A World of Worry

Compounding crises have made everyone anxious, but how do you know if you’ve slipped into a more serious disorder— and what do you do about it?

- By Rebecca Philps. Illustrations by Pete Ryan

FIVE YEARS AGO, Meredith Arthur, a 45-year-old San Francisco employee of the social media company Pinterest, arrived at a neurologist appointment in a distraught state. She spoke a mile a minute, rattling through her extensive research on the vagus cranial nerve and explaining why she thought it might hold clues to her crippling shoulder and neck pain, frequent dizziness and nausea and chronic migraines. “I was presenting my inexpert case to an expert, and she stopped me and said, ‘I know what’s wrong. You have generalised anxiety disorder.’”

For Arthur, the diagnosis was a shock. She had been so focused on her debilitating physical symptoms that she hadn’t considered that they could be linked to her mental health. But almost immediately, it clicked.

“My brain was always in overdrive, from early childhood,” Arthur recalls. “I always wanted to work really hard all the time and solve everything.”

She would have never described herself as a worrier, however, and certainly didn’t connect her perfectionism to anxiety or its impact on her body. But in fact, physical discomfort (like stomach and chest pain, feeling restless or irritable, sleep problems, fatigue and muscle aches) is most often what drives people with anxiety to seek treatment, not distressing thoughts.

“The diagnosis changed everything,” says Arthur. “It’s like somebody picked me up off the earth, turned me around 180 degrees and put me back down. It was the same world, but everything looked a little different.”