Modern life is getting more mentally challenging

Current estimates suggest that anywhere between 25 and 40% of the population are currently suffering from anxiety or depression, made materially worse since the start of the Covid pandemic.

A recent BBC analysis of over 500,000 people’s mental skills found a straight line correlation between anxiety and people’s use of social media. The younger the person, the more time they tended to spend on social media and the more anxious they felt.

Additionally, a long-term Blue Cross survey of generational changes, found that mental health problems are becoming epidemic in young people and getting worse by the day.

Furthermore, other surveys now also find that young people are twice as likely to be lonely as older people, that attention spans are getting shorter and that narcissism is greatly increasing.

Added together, all of this recent research suggests that the mental picture for the population and particularly younger people is now bleak and getting bleaker by the day.

But its not just all in the mind. What's also clear is that poor mental health eventually leads to poorer health outcomes generally and that such poor health outcomes leads to a lower quality of life and lower life expectancy.

So, what's causing this dire picture and what can we do about it?

At its roots, most societal anxiety and depression starts with overthinking.

Modern lives are so rushed, that most people wake up with thoughts already on their mind and a long list of things to do. To get themselves going they use sugars and stimulants such as caffeine and continue to use them all through the day when naturally our hunter-gatherer brains would have hoped to rest and recuperate in the middle of the day.

Ending the day over-stimulated and still with a host of incomplete thoughts, people then often turn to relaxants such as alcohol to help them come down again and this chaotic daily rhythm results in their sleep cycles becoming disturbed.

Too many of these chaotic cycles leave people tired and their brain foggy, compounded by the fact that the convenience foods and drinks they typically consume to keep them going are so full of empty sugars and so low in essential nutrients, that their bodies and minds become depleted and recovery gets harder.

Modern screen-based lives and working practices are primarily to blame for these chaotic cycles, but knowing no other way, most people feel unable to escape them. Add to this the fact that 75% of people don’t like the jobs they do or the companies they work for and the problem looks more like a social rather than a personal issue.

The world is fast becoming dominated by big impersonal companies who only have profit on their minds. The employees of these businesses have little if any direct relationship with the people they are serving and have little if any autonomy. They lack purpose or the ability to see how something they have done has led to an improvement in someone else’s life. Consequently, less and less people feel motivated to work in corporate roles and more want to work in smaller businesses or be self-employed.

But contrary to this desire to work in more personal settings, big business is getting more and more omnipresent. During the Covid pandemic, the power and profits of these corporations greatly increased, whilst small businesses carried most of the burden of restrictions.

What hope then for those who want to do more meaningful work?

Having little control over your own life or destiny is in itself depressing. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, if you were a valuable member of the group, then you would have had a seat at the table when group decisions were made, but today, most people are now so far away from the decisions that control much of their lives that they feel increasingly helpless, dependent and demotivated.

And feelings of dependency have only got worse since the government started its Covid ‘campaign’. Increasingly authoritarian measures may have worked in keeping people compliant with the government’s goals, but at what cost to the long-term mental health of individuals?

Many children in their formative years now have it hard-wired into them that the government tells you who you can meet and where you can meet them and is even capable of effectively forcing you to undergo medical procedures, even when they may not clearly benefit you.

The fear tactics, now regularly used in all marginal government campaigns, were taken to new heights during Covid, leaving a whole swathe of people disproportionally frightened.

And for people who have doubted the usefulness of continually locking them away from their normal lives or vaccinating healthy people, their own feelings of oppression will only lead to an internalisation of their resentment that will create new mental disease, even in people previously able to cope.

On top of this, most people can only operate in the modern world if they now spend most of their time behind a screen. Most jobs require long periods behind a