Surviving Collapse: Stress and Anxiety
It is imperative we do our best to manage chronic stress so it doesn't destroy us mentally and physically.
Some of you know that I've worked in finance for over 20 years. Academically, the subject matter interests me, so I pursued it in school. Unfortunately, as soon as I entered the corporate world I was blindsided. The real (corporate) world is driven not by subject matter but by profit and empires. Subject matter expertise is hardly a prerequisite for success in the corporate world.
The corporate world is such a disappointment.
The years leading up to September 2023 were brutal. Surviving re-org after re-org, I ended up with a pile of accountabilities with insufficient support. I was effectively doing the jobs of four people.
The low hum of stress that comes with any job crescendoed into the beat of war drums.
My stress, once purely mental, manifested physically. At times, I could feel it in my chest. In my breathing. I maintained my calm veneer, but a storm was brewing internally. Numerous times, I warned my superiors by communicating from angles I thought they'd appreciate. Productivity, quality of work. I told them what I needed but they only continued to add more responsibility to my pile.
In September 2023, I had a stroke.
Getting up from my chair to join a meeting, coordination drained from my body. I couldn't connect my ear buds to my ears, and rapidly lost strength in the right side of my body. Collapsing to the floor, I dragged myself to get help.
I was lucky. The stroke was transient and the effects wore off after about an hour.
There were no pre-indications that I was vulnerable. I exercised regularly, was a healthy weight, relatively young, ate reasonably well, didn't smoke, wasn't diabetic. Yet, looking back, I was forewarned. Those moments of breathlessness in the months preceding my stroke were telling me something was about to happen.
I blame stress for my stroke. Years of chronic and rising stress elevated my cortisol levels and blood pressure, wrecking my body from the inside out. I mistook my outward calm appearance for an ability to handle stress. In reality, I was not dealing with the problem.
This isn't unique to me. As institutions, supply chains, agriculture and civility collapse, everyone will experience severe, chronic stress and anxiety. Those who anticipate the future already do. Surviving (aka living through) collapse requires us to remain strong and healthy. It is imperative we do our best to manage chronic stress so it doesn't destroy us mentally and physically.
Sarah Connor
In this article, I will share my experience managing stress and anxiety, which I believe go hand-in-hand (frequently joined by depression). It's impossible to eliminate stress entirely, but your health depends on your ability to dampen its effects.
Given my personal experience, here's how I'd suggest handling stress:
Talk to someone without a stake in your outcome
Your boss, spouse, friends, colleagues might mean well, but they all have limited capacity to focus on your stress and anxiety. Moreover, they are all affected by your behavior, which could taint how they respond to your problems.
Instead, find someone who will 1) dedicate a set amount of time to listening to you, and 2) has no other incentive other than to help alleviate your stress and anxiety. Usually, this person is a therapist of some sort.
Personally, I've never been one for talking about my problems. However, I've found the simple act of describing my issues to someone who would listen without distraction relieving. Of course, this person also becomes an advocate and coach, providing tools you can use to manage stress and anxiety.
Break down stress into something you can manage
One of the causes of my stress is generalized anxiety. In other words, I wasn't stressed about a specific work task, for example. Instead, the weight of the world - i.e. nothing in particular, but everything in general - was crushing. I believe existing within a system beyond one's control can cause generalized anxiety. Those systems include the work environment, interpersonal relationships and the world at large.
It is natural to feel stress and anxiety about a system under strain - especially the one that feeds, clothes and houses us. What I learned, however, is to break down the sources of generalized stress and anxiety into manageable bites. This required me to understand and prioritize stresses that I can control.
A curse the collapse-aware must endure is they are able to connect actions-reactions, inferring second and third order effects that might occur years or decades into the future. It's a heavy burden, but one that's largely beyond our control.
Pretending the world isn't breaking down isn't in our DNA, so I don't think searching for contrary evidence works in this situation. (In other situations, one might lessen stress by realizing there's no evidence to support their concerns.) Many of us are also unable to fully compartmentalize the uncontrollable future. Instead, mitigating the stress that comes with this knowledge requires one to re-focus on the more controllable present.
