resiliency and being able to sit with discomfort. Because I think in many ways we have, and there's a lot of research around this, but I think in many ways we have created this almost like societal comfort blanket for kids and for, you know, teenagers and young adults that says if you're feeling something that you don't like, change the external world instead of learning how to sit with the feeling that you don't like. And that is wildly problematic. I mean, that is just a, a brutal, brutal way to, I think to not only raise kids because then they become adults that are so fragile that any hint of disagreement or differing opinion becomes something that they have to remove themselves from. And so discouragement discourse is just impossible. Having any type of coherent discourse with anybody that you disagree with becomes impossible. And I think that's the essence of a healthy society is being able to disagree, being able to sort through it, being able to have differing opinions. And hell, I mean, that's the foundation of a relationship. If you want to have a good long term relationship, it's predicated on one simple thing, as my colleague and friend would say, which is to go through a hard time and come out the other side. Okay? And we've created culture and parenting styles that have disintegrated that where it says if you're going through a hard time with somebody, cut them off or make them change so that you feel better.

Or demand to see the manager. Demand to see the manager.

Right.

Demand an outcome, write a letter of complaint, be outraged, and then, you know, turn to social media and just, you know, rant, rant. I was asked to actually Do a presentation for the National Press Club in Australia and it's a space gets televised nationally live. And you know, I think both the Obamas have, have presented there. Almost every American president has presented there. It's where the journalists come together and they, and they get to quiz these public voices. And I was invited to come and talk about, you know, this childhood anxiety epidemic. And I had to say to them, look, I will have to ensure that the topic is actually the lack of resilience epidemic, because that really is the bigger issue here. And I feel that a lot of adult anxiety is being projected on to kids and that as a result is actually producing these children that lack the resilience and therefore they, as you say, then don't develop the skills to sit with difficult, complex emotions. And that is the bigger issue. And I think that's the discussion that we need to be having. And I looked into the whole etiology of anxiety as a disorder and really it comes as a big shock to people to learn that prior to 1980, anxiety was not a disorder as such. It entered the DSM, which is the main diagnostic tool used in the US, but also in Australia and the UK, until 1980. And it happened to be, what do you know, six months after the first anti anxiety drug was invented. So prior to that, does that mean we weren't anxious? Of course we were, but we were anxious and it was one response amongst a whole range of other kinds of responses that we would have. And anxiety was deemed often appropriate. I mean, of course there were anxious disorders, so obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia, you know, there was also bipolar or manic depression as it was called back then, these diseases did exist. And interestingly, they always exist. And I found this correlation in my research when I was researching the book in about 1.2% of every population around the world. Which suggests that it's an evolutionary quirk that exists for a really important reason. And I'm sort of going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I think it's an interesting one and it feeds into this idea that anxiety hasn't always been a disorder. Anxiety was seen as something that we had to live with and in fact, for many people, or I should say for that 1.2% of the population of people, it was hard, they had it tough, but there was a sense that it was, that had always been that way. And so Diane Fosi, who did lots of work on chimps, she found that when she was looking at a clan of chimps, there was always about 1.2% of the population that had these traits that emulated obsessive compulsive disorder. So highly agitated, couldn't sleep at night on, on, on super sensitive to smells and sounds. And she would remove these particular chimps, these neurotic chimps, from the clan, and the clan would. Would. Would disintegrate within about three months. It couldn't survive. So these sensitive chimps that existed in 1.2% of the population, they would hear the danger, the tiger that would, you know, creep up at them at night. They'd be able to smell when a food was poisonous. They freshered about the welfare of the group, and without them, a society can't function. So a big part of my premise to my book was that, you know, and the title of the book suggests as such, first we make the beast beautiful. When we can see that these particular traits exist for a reason, we can then have a very different discussion around it. And as it turns out, 70% of poets, 70% of scientists, and the majority of wartime leaders are bipolar. Throughout history have been bipolar. Huge number of artists, same thing.

There's an association between these conditions and incredible sort of productivity and creativity and contribution to the human experience. Which is a long way of saying that when we don't deem these conditions a problem, when we can sit with the discomfort of, you know, some really incredible, incredibly hard experiences like anxiety and depression, we have a very, very different experience.

