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My Age of Anxiety

Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

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A "bravely intimate [and] dazzlingly comprehensive" history (The New York Times Book Review) of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand anxiety—from an acclaimed journalist with his own longstanding battle with this often misunderstood affliction.  

Drawing on his own experience with anxiety, Scott Stossel presents a moving and revelatory account of a condition that affects some 40 million Americans. Stossel offers an intimate and authoritative history. We discover the well-known who have struggled with the condition, as well as the afflicted generations of Stossel's own family. Revealing anxiety's myriad manifestations and the anguish it causes, he also surveys the countless psychotherapies, medications, and often outlandish treatments that have been developed to relieve it.

Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze. He also explores how individual sufferers—including himself—have managed and controlled symptoms. By turns erudite and compassionate, amusing and inspirational, My Age of Anxiety is the essential account of a pervasive affliction.

Some eighty years ago, Freud proposed that anxiety was "a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence." Unlocking the mysteries of anxiety, he believed, would go far in helping us to unravel the mysteries of the mind: consciousness, the self, identity, intellect, imagination, creativity — not to mention pain, suffering, hope, and regret. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

The differences in how various cultures and eras have perceived and understood anxiety can tell us a lot about those cultures and eras. Why did the ancient Greeks of the Hippocratic school see anxiety mainly as a medical condition, while Enlightenment philosophers saw it as an intellectual problem? Why did the early existentialists see anxiety as a spiritual condition, while Gilded Age doctors saw it as a specifically Anglo-Saxon stress response — a response that they believed spared Catholic societies — to the Industrial Revolution? Why did the early Freudians see anxiety as a psychological condition emanating from sexual inhibition, whereas our own age tends to see it, once again, as a medical and neurochemical condition, a problem of malfunctioning biomechanics?

Do these shifting interpretations represent the forward march of progress and science? Or simply the changing, and often cyclical, ways in which cultures work? What does it say about the societies in question that Americans showing up in emergency rooms with panic attacks tend to believe they're having heart attacks, whereas Japanese tend to be afraid they're going to faint? Are the Iranians who complain of what they call "heart distress" suffering what Western psychiatrists would call panic attacks? Are the ataques de nervios experienced by South Americans simply panic attacks with a Latino inflection — or are they, as modern researchers now believe, a distinct cultural and medical syndrome? Why do drug treatments for anxiety that work so well on Americans and the French seem not to work effectively on the Chinese?

As fascinating and multifarious as these cultural idiosyncrasies are, the underlying consistency of experience across time and cultures speaks to the universality of anxiety as a human trait. Even filtered through the distinctive cultural practices and beliefs of the Greenland Inuit a hundred years ago, the syndrome the Inuit called "kayak angst" (those afflicted by it were afraid to go out seal hunting alone) appears to be little different from what we today call agoraphobia. In Hippocrates's ancient writings can be found clinical descriptions of pathological anxiety that sound quite modern. One of his patients was terrified of cats (simple phobia, which today would be coded 300.29 for insurance purposes, according to the classifications of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-V) and another of nightfall; a third, Hippocrates reported, was "beset by terror" whenever he heard a flute; a fourth could not walk alongside "even the shallowest ditch," though he had no problem walking inside the ditch — evidence of what we would today call acrophobia, the fear of heights. Hippocrates also describes a patient suffering what would likely be called, in modern diagnostic terminology, panic disorder with agoraphobia (DSM-V code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates described it, "usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him." The syndromes described by Hippocrates are recognizably the same clinical phenomena described in the latest issues of the Archives of General Psychiatry and Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic.

Their similarities bridge the yawning gap of millennia and circumstances that separate them, providing a sense of how, for all the differences in culture and setting, the physiologically anxious aspects of human experience may be universal.

