Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (12 page)

T. S. ELIOT

J
ust as I was dozing off, the phone began to ring. I had spent a long day in the lab crushing dozens of mouse brains to obtain a few precious milligrams of purified protein, and I had just gone to bed. Exhausted, I picked up after four rings. At the other end was Robert, an old university friend.

‘Have you heard?’ he asked.

‘About what?’

‘The world economy is going down the drain.’

‘And you called to tell me that?’ I yawned.

‘It’s truly bad this time, believe me.’

It was a cold, dark night in December. Worldwide, stockmarkets slumped, while the number of jobs shed continued to rise. It had been one of the worst days for the economy that year, and I had spent it isolated in a biochemistry room.

Now awake, I jumped to my desk to check the news on my laptop.

‘You don’t seem to understand.’ I could hear the tension in his voice.

‘Are you worried?’

‘Worried? I’m terrified. I can’t even sleep.’

Scanning the headlines, I could see that things were bad. And, yes, I knew Robert had just started working for a major investment bank in the city, one of those financial giants which only one year before had seemed entirely immune to any economic downturn. Things were still going well for him, but he made it sound as if he were barely a few weeks away from being a beggar at the tube station.

‘I could always earn money busking,’ he said, ‘or try once and for all to become a rock star.’

‘Robert, I’m really tired,’ was all that I managed to say.

‘Come on, you work in a neuroscience lab, aren’t you supposed to know what to do in these circumstances?’ Robert insisted.

‘Fix the economic crisis? You’re the banker.’

‘No, help me cope with anxiety,’ Robert replied.

Promising to visit Robert the next day, I ended the conversation, switched off the lights and fell back into bed. But sleep eluded me. Oddly, obscure figures and indices of the economic crisis continued to occupy my mind, like the thought of maths homework left unfinished or a nagging irresolvable equation. My eyes stayed wide open and even though I had a good job and no savings to speak of in danger of evaporating in a cloud of smoke, I found myself worried about the incumbent recession. From there, thoughts roamed freely and became galling concerns. One worry was creating another, for in a matter of minutes I found myself worrying about almost everything. I heard my heart accelerate, my head and chest felt heavy, my throat closed and the following thoughts and questions began to ramble in my mind in disorderly succession:

– Had I switched off the centrifuge properly?

– A rare chronic disease was what kept causing those terrible headaches in the morning.

– Was the front door locked?

– I should not have read that Facebook post.

– What if my university ran out of research funds?

– I was never going to finish the experiments for my next paper in time, so my competitors were sure to scoop me.

– My neighbour hadn’t greeted me that morning. Had the party at the weekend been too loud?

– A new red spot on my left arm was the beginning of cancer.

– I still have to buy all my Christmas presents and I won’t make it in time.

– The boiler would undoubtedly break down again next week.

– I might never be in a position to buy my own property.

– No pension for me in this lifetime.

– What if I had a bike accident tomorrow?

– Was a new terror attack looming in the distance?

The list could easily go on. Everything seemed to be accelerating towards a catastrophic end.

If examined carefully, some of those worries sound ridiculous, or unnecessary to say the least, don’t they? Yet, alone in the darkness of my bedroom, I didn’t seem to have much control over them.

Eventually, my worries became something else. Spinning in a vortex of confusion, I began to feel directionless, pondering my whole existence. Just over the threshold of thirty, single, overworked, on the verge of making a leap in my career, I began to worry about the meaning of all I had done, whether or not I had taken the right decisions in life. It was one of those moments when I thought I needed to do everything at once, as if the world were about to end and I only had a few hours left to accomplish all I had ever wanted to do. It felt as if someone had turned off the customary soundtrack to my day, and a strong, stubborn wind had dislodged me from the life carousel I was a part of, uprooting the pillars of hope for the future and leaving an empty stage, with me at its centre, in the spotlight.

That wind had a name – ANXIETY – and it was blowing strong and determined.

When I turned the light back on I was astonished to see that it was still only midnight. I decided to call Robert back.

‘Are you still up?’ I asked.

Fig. 7 Edward Hopper,
Nighthawks
© CORBIS

‘Yes.’

‘OK. Meet me for a drink in half an hour.’

So, there we were, a scientist and a banker trying to tame their anxieties in an all-night bar in the early hours of a winter night (Fig. 7).

The circumstances reminded me of W. H. Auden’s poem
The Age of Anxiety
, in which four characters discuss their lives, and share their hopes and distress over the human condition in a bar on Third Avenue in New York City.

‘When the historical process breaks down . . . when necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good to the bar business,’ begins the poem.
¹
Well, a glass of wine can indeed be of help if times are hard and you are trying to calm down. The characters are: Quant, a clerk, Malin, a medical officer in the Canadian Air Force, Rosetta, a department-store buyer, and Emble, a young man who has recently enlisted in the navy. The mood of the poem is that of uncertainty. The four protagonists feel lost, without a clear direction. Auden began that poem in July 1944, against the backdrop of a war which had left humanity doubtful about the future and hungry for peace. Everyone, he wrote, was ‘reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person’.
²
Auden was thirty-seven and considered himself ‘still too young to have any sure sense of direction’.
³

 • • • 

Nearly seventy years later, do we still live in an age of anxiety?

Certainly, neither Robert nor I was alone that night. Our anxieties echoed those of millions around the world. The risk of a global recession proved indeed to be real. Five years into it, we are not yet nearing a full recovery. On a weekly basis we hear of terrible news about the general economy and we are all waiting for a resolution that does not seem to arrive. The euro has been on the verge of collapsing several times, with debtor countries like Greece, Italy or Spain at risk of having to leave the monetary union. Our money and the future of our national economies are in the hands of a few suits whom we are asked to trust. The current overall grim state of the economy has affected the well-being and calm of the global population. In the last few years, a daily news diet of layoffs, bankruptcies, fluctuating indices and currency spreads and other financial disasters has caused a worldwide increase in the number of people displaying the symptoms of anxiety, ranging from changes in sleeping patterns, to general nervousness and painful headaches.

In 2010, a report revealed that 52 per cent of people who had lost their jobs to the recession manifested symptoms of anxiety, and 71 per cent reported being depressed.
⁴
The most affected were those in the age group eighteen to thirty. In Britain, the NHS estimates that one in twenty adults is affected by anxiety.
⁵
In the United States, every year about 18 per cent of the population suffers from an anxiety disorder.
⁶
In 2009 the UK government offered psychological help to the millions of people who were confronted with unemployment and debt by increasing the number of therapists and counsellors across a wide network of services that included psychotherapy centres and help hotlines.
⁷
Anxiety is also a burden for the wider economy. Currently, the annual cost of anxiety disorders in Europe amounts to €77.4 billion, a figure big enough to trigger anxiety itself, and prompting many to consider taking immediate action to fix the crisis and attend to this enormous public health challenge.
⁸

Recession aside, we inhabit a world where there is no dearth of reasons to worry. These are both private and global, immediate and remote.

On one hand, we all face the daily pressure of keeping up with work demands, sustaining wide and fierce competition, achieving success and climbing the career ladder. We need to keep on top of our finances, make ends meet on a monthly basis, think ahead and save for the future. We may also be responsible for family, or have to provide support for children, and we are expected to initiate and cultivate social relationships.

On the other hand, the global situation is altogether not reassuring. The world’s attitude towards the peril of international terrorism has profoundly altered in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent al-Qaeda attacks, with the military forces of several Western countries mobilized in two major conflicts over the past decade. We live under the constant threat that delicate political and ideological disputes over the construction and use of nuclear programmes in the Middle East may end up sparking a third world war. Unrelenting epidemics – for instance, that of HIV – and the outbreak of new, unexpected fast-spreading infections, such as avian flu and swine fever, are a reality we must learn to come to terms with and that continues to menace the health of the world population.

As if all this weren’t enough, we are told that the looming threat of global climate change may indeed irreversibly transform planet earth and initiate major natural disasters. Hurricane Sandy which hit the US east coast in November 2012 may have been a proof of that.

Undoubtedly, each historical period has endured its own share of different, but equally worrying and serious threats. Biologically, the mechanisms with which we are equipped to counteract such threats and experience anxiety are no different from those of our ancestors. But the frequency and speed at which we are bombarded with news of risks, danger and actual disasters poses an unprecedented challenge to our minds. Turning on the radio or reading a newspaper is enough to be overwhelmed by the load of disquieting events.

 • • • 

As Robert and I sat there talking and drinking, I realized that I had rarely challenged myself to harvest all those hours spent in a brain laboratory to counter a real-life necessity. Each time I told new acquaintances I worked in a laboratory devoted to the study of fear and anxiety, everyone would volunteer to be a subject for one of my experiments, claiming to be material of first quality, the best specimens for research into these dreadful emotions. Yet the meaning of my experiments had all too often remained abstract, confined behind laboratory walls. Talk of brain regions, genes, neurotransmitters and behavioural measurements sounded unbelievably distant from the monologue of personal anxious turmoil. So it was time to understand whether knowledge gathered in the lab could come in handy in such circumstances.

Fear or anxiety: know your enemy

If you are to defend yourself from your enemies, or to defeat them, you need to know them well. A good first step is to distinguish anxiety from fear.

Fear is one of our basic emotions and by far the most widely investigated in the laboratory. It is classically defined as a response to an imminent threat or danger. When we have fear, it is usually of something specific, of a lion, say, or snakes, or of flying. Evolutionarily speaking, fear is a useful, protective trait that is critical for our survival. It sharpens our senses and prepares our bodies to face sudden perils. If we weren’t capable of experiencing it, we would be dead, simply because we would not avoid dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations.
⁹
Fear makes us swim fast to the shore if we catch sight of a shark, but it dissipates as soon as the shark is no longer a threat.

As so often, Charles Darwin can be of help here. As part of his section on fear in his book, Darwin writes: ‘Fear is often preceded by astonishment, and is so far akin to it, that both lead to the senses of sight and hearing being instantly aroused . . . The frightened man at first stands like a statue motionless and breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to escape observation . . . ’ ‘The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks against the ribs . . . the skin instantly becomes pale, as during incipient faintness . . . perspiration immediately exudes from it . . . ’
¹⁰
Moreover, the pupils dilate. The guts churn and stir. Breathing becomes shallow. Sometimes, even, hair stands up! Darwin also added that ‘terror’, by which he meant a state of heightened fear, involves ‘trembling of the vocal organs and body’.
¹¹