Arcade Fire gets Anxiety.
How their newest album speaks to mental illness in the modern world.
Indulge me. This is my new favorite song. I like it as a fan of new alternative music, and I especially like it as a mental health professional. Take a listen. Then come back and read on so I can tell you why I named my anxiety support & skills group after its title: Age of Anxiety.
This song says a lot about the experience of anxiety, but I’m most impressed by these opening lines.
It's the age of doubt
And I doubt we'll figure it out
Isn’t that the essence of anxiety: doubting? The stresses of the past few years have riddled us with doubt. There’s the obvious stuff, the big stuff: global warming, democracy’s decline, economic instability, and infectious diseases. But there’s also the personal stuff that keeps us trapped in our heads: “Did I offend that person?” “Should I go to that party?” “What’s my boss/employee thinking about me?” Doubts about ourselves, our environment, and our choices tap dance through our heads throughout the day, every day. We are riddled with doubt.
The essence of anxiety is doubt.
The song begins by naming our dilemma: It’s the age of doubt. Then, in the next line, they finish the thought, but they also answer the first line: And I doubt we’ll figure it out. We could interpret this to mean “We’re doomed. Let’s give up.” But I think they’re saying something else. I think they’re suggesting there’s an antidote to the problem. I’ll explain.
Doubt is a natural response to any risky situation, especially one where the stakes are high. When someone—anyone—says, “Relax! It’ll be fine,” what is your first reaction? Mine too. It’s total disbelief, or—at best—healthy skepticism. That’s because doubt is our brain’s way of questioning a situation, anticipating danger and, ultimately, keeping us alive. Evolution put that mechanism in our brains over 100,000 years ago, and it has served us pretty well.
Doubt isn’t the problem. It’s a feature, not a bug. The real problem is our reaction to doubt, which is trying to figure it out. Not knowing is very, very uncomfortable. To get rid of that feeling, we go about trying to know what’s going to happen. Our brains predict every outcome (usually the worst we can imagine), then we worry, worry, and worry some more. It feels like we are working toward the solution, like we’re figuring it out. But we never do figure it out, so we are actually just making ourselves feel crazy. What if that’s because we’re trying to do something that can’t be done?
“It’s a maze of mirrors. It’s a hologram of a ghost
And you can’t quite touch it, which is how it hurts us the most”
from Age of Anxiety I by Arcade Fire
Time machines don’t exist. Knowing the future for certain is a fantasy. Trying to know is a fool’s errand, a losing battle, a rigged, unwinnable game. What’s the only way to win an unwinnable game? Not to play. The solution to not knowing is to accept that we don’t know. This is difficult, but there’s freedom here. Accepting that we don’t know frees our brains and our spirits from the struggle, and it gives us the time and energy to be who we want and do what we want with our lives: deal with the day-to-day reality of living in an unpredictable world, rather than just worrying.
It's the age of doubt
And I doubt we'll figure it out
Times are tough, and we don’t know how things are going to turn out with the big or the small things. But, if we give up that struggle to get rid of doubt, we can learn to show up as the people we want to be and to get on with the business of living. A support & skills group like Age of Anxiety is a laboratory where we try new ways of dealing with the doubt that our brains hand us. Together we learn new ways of relating to anxiety whenever and however it arises. We stop trying to “figure it out,” and we take some real action.
Do you have songs that describe your experience with anxiety? Share them with me via email. And, please, reach out if you’re interested in learning more about how group therapy can help you take action in your life.