In this book, I have set out to explore the "riddle" of anxiety. I am not a doctor, a psychologist, a sociologist, or a historian of science — any one of whom would bring more scholarly authority to a treatise on anxiety than I do. This is a work of synthesis and reportage, yoking together explorations of the idea of anxiety from history, literature, philosophy, religion, popular culture, and the latest scientific research — all of that woven through something about which I can, alas, claim extensive expertise: my own experience with anxiety. Examining the depths of my own neuroses may seem the height of narcissism (and studies do show that self-preoccupation tends to be tied to anxiety), but it's an exercise with worthy antecedents. In 1621, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton published his canonical The Anatomy of Melancholy, a staggering thirteen-hundred-page work of synthesis, whose torrents of scholarly exegesis only partially obscure what it really is: a massive litany of anxious, depressive complaint. In 1733, George Cheyne, a prominent London physician and one of the most influential psychological thinkers of the eighteenth century, published The English Malady, which includes the forty-page chapter "The Case of the Author" (dedicated to "my fellow sufferers"), in which he reports in minute detail on his neuroses (including "Fright, Anxiety, Dread, and Terror" and "a melancholy Fright and Panick, where my Reason was of no Use to me") and physical symptoms (including "a sudden violent Head-ach," "extream Sickness in my Stomach," and "a constant Colick, and an ill Taste and Savour in my Mouth") over the years. More recently, the intellectual odysseys of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and William James were powerfully driven by their curiosity about, and the desire to find relief from, their own anxious suffering. Freud used his acute train phobia and his hypochondria, among other things, to construct his theory of psychoanalysis; Darwin was effectively housebound by stress-related illnesses after the voyage of the Beagle — he spent years in pursuit of relief from his anxiety, visiting spas and, on the advice of one doctor, encasing himself in ice. James tried to keep his phobias hidden from the public but was often quietly terrified. "I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread in the pit of my stomach and with a sense of insecurity of life that I never knew before," he wrote in 1902 of the onset of his anxiety. "For months, I was unable to go out in the dark alone."

Unlike Darwin, Freud, and James, I'm not out to adumbrate a whole new theory of mind or of human nature. Rather, this book is motivated by a quest to understand, and to find relief from or redemption in, anxious suffering. This quest has taken me both backward, into history, and forward, to the frontiers of modern scientific research. I have spent much of the past eight years reading through hundreds of thousands of the pages that have been written about anxiety over the last three thousand years.

My life has, thankfully, lacked great tragedy or melodrama. I haven't served any jail time. I haven't been to rehab. I haven't assaulted anyone or carried out a suicide attempt. I haven't woken up naked in the middle of a field, sojourned in a crack house, or been fired from a job for erratic behavior. As psychopathologies go, mine has been — so far, most of the time, to outward appearances — quiet. Robert Downey Jr. will not be starring in the movie of my life. I am, as they say in the clinical literature, "high functioning" for someone with an anxiety disorder or a mental illness; I'm usually quite good at hiding it. More than a few people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable, would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I've learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: "the need and ability" — as described in the self-help book Your Phobia — "to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside." *

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck — paddling, paddling, paddling.

* "For many, many people who have anxiety disorders — particularly agoraphobia and panic disorder — people would be surprised to find out that they have problems with anxiety because they seem so'together' and in control," says Paul Foxman, a psychologist who heads the Center for Anxiety Disorders in Burlington, Vermont. "They seem to be comfortable, but there's a disconnection between the public self and the private self."
  • FINALIST | 2015
    Wellcome Trust Book Prize
A Washington Post Notable Book
A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year

“Scott Stossel has produced the definitive account of anxiety. . . . This story has needed to be told.” —Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

“Enlightening, empowering. . . . Brave and . . . potentially therapeutic.” —The Washington Post

“Sheds light not just on a particular disorder but on the human condition that gives rise to it.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Brings to this story depth, intelligence, and perspective that could enlighten untold fellow sufferers for years to come.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“A carefully reported, wryly funny, and admirably honest historical and personal investigation.” —Elle

