Anger, Anxiety & Loneliness, Three Plagues of Modern Day Society:

Which one afflicts you?

The level of stress and demands to meet expectations in a world that is constantly in turmoil or pregnant with issues of inflation, crime, poor health care, racism, and economic hardship can generate a decent amount of uncertainty.

Anxiety:

Uncertainty is the psychic trigger for anxiety and when intersected with stress can give rise to a culture and societal conditioning that this mode of living appears normal.

As a society, we are plagued with a diverse number of unintended consequences that arise due to the stress of trying to make it or compete with life’s demands.

The health crisis experienced during COVID where we lost over a million people most of whom had secondary medical complications is evidence of the corrosive plagues we face as it takes us out from within.

Anxiety is America’s number one mental illness and drives our pharmaceutical consumption of prescriptions. We are 5% of the world’s population and consume 25% of its prescription drugs.

This reflects a society that is mentally and emotionally hijacked and overwhelmed because there are vast portions of the populace who do not have access to adequate resources to meet their basic needs for housing, food, transportation, and medical care and this is anxiety-inducing.

In 2022 the GDP per capita in the US which is the income per person was $76,400 which sounds like lots of money when compared to the average income across the world of $10,000 US dollars. This illustrates the significant income gaps between the haves and the have-nots.

Our ongoing attachment and addictions to social media and our phones are a testament to the need to dissociate in cyberspace or to be on lockdown with our “cell” …. phones as a way of anesthetizing our precarious feelings of uncertainty added to the fact that we are in constant bombardment by the News Outlet overloads about situational crisis.

If it is not a hurricane, it’s a fire, a drought, flooding, or a random mass shooting that occurs daily and does not make the news because of its frequency.

We are constantly experiencing climatic anomalies that keep us as a society on a vigilant alert level that is not sustainable.

Trauma is often described as a restriction of your authenticity in the present moment as a way of managing an overwhelming external event.

This form of management is often unconscious and creates internal states that become traits.

Is our society and the way we adapt to it a regimen for pathological diseases?

Medical experts have also concluded that most Americans are deficient in magnesium which is excreted from the body when it’s exposed to overwhelming levels of stress.

Anger:

Anger is a tell-tale sign that an individual or society is in distress.

It’s an expression that something about the system or person is dysregulated and more balance is needed.

According to data reports, there have already been 368 mass shootings in the US for 2023. This anger has gone wild and presupposed a very sick society that needs collaborative interventions from the international community because this excessive violence with guns seems exclusive to American soil.

Other countries may have solutions that we need to create and adopt a safe environment for all, in particular our children.

It is also evident as a clinician to see the influx of people seeking therapy due to cultural habits, norms, and social conditioning that allow us to suffer in silence and to take on an invulnerable disposition when facing difficulties. We suppress our emotions, keep a stiff upper lip, and disallow others from seeing us frazzled or sweating.

The consequences of repressed emotions are often an explosive outburst of anger or volcanic episodes or a trip into a vice that continues to inoculate our feelings while causing an individual or family crisis.

The ubiquity of social media and the exposure to cyberbullying, online harassment, or the indulgence to compare with others can be a source of anger, envy, and frustration.

Capitalism is our economic machinery, and this breeds competition, and a false sense of scarcity, which can result in jobs being highly stressed and overwhelming giving rise to imposter syndromes, inadequacy, and distress which can fuel more anger states.

Given the metrics above anger can be a byproduct of intense displeasure, irritation low frustration tolerance, and rage. This anger often shows up as increased heart rate, muscle tension, flushed face, clenched fists, or strong desires to be aggressive.

This unresolved anger over things that we often have no control over often finds an outlet at home in the form of domestic violence. In the US we have had over 6000 cases for the first six months of 2023 a 19% increase over 2022.

These anger states when prolonged can become traits with medical consequences that show up as elevated blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases.

Loneliness:

Loneliness is defined as a perceived lack of social support or the absence of the right quantity or quality of social support and is often accompanied by a feeling of unhappiness.

The pandemic has opened a wide range of opportunities to work remotely and this has exacerbated the state of loneliness in our culture.

Prolonged loneliness can contribute to various mental health issues including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.

There is a double-edged sword with loneliness due to the fact the phenomenon when engaged in over extended periods of time reduces one’s capacity to have appropriate social skills and becomes a hindrance to healthy relational development.

According to recent census data almost 28% or 32.7 million American live alone a recipe for early death due to statistics that state that married couples live longer than single households.

Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom have appointed a Minister of Loneliness to address the increasing problem of social isolation.

If there is some personal confusion between the words solitude and loneliness given that it is often used interchangeably the term solitude has a positive connotation whereas loneliness has a culturally negative one.

Published in Cureus by Bhatti & Haq, their findings indicate and establish a link between loneliness and pathological outcomes manifested through illnesses such as cardiovascular, inflammatory, cognitive, affective disorders, and neuroendocrine disorders.

The studies from the above also highlighted that perceived social isolation or loneliness increased morbidity and mortality.

Prolonged exposure or extended periods of loneliness make individuals vulnerable to inflammatory responses, and metabolic and hormonal imbalances.

This is a question of curiosity the CDC data states that 1% of the world’s population is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder which amounts to over 80 million people would this neurological divergence be a buffer against the pathological outcomes of loneliness?

The above is premised on the observation that most individuals on the spectrum are often wired to be alone or appear comfortable within the confines of their company.

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone, and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.” — Paul Tillich

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