Anxiety, allergies, asthma - modern world diseases with something in common...

Anxiety is everywhere - children, teenagers, adults, older people, it spares no-one.
At the same time, there is a huge recrudescence of allergies and asthma - who had heard about anaphylaxis in the 60s? And the "kid with asthma" used to be a one-off.

What happened to our world? Are we just more "wimpy" than before?
I don't think so. There really seems to have been an extreme change over the last 100 years.

Here's my theory:

For a very long time we were faced with real physiological threats.
We were confronted with parasites, dirt, bacteria.
Our immune systems were honed over tens of thousands of years to respond to these threats in order to keep us alive.

Over the last 100 years, the standards of hygiene in our societies have been lifted to lofty levels.
First we eliminated dirt, which in turn reduced the parasites we were exposed to (think intestinal worms etc). Then we went "anti-bacterial".

Now our immune system freaks out over anything out of the ordinary - "oh my god, a cat hair!" "yikes, the fungus on a peanut!" - because its role is to keep us safe from the unknown, and not being exposed to any crap early on means pretty much everything is unknown to our bodies.

Countless studies have shown that children are more likely to develop asthma in households where the cleaning standards are extremely high, and where there are no pets, which are just lovely furry collectors of dirt, bacteria and parasites (I'm glad to report that my kids have never been exposed to such a pristine environment lol).

Anxiety follows a similar pattern.

For millennia we were exposed to danger, violence and untimely deaths, starting with the sabre tooth tiger and finishing with human wars...

Our generation (Gen X in my case) has been lucky.
We benefit from a reasonable rule of law, our cities are safe and we haven't known war on our soil.
We are very rarely faced with real threats to our life and limbs.

And hence our psychological threat baseline has become very low. Anxiety, an emotion the purpose of which is to keep us safe from recurrent danger, no longer gets exercised to keep us safe from the risk of getting eaten by animals or killed by humans, but instead gets triggered when we're afraid of not getting the promotion at our job, don't write straight A's at school or when we get an attack of FOMO - the fear of missing out (on fun stuff).

Now, I'm not suggesting we should give up progress, bathe our kids in dirt and have some more wars - that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But there is nothing wrong with questioning the way we do things.
Antibacterial soap certainly has its place in hospitals etc. where some people have compromised immune systems; but most probably doesn't have its place in normal households.

Extreme cleaning - hard to define, but I reckon if you disinfect your whole house every day you may fall into that category - is not only a waste of time (IMHO), but also likely to lead to immune systems which won't be triggered enough in early childhood and hence be more likely to overreact later on.

Regarding anxiety, the solution may be to put things back into perspective.
Is there real harm we're facing?
Or are we more worried about a loss of face or a possible diminution of our (in historical terms extremely high) quality of life?

Next time you feel anxious, ask yourself: "what am I risking here?" or "what is the threat?".
This simple act of rationalisation will help you defuse most anxious feelings.


Post scriptum: if your anxieties stem from actual trauma, if you suffer from PTSD, please consider asking for help, having therapy, to help you deal with it.