 “[An] erudite, heartfelt, and occasionally darkly funny meld of memoir, cultural history, and science. . . . Excruciatingly relevant.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Bravely intimate. . . . Dazzlingly comprehensive.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Admirably done. . . . Intelligent, interesting, and well written.” —The New Yorker
 
“First-rate. . . . Fascinating. . . . [A] triumph.” —The Boston Globe
 
“There is much pain here, but humor, too. . . . Without meaning to, Stossel has written a self-help manual.” —Newsday
 
“Quite impressive. . . . [Stossel is] a terrific, companionable writer.” —Forbes

“With humor, insight and intense research, [Stossel] sheds light on the disorder that is believed to affect one in seven Americans. From a historical overview to a review of current treatments in a book laced with fascinating personal anecdotes, Stossel delivers authentic perspective on such suffering. “ —New York Daily News

“Scott Stossel’s new book on his lifelong struggle with severe anxiety is outstanding in the fullest sense of the word. . . . Both conspicuous and superior within its genre.” —The Seattle Times

“Books exploring personal experiences of mental illness tend to be either over-wrought accounts of personal trauma that shed little light on the world beyond the author’s nose, or the more detached observations of scientists and medics. It is rare to find works that bridge these objectives, which is one reason that the writer Andrew Solomon achieved such success with The Noonday Demon. . . . Stossel’s book deserves a place on this higher shelf.” —Nature

“Powerful, eye-opening and funny. Pitch-perfect in his storytelling, Stossel reminds us that, in many important ways, to be anxious is to be human.” —The Dallas Morning News
 
“An immense achievement. . . . Superbly wide-ranging. . . . With this substantial treatment, Stossel has done justice to himself and his subject.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)

“An extraordinary literary performance. . . . In an age inundated by memoirs and psychic self-help books, My Age of Anxiety is the rare memoir that tells an entirely compelling story, and the rare self-help book that really helps. You, and many thousands of readers along with you, will laugh until you cry.” —Bookforum
© Michael Lionstar
Scott Stossel is the editor of The Atlantic and the author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic,The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,and many other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. View titles by Scott Stossel

About

A "bravely intimate [and] dazzlingly comprehensive" history (The New York Times Book Review) of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand anxiety—from an acclaimed journalist with his own longstanding battle with this often misunderstood affliction.  

Drawing on his own experience with anxiety, Scott Stossel presents a moving and revelatory account of a condition that affects some 40 million Americans. Stossel offers an intimate and authoritative history. We discover the well-known who have struggled with the condition, as well as the afflicted generations of Stossel's own family. Revealing anxiety's myriad manifestations and the anguish it causes, he also surveys the countless psychotherapies, medications, and often outlandish treatments that have been developed to relieve it.

Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze. He also explores how individual sufferers—including himself—have managed and controlled symptoms. By turns erudite and compassionate, amusing and inspirational, My Age of Anxiety is the essential account of a pervasive affliction.

Excerpt

Some eighty years ago, Freud proposed that anxiety was "a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence." Unlocking the mysteries of anxiety, he believed, would go far in helping us to unravel the mysteries of the mind: consciousness, the self, identity, intellect, imagination, creativity — not to mention pain, suffering, hope, and regret. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

The differences in how various cultures and eras have perceived and understood anxiety can tell us a lot about those cultures and eras. Why did the ancient Greeks of the Hippocratic school see anxiety mainly as a medical condition, while Enlightenment philosophers saw it as an intellectual problem? Why did the early existentialists see anxiety as a spiritual condition, while Gilded Age doctors saw it as a specifically Anglo-Saxon stress response — a response that they believed spared Catholic societies — to the Industrial Revolution? Why did the early Freudians see anxiety as a psychological condition emanating from sexual inhibition, whereas our own age tends to see it, once again, as a medical and neurochemical condition, a problem of malfunctioning biomechanics?

Do these shifting interpretations represent the forward march of progress and science? Or simply the changing, and often cyclical, ways in which cultures work? What does it say about the societies in question that Americans showing up in emergency rooms with panic attacks tend to believe they're having heart attacks, whereas Japanese tend to be afraid they're going to faint? Are the Iranians who complain of what they call "heart distress" suffering what Western psychiatrists would call panic attacks? Are the ataques de nervios experienced by South Americans simply panic attacks with a Latino inflection — or are they, as modern researchers now believe, a distinct cultural and medical syndrome? Why do drug treatments for anxiety that work so well on Americans and the French seem not to work effectively on the Chinese?

As fascinating and multifarious as these cultural idiosyncrasies are, the underlying consistency of experience across time and cultures speaks to the universality of anxiety as a human trait. Even filtered through the distinctive cultural practices and beliefs of the Greenland Inuit a hundred years ago, the syndrome the Inuit called "kayak angst" (those afflicted by it were afraid to go out seal hunting alone) appears to be little different from what we today call agoraphobia. In Hippocrates's ancient writings can be found clinical descriptions of pathological anxiety that sound quite modern. One of his patients was terrified of cats (simple phobia, which today would be coded 300.29 for insurance purposes, according to the classifications of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-V) and another of nightfall; a third, Hippocrates reported, was "beset by terror" whenever he heard a flute; a fourth could not walk alongside "even the shallowest ditch," though he had no problem walking inside the ditch — evidence of what we would today call acrophobia, the fear of heights. Hippocrates also describes a patient suffering what would likely be called, in modern diagnostic terminology, panic disorder with agoraphobia (DSM-V code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates described it, "usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him." The syndromes described by Hippocrates are recognizably the same clinical phenomena described in the latest issues of the Archives of General Psychiatry and Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic.

Their similarities bridge the yawning gap of millennia and circumstances that separate them, providing a sense of how, for all the differences in culture and setting, the physiologically anxious aspects of human experience may be universal.

In this book, I have set out to explore the "riddle" of anxiety. I am not a doctor, a psychologist, a sociologist, or a historian of science — any one of whom would bring more scholarly authority to a treatise on anxiety than I do. This is a work of synthesis and reportage, yoking together explorations of the idea of anxiety from history, literature, philosophy, religion, popular culture, and the latest scientific research — all of that woven through something about which I can, alas, claim extensive expertise: my own experience with anxiety. Examining the depths of my own neuroses may seem the height of narcissism (and studies do show that self-preoccupation tends to be tied to anxiety), but it's an exercise with worthy antecedents. In 1621, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton published his canonical The Anatomy of Melancholy, a staggering thirteen-hundred-page work of synthesis, whose torrents of scholarly exegesis only partially obscure what it really is: a massive litany of anxious, depressive complaint. In 1733, George Cheyne, a prominent London physician and one of the most influential psychological thinkers of the eighteenth century, published The English Malady, which includes the forty-page chapter "The Case of the Author" (dedicated to "my fellow sufferers"), in which he reports in minute detail on his neuroses (including "Fright, Anxiety, Dread, and Terror" and "a melancholy Fright and Panick, where my Reason was of no Use to me") and physical symptoms (including "a sudden violent Head-ach," "extream Sickness in my Stomach," and "a constant Colick, and an ill Taste and Savour in my Mouth") over the years. More recently, the intellectual odysseys of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and William James were powerfully driven by their curiosity about, and the desire to find relief from, their own anxious suffering. Freud used his acute train phobia and his hypochondria, among other things, to construct his theory of psychoanalysis; Darwin was effectively housebound by stress-related illnesses after the voyage of the Beagle — he spent years in pursuit of relief from his anxiety, visiting spas and, on the advice of one doctor, encasing himself in ice. James tried to keep his phobias hidden from the public but was often quietly terrified. "I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread in the pit of my stomach and with a sense of insecurity of life that I never knew before," he wrote in 1902 of the onset of his anxiety. "For months, I was unable to go out in the dark alone."

Unlike Darwin, Freud, and James, I'm not out to adumbrate a whole new theory of mind or of human nature. Rather, this book is motivated by a quest to understand, and to find relief from or redemption in, anxious suffering. This quest has taken me both backward, into history, and forward, to the frontiers of modern scientific research. I have spent much of the past eight years reading through hundreds of thousands of the pages that have been written about anxiety over the last three thousand years.

My life has, thankfully, lacked great tragedy or melodrama. I haven't served any jail time. I haven't been to rehab. I haven't assaulted anyone or carried out a suicide attempt. I haven't woken up naked in the middle of a field, sojourned in a crack house, or been fired from a job for erratic behavior. As psychopathologies go, mine has been — so far, most of the time, to outward appearances — quiet. Robert Downey Jr. will not be starring in the movie of my life. I am, as they say in the clinical literature, "high functioning" for someone with an anxiety disorder or a mental illness; I'm usually quite good at hiding it. More than a few people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable, would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I've learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: "the need and ability" — as described in the self-help book Your Phobia — "to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside." *

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck — paddling, paddling, paddling.

* "For many, many people who have anxiety disorders — particularly agoraphobia and panic disorder — people would be surprised to find out that they have problems with anxiety because they seem so'together' and in control," says Paul Foxman, a psychologist who heads the Center for Anxiety Disorders in Burlington, Vermont. "They seem to be comfortable, but there's a disconnection between the public self and the private self."

Awards

  • FINALIST | 2015
    Wellcome Trust Book Prize

Praise

A Washington Post Notable Book
A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year

“Scott Stossel has produced the definitive account of anxiety. . . . This story has needed to be told.” —Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

“Enlightening, empowering. . . . Brave and . . . potentially therapeutic.” —The Washington Post

“Sheds light not just on a particular disorder but on the human condition that gives rise to it.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Brings to this story depth, intelligence, and perspective that could enlighten untold fellow sufferers for years to come.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“A carefully reported, wryly funny, and admirably honest historical and personal investigation.” —Elle

 “[An] erudite, heartfelt, and occasionally darkly funny meld of memoir, cultural history, and science. . . . Excruciatingly relevant.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Bravely intimate. . . . Dazzlingly comprehensive.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Admirably done. . . . Intelligent, interesting, and well written.” —The New Yorker
 
“First-rate. . . . Fascinating. . . . [A] triumph.” —The Boston Globe
 
“There is much pain here, but humor, too. . . . Without meaning to, Stossel has written a self-help manual.” —Newsday
 
“Quite impressive. . . . [Stossel is] a terrific, companionable writer.” —Forbes

“With humor, insight and intense research, [Stossel] sheds light on the disorder that is believed to affect one in seven Americans. From a historical overview to a review of current treatments in a book laced with fascinating personal anecdotes, Stossel delivers authentic perspective on such suffering. “ —New York Daily News

“Scott Stossel’s new book on his lifelong struggle with severe anxiety is outstanding in the fullest sense of the word. . . . Both conspicuous and superior within its genre.” —The Seattle Times

“Books exploring personal experiences of mental illness tend to be either over-wrought accounts of personal trauma that shed little light on the world beyond the author’s nose, or the more detached observations of scientists and medics. It is rare to find works that bridge these objectives, which is one reason that the writer Andrew Solomon achieved such success with The Noonday Demon. . . . Stossel’s book deserves a place on this higher shelf.” —Nature

“Powerful, eye-opening and funny. Pitch-perfect in his storytelling, Stossel reminds us that, in many important ways, to be anxious is to be human.” —The Dallas Morning News
 
“An immense achievement. . . . Superbly wide-ranging. . . . With this substantial treatment, Stossel has done justice to himself and his subject.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)

“An extraordinary literary performance. . . . In an age inundated by memoirs and psychic self-help books, My Age of Anxiety is the rare memoir that tells an entirely compelling story, and the rare self-help book that really helps. You, and many thousands of readers along with you, will laugh until you cry.” —Bookforum

Author

© Michael Lionstar
Scott Stossel is the editor of The Atlantic and the author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic,The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,and many other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. View titles by Scott Stossel

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