What Our New Age of Pandemic Anxiety Looks Like—And How to Deal With It
Right after 9/11, I looked around and had a realization: The rest of the world was as scared to fly as I was. Yes, I am a person who has suffered for decades with a crippling fear of flying. It’s a delicious irony to some—my mother is most famous for writing Fear of Flying—but to me, it’s mostly annoying.
But after 9/11, there was something oddly comforting about knowing the rest of the world was as neurotic as me. Granted, I had a leg up on them: For most of my 20s I was haunted by dreams in which I would need to get somewhere but I wouldn’t be able to, because getting to that place required getting on a plane. I was just incredibly, profoundly stuck. But eventually the world got flying again, and years later so did I.
Now, after 18 months of the pandemic, I can’t help but notice that the rest of the world seems to be struggling with the kind of anxiety that I was born with. After a brief respite, after a few months of cockeyed optimism, COVID anxiety is back. According to a recent Associated Press and NORC institution poll, 41 percent of respondents said they were “extremely or very worried that they or a member of their family would become infected.” As someone who has struggled for much of my life with health anxiety, I say, “Welcome.”
“People felt like they could relax a little, and then Delta came,” says Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. “I think people are feeling vulnerable with the new strain because they feel like even if they take every precaution, they still could get sick or someone they love could get sick. People who weren’t aware of their mortality have become very aware of it.”
What Gottlieb is pointing to is what I see as a newfound awareness of health anxiety. Health anxiety is something we don’t talk about much, but about 10 percent of Americans suffer from anxiety, and about half of those people have health anxiety. Health anxiety is the conviction that even though you don’t have any symptoms, you know deep down that you’re sick.
I began to experience this form of anxiety long before the pandemic, when my best friend, Samantha Stein, died of brain cancer right after she turned 40. Her death was confirmation that the worries and preoccupations about bad things that had plagued me for my entire life were in fact going to happen. Samantha’s death was proof that the worst-case scenario was coming for me too; it was only a question of when. I too would die in some terrible, tragic way just like Sam had. Every headache was a brain tumor; every ache was cancer; every rash was something untreatable and fatal.
This inaugurated a period of near-constant testing: I just needed to test and test and test. Maybe I could prevent these things from happening if I were vigilant—very vigilant. Maybe a CAT scan for my head, and then maybe a check of this and that? A mammogram, a colonoscopy, an X-ray. Was that rash a rash or was it inflammatory breast cancer? The internet is not great for health anxiety.
But unfortunately for people with anxiety disorders, that drive to “make sure” doesn’t quiet the anxiety. If anything, “reassurance seeking” is the beginning of a miserable cycle. A test would quiet the voices, but sooner or later they would be back again. Just because my lungs were clear a month ago didn’t necessarily mean I was okay now. What was that pain? Anxiety for me really boiled down to the fear of living with uncertainty. I needed to know things were going to be okay; I couldn’t handle not knowing.
When the pandemic arrived, there was a whole new world of uncertainty. But there was also this weird feeling of knowing the rest of the world probably felt something like the way I always felt. For someone with health anxiety, a pandemic was my worst nightmare, but it also felt oddly familiar, like suddenly everyone was as worried as I was.
Of course, my anxiety disorder is not the same thing as a healthy fear of COVID. Everyone in the world has been right to be worried over the past 18 months. That said, some of the tricks that have helped me could theoretically help you. Things like trying to stay in the moment, looking at my feet, not getting ahead of myself. I try not to follow my anxious thoughts. “I almost feel like people who have anxiety are doing better with the pandemic panic,” says Gottlieb, “which isn’t what you might expect. I think they’re doing better with the worry because they already have tools and strategies to manage their anxiety.”
In recent years I’ve found help for my anxiety through exposure therapy, guided by an amazing behaviorist named Dr. Marty Seif. The cure for a fear of flying is flying. The cure for my fall from a horse is to get back on a horse, which I did on my birthday last week. Seif took me on an airplane after a 10-year hiatus, and, after not flying for a year due to the pandemic, we flew to Boston, just to help me remember not to engage in my anxious thoughts.
Growing up, my grandmother would always say she “wasn’t religious but she was extremely superstitious”; unsurprisingly she suffered from an anxiety disorder too. Superstitions are a way to try to control situations when it’s much better to let go of control and accept the anxiety. Fighting anxiety is the worst way to stop it.
Dealing with anxiety is an individual process, different for every person, but for me it was been important to discern what is being careful and what is being pathologically anxious. When I stayed with a friend who had cancer, I made sure to quarantine before. I wear KN95 masks when flying and try to avoid large gatherings even now. Sometimes the line between sane and neurotic is pretty hard to discern, but I try to gauge my suffering when I’m trying to figure it out. If I’m suffering over something, then usually that’s a tell that I’m being neurotic.
Am I fearless today? Absolutely not. But I have found a way to do the things that used to leave me utterly defeated, in a state of mortal fear. Yes.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