In more pragmatic terms, this could mean learning skills, consuming less, growing more. This is one of the reasons I started Collapse 2050 - to immediately discuss, learn and share with others, instead of wallowing in my fears about the future.
Some might accuse me of distracting from the big issues with busy-work. In some ways this is true. But I find breaking down the looming threats - e.g. food security - into current manageable tasks - growing food - helps provide some semblance of control, thereby reducing stress and anxiety about the future. In reality, these mitigation strategies may prove fruitless but it beats doing nothing.
Prioritize what you can control
Where you spend your mental and physical energy affects the way you perceive the world.
I was over-invested in my employer's decisions. Instead of focusing on what I could control, which was my daily capacity, I spent my time and energy attempting to deliver on the insurmountable responsibilities handed to me. Treating the business as if I owned it, as opposed to an entity that contracted with me to provide a set of outputs, pushed me into an uncontrollable spiral. I didn't own the business and couldn't control how it acted, so behaving as though I could created a ton of stress.
This applies to the end of the world as much as next quarter's corporate re-org.
Instead of attempting to control the uncontrollable, spend mental and physical energy managing what you can influence. I can become a better writer. I can improve my vegetable yields. I can become stronger. And as I do so, my satisfaction with life grows and overall stress declines.
Take their money
I'm not saying to ignore the job that helps you pay the bills. Instead, I'm suggesting you approach work knowing what you can and cannot control, and don't take ownership of things beyond your influence.
Your superiors want to erode the business by under-supporting it? Not your problem. You're not there to fix their mistakes. You're there to produce X within Y timeframe. Of course, if you want to remain employed you must remain professional and empathetic to your superiors.
I'm still not great at this, but I've become more clear about what I can and cannot do. My employer will push until something breaks, leaving it up to me to inform them of capacity limits. Anything beyond those limits simply isn't achieved. Alternatively, everything might be achieved but at a lower quality. Personally, I prefer to do fewer things really well.
In a crumbling world, the pointlessness of most work is striking, making it easier to disassociate any greater purpose from the daily grind. I'm simply there to do what I've been contracted to do for a fee. They don't own me. It's a freeing paradigm that has allotted me the mental capacity to write about collapse.
Medication
After my stroke, I was put on several medications - including one for anxiety - that I'll need for the rest of my life. These medications help, but they create a conundrum.
In a collapsing world, someday these medications might not be available to me. That shouldn't stop me from using them today. Remaining physically and mentally healthy today will help me deal with the challenges of tomorrow, when I may no longer have medical support.
Stress in a post collapse world
Today's stresses will differ from those in our future. However, learning to deal with stress today will make us more resilient to the changes that approach.
Collapse isn't a binary event. It's incremental, with things getting worse year-after-year. That means less money, less freedom, less food, less choice. Likely, it also means most of the conveniences we depend on to make life bearable will slowly go away, due to resource scarcity, cost and collapsing infastructure.
Brutality will rise as economic and social surplus falls. Eventually, we'll spend our lives looking around corners and over our shoulder in a fight for survival, making today's stresses seem like nothing.
While this situation is unprecedented, we can learn from others who have lived through war and economic depression. During these times stress was omnipresent, yet people mentally coped by viewing life through a different prism.
Viktor Frankl - Austrian Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist, philosopher and author - states that we when we cannot change a situation we must change ourselves. We must change our attitude. To do this, one must create meaning and purpose.
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
This is deeply personal, so I cannot prescribe meaning to your life. However, as the world slowly rots, our remaining days will be more joyful if we - despite suffering - have a reason to live.
Similar to what I said earlier about prioritizing what you can control, investing mental and physical energy in a personal mission can help alleviate some stress, anxiety and suffering in a collapsing world.
This is my personal story, not professional advice. Please share your personal experience below. A number of my readers are experts in this field so please also share your expertise (with a link to your book if you'd like).
