FUTURE TENSE

Anxiety is today among the most common mental health issues that people are seeking help for. Sonali Gupta, a Mumbai-based psychologist and author, talks to Nidhi Gupta about why we’re collectively feeling more anxious, and what we can do about it

- Nidhi Gupta

In early June, the 23-year-old tennis sensation Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open on account of her mental health. In an Instagram post, she talked about getting “huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media”, and wearing headphones at tournaments to “dull my social anxiety”. Around the same time, the American comedian and actor Bo Burnham released his first special on Netflix in five years. Burnham found superstardom with his YouTube channel, like several of his generation, including Justin Bieber. Inside, a double entendre on the life of isolation we’ve all gotten accustomed to lately, as on the interior life of any human being, also channels his anxieties around being under the spotlight all the time – something he talked about five years ago, after he took a sabbatical from stand-up when he began to get panic attacks on stage.

If burnout is our contemporary condition, as Jill Lepore notes in a recent essay in The New Yorker, then anxiety is its most visible symptom and loudest warning sign. It can feel like there’s much to be anxious about these days: Eco-anxiety is real now, as is reopening anxiety (the distress that comes with life returning to normal, postCovid). Our expectations of life, relationships, success, and the discomforting ease with which we are able to compare ourselves to others, entirely unjustly, has fuelled this further. It isn’t just contemporary, it is also a collective affliction.