Yeah, it does seem like we have not only discredited the value of anxiety, because that's what I hear you saying in some ways. And maybe, you know, correct me if I'm misreading what you're saying, but there's. That there's an inherent sort of value in anxiousness that can be.

Evolutionarily useful in some capacity. And that part of it is maybe us learning to see the value. And it's like anger. A lot of the men that I've worked with over the years have tried to live in such a way as to avoid their anger almost entirely because they've been told that if they're angry, they're toxic, they're unhealthy, that anger itself is a useless emotion. And so a lot of men will come into our work either, you know, completely unhinged in their anger because no one's ever taught them how to deal with it, or they've just never gone near it because it's been this, you know, it's perceived as a toxic chemical that, you know, they should never handle and that they should try and rid themselves of immediately. And it seems like socially we've done that with anxiety, that we've kind of ostracized it and said this is a terrible thing. You shouldn't feel it. If you're feeling it, you know, immediately take some medication. Take medication and get rid of. Take medication. Tell me. So just to make sure I got that right, anxiety as a disorder didn't enter into the DSM 5 or DSM because it wasn't a DSM 5 then until 6 months after anti anxiety medication was produced. Is that. Did I get that right?

Correct. It was 1980. So in relatively recent history that's.

Can you. Do you have any other insight into the role that pharmaceutical companies have played in quote unquote mental health and treatment? Because that seems a little suspicious for sure. Immediately I'm like, well that's a little too convenient that all of a sudden we have anti anxiety drugs and we produce the cure to the problem that hasn't really necessarily existed before.

Right.

It's like that seems a little strange. And so. So yeah. Can you say more about that?

Yeah, I mean I, I don't go into it too deeply in terms of other disorders because I focused on anxiety and I should actually just mention to listeners I have OCD. I've lived with obsessive compulsive disorder since I was 11 and I also have bipolar. I was diagnosed when I was 21. So I come from a position of absolute curiosity and, and doing this sort of the experiment on myself and, and as anyone with one of these disorders knows, you know, just taking a pill for the rest of your life just never seems to quit sit really comfortably. For me. I always had this burning sense that there was purpose to everything that I was going through. Which is not to say I haven't needed medication in, you know, during periods in my life. And I say this very, very, very clearly in my book. Medication is a salve, particularly when you first get diagnosed and before you've developed skills to self modulate and manage things. So I just want to put that out there in case people are wondering, you know, where I sit on the medication front. But look, medicine first sort of history of various ailments, particularly in the mental health realm is very, very common. You know, there are a number of disorders and I don't have, you know, all the details in front of me, so I don't want to give out information that I can't back with you right now. But it is a very, very common story. And look, I don't get too worked up about conspiracies and big Pharma and all of this kind of thing. I'm more interested in moving the discussion into, okay, well how can we then take agency in a productive way? And even to the extent of using your anxiety as a superpower, which is essentially, you know, that book took me seven years of research. It was an epic book to research and because I, you know, to write a book that basically claims to go beyond the medical model and work, you know, certainly hand in hand with the medical model, but it expands our thinking. You know, I needed to get my information right. And I should also say that I give the book to three American mental health sort of professionals and institutes and four in Australia and two in the UK and got them to fact check absolutely everything and make sure it's responsible and, and safe information that I was sharing. But yes, I think it's. I would advise people listening to this to take note, to not get overly upset about it, and instead put the energy into working out how you can sit with your anxiety in a far more fruitful way. I like to say that I don't just live with anxiety, I thrive with it. And I've learned to do that predominantly through reading spiritual texts, psychological texts. I think you'd be aware of the work of James Hollis. He's an incredible Jungian therapist. He very much inspired me and gave me incredible intimate advice.

You know, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I was an ambassador to His Holiness for three years and he worked with me a lot on some of these theories. So, yes, I prefer to go on a different kind of journey rather than getting angry. And I went through all this work, Connor. When I wrote my I Quit Sugar books, it was exactly the same story. You know, you have these big, big companies taking a vested interest in setting us up with a problem and then coming in with the fix. And, you know, it's the same story that gets rolled out over and over again. We needn't be surprised anymore. And we are better off channeling our energy into doing things differently. So, yeah, and it's the same with the climate crisis. You know, it's the same thing. It's these big institutions that will abuse the situation unless we take agency ourselves.

Can you say a little bit more about the practicality or the practical steps that individuals can take when dealing with anxiety? Because I think it's become something that's. I mean, we could talk extensively about why anxiety has become so rampant and why it's such on the rise and the different forms existential anxiety, et cetera. But what are some of the very real practical things that you've found have worked for you and the people that you've interacted with?

Well, there's some obvious ones that get rolled out by most people in my position. So meditation is non negotiable. You just have to do it. And I am a shithouse meditator. Like, I have so much mental chattering. And in fact, my conversation with his Holiness the Dalai Lama was to this effect. How do I stop it? Like, I know that that's meant to be the ultimate goal, but how do you do it? Surely you know how to do it. And his words were literally this, don't even bother. He said, maybe if I sat in a cave for two years and all I did was meditate, yes, I could make it happen. And he said, but waste of time, Sarah, waste of time. He said, you're far better spending your life attending to what he called altruism. So basically being of service to the world. So it's not so much the meditation that does the work. It's not the actual 20 minutes where you still the mind that does the, the wonders. It's actually this torturous process. And anyone who's meditated knows what I'm talking about of having to bring like herd the mind back to either the mantra, the breath, whatever it might be, over and over again. It's like a parent grabbing the child. Come on back from the edge of the lake. Come on back from the edge of the lake. And you have to do that over and over again. And what that does is build up a muscle. That means that when you go out into the real world and you're dealing with fractured thinking, you have this muscle that is used to bringing your chattering mind, your anxiety, anxious entity back in, closer to yourself, in relationship with yourself, back to your core. So meditation for me is, you know, I forget to do it, I kind of get the shits with it and then I come back to it and it makes a huge difference. The other obvious one is exercise. The studies, even since I've written the book, have rolled in to show the effects there, but particularly movement in nature. So hiking, that's something that I knew from a very young age, healed my anxiety. And so I have hiked all of my life and my most recent book, I hiked around the world for three years with one 35 pound backpack. And in the footsteps of philosophers and poets to, to provide a path. I think the subtitle of my book is literally A Hopeful Path. Through a fractured world, and it's really about the climate crisis. The other thing that I like to do is there's a couple of little mantras and wisdoms. Wisdoms I think are really helpful. So one of them is anxiety and excitement actually are experienced in the same part of the brain and experienced as very much the same thing. So there's an opportunity, opportunity to reframe anxiety as excitement. And studies have actually been done to show that even just saying the words I'm currently feeling excited is enough to shift your perspective. And I use that a lot. So when I've got to go and do public speaking or a podcast like this one today, I will say to myself, I'm currently doing excitement and can really dial down that sort of anxious chattering that can send you over the edge and, and, you know, affect your performance. The other thing that I find really helpful, it's. And it's a wisdom that if you live with someone or, you know, somebody who is anxious and has panic attacks, this is a particularly good one. A panic attack will only ever last between 10 and 15 minutes. That is how long it our biology is set up to. To give us this experience and exists for a very good reason. It's to, to get us alert and to, you know, flight or flee, sorry, fight or flee a situation. But obviously in the world that we live in today, we don't necessarily get that experience of running off from the thing that's making us anxious or fighting the thing. Right. So we've got to sit in it. Best thing you can do is remind yourself 10 to 15 minutes. I can do 10 to 15 minutes. And so if you're somebody who is sitting alongside someone who's having a panic attack, the best thing you can do is remind them of that. Just be with them, sit with them. You can do it. This is going to pass in. You've got another five minutes. We can do this. And that speaks to probably my favorite wisdom, and I think it's the most effective one. It's the one that really kind of causes penny drops for people, is that essentially it's do anxiety once. Anxiety is a very important mechanism. It exists primarily to get us, as I say, to run off from a threat or to fight it. The third mechanism, and there's about four that are identified today, but another one is the freeze mechanism. And I'm sure you've spoken about it with other guests on your program. We freeze as a kind of last resort maneuver. If we can't run, like if you think of a deer Being chased by a tiger, the deer can, you know, only outrun it for so long. It certainly can't fight the tiger. Eventually, as a last resort option, it will collapse in a heap and essentially play dead. And mice do it when they're being chased by cats. We've all seen this in nature. It plays dead. And for all intents and purposes, it is. The lungs stop working, the heart stops beating, and the tiger kind of goes, oh, this is pretty chill situation. I'll go and get my cubs, come back, we can have a leisurely lunch. And in that time, the deer has a chance to jerk back online and flee the situation, right? In our culture, we experience anxiety. We go into the freeze state because we can't fight or flee the situation, right? And we stay in that freeze state. And it's highly problematic. What we do in that freeze state is, well, we're not shaking it off. You know, we now know the benefits of that shaking off trauma. And that's what the flight or fight mechanism does. It actually uses physicality to shake off the anxiety so that if you do survive it, you're freed of that anxious sort of buildup of hormones. So what we do is we sit in this free state, and then we get anxious about being anxious because anxiety has been stigmatized, right, by the medical industry. It's a problem. So we get anxious about being anxious because we think we shouldn't be behaving that way, and this is uncomfortable, and I shouldn't feel this way, so I must fix it. And then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious, and we go down this kind of death spiral, and it's impossible to get out of it. And anyone with anxiety will identify that experience. So back to the wisdom. Do anxiety once. And that is the whole premise of my book. When you recognize that anxiety exists for a reason, a panic attack lasts, you know, 10, 15, maximum 20 minutes. You can actually just sit in it, not fight it, not. Not flee it, sitting it, pass through it. And then you can bring in other mechanisms that can help, like movement, dancing, going for a run, things like this. And you do it once because you understand that it's an important process. All is okay. The body is doing what it needs to do to pass through a difficult situation.

And that, I think, is actually one of the most effective tools for dealing with contemporary anxiety.

And those are all incredible tools. And I think it's. It's interesting because they're often simple things, you know, like doing, sitting and being in meditation and breathing. It sounds. I remember I've put out a bunch of stuff around quitting porn and how, you know, a lot of men will. I mean, I did it as well, but like, we'll use porn as a means of like hard resetting our nervous system, right? And so when we're feeling something we don't want to feel, porn is a very simple solution to hit the reset button, release a bunch of dopamine, a bunch of feel good neurochemicals, and they feel great. Right? So it's a good way to get rid of your anxiety. It's a good way to get rid of anger or frustration or boredom or loneliness or whatever. And one of the things that I've talked about in terms of quitting pornography is actually every single time you feel the urge to watch porn, to sit down, close your eyes, set a timer for five to 10 minutes and just breathe and ask yourself, what am I actually experiencing right now that's causing me to want to go and watch porn? And for a lot of guys, the reality of it is that it's rarely that they're really feeling super aroused and turned on. It's often that they're feeling something that they don't want, and porn has become this mechanism to help them deal with the internal state. And I remember on one of my YouTube videos, some guy was like, so every time I want to jerk off, I got to sit down and just breathe. He's like, that's going to help me quit porn. And I was like, honestly? Yes. Like, yeah, yeah, that's. That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. And. But it's a, you know, so it's a funny thing that for some of the not solutions, but some of the mechanisms that we can use to deal with, with things like anxiety are just simple. You know, it's regulating the breath, it's returning our awareness to the breath and the body and you know, these types of things that are, that are somewhat simple and that I think people can underestimate. So I appreciate you laying that out because there's some really good tactical pieces in there. Anything else you want to add? Maybe I'll just ask you one specific question or two specific questions about the bipolar piece, which is for individuals that have people that are in their family that are bipolar or maybe they're married to someone that's bipolar or have a child that's bipolar. What are some of the resources or tools that they can deploy to best interact with them and support them? Because I think oftentimes there's this sort of surrounding.

The people that are around them are like, I don't know what I should or shouldn't be doing or how I should or shouldn't be operating. So I'd love to hear some insight on that front.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I actually write in the book, I actually have a section that somebody with bipolar can actually leave surreptitiously open for the loved ones in their lives to find. And it's really for when you're at that stage where you feel like you're such a burden on others. And it lists a bunch of things that people with anxiety, broadly, but you know, particularly those with a hyper vigilant version of it. So bipolar, OCD and so on. You know, you're generally the person that will remember who's got celiac's disease and you know, the picnic and who needs to be specially cared for. You're the person who will remember to bring a second umbrella when, you know, it's raining and you're going off to meet somebody in the park. There's a whole range of things like that that I think are really worth having discussion around. However, most of the information that I provide Connor is particularly for people with bipolar because it is characterized by these grandiose feelings. I mean, you can be a real pain in the ass in other people's lives when you have bipolar. And I think that the more important discussion is to encourage people who do have the condition to take responsibility for it. It comes with incredible upsides, including productivity and incredible focus at times, and creativity, that kind of thing. But it's really the responsibility of somebody who has this condition to modulate it in such a way that you don't impact others. And I describe it as carrying around a shallow bowl of water for the rest of your life. And it's a strange metaphor, but I think it works. You really need to find ways to. To modulate and create as much balance and stability in your life as possible. So these techniques, meditation, etc. So that when you do have a tricky time, you're as solid as possible. Because otherwise you spend your entire life walking around sloshing water all over everybody and then having to return to the source to fill it up again, which is, you know, the experience that a lot of people with anxiety have. You expend all this energy and, you know, if you're bipolar, it's this outward manic energy and then you've got to go and regroup, patch up all the relationships, fix up all the things that you've sort of ruined and start again. So I really encourage that kind of mindset, and perhaps that's something that if you are a loved one of somebody who has bipolar, it's a conversation that you can have with them about this idea of taking responsibility. But I think, look, I think the discussion just needs to be different in general. And I would say that that idea about taking responsibility, a lot of people with anxiety are a. Types of. And so they will rise to the challenge of taking care of others. So I put that information in there in that way for a very specific reason because I know it appeals to a type anxious people. But yeah, I think there needs to be a discussion that is kind of multifaceted. We appreciate that anxiety exists for a reason. We then see that it can then be used in a way that can be wonderful for society, and then we also take responsibility. The problem with medical.

Interpretation, the medicalization of the disease, is it actually takes away all of those important aspects of the condition. So I think these kinds of conversations are probably the most important thing. And a lot of people who are in that position, they've read my book and they've found it to be useful just because it actually frames what their loved ones going through. They actually understand it. Most of the problems in the world are about, really are really healed by understanding each other far better. So that would be my answer there.

I agree. I agree entirely. I don't remember who said it, and I'm probably going to butcher what it actually is. But something along the lines of sometimes to find the solution is to understand the problem more effectively. And that oftentimes the issue is not that we can't find the solution, but we haven't understood the actual depths of the problem. And so I agree entirely with what you're saying.

Alfred Einstein says something similar. He says, if I have an hour to solve a problem, I spend 59 minutes trying to understand the issue and then one minute solving it. And it's a similar kind of concept.

Yeah, but that means that we have to think about problems for a very, very long time.

What else are we going to do, really? I mean. Oh, man. You know, I mean, I think that the. The meatiness, the juiciness of life, right? Like they're the conversations that we crave. It doesn't mean we have to wallow, and it doesn't have to mean we despair. In fact, really, when we sit in and move through problems, it generally produces a thing of beauty out the other end. I mean, that's. That's what I think defines us as humans, is, is that very ability to create out of despair, out of pain. And that's what we deny ourselves with the current way that we're discussing things. While ever we, you know, isolate, go into a silo, take on that tribal mentality, we're denying ourselves that juicy, juicy experience. You know, it's. It's our humanity that we're denying ourselves.

I agree. And this was a really fruitful conversation. I really enjoyed diving into some of these topics with you.

Where can people find more about you and your work? Where would you like them to go?

Well, at the moment, I'm doing most of my work over at substack, so Sarah wilson.substack.com it's a kind space. The rest of social media has become a fraught realm. So, yeah, I'm loving working over there. And then I've got a podcast, of course, with the very recent guest Connor Beaton, talking about pornography. And that's called Wild with Sarah Wilson.

Wonderful. Well, we'll have the links to that in the show. Notes for everyone that's out there. If you enjoyed this conversation, as always, man it forward. Share this podcast episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. Have a great conversation with them about some of the main pieces and components that we talked about. And as always, until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. We'll see you soon.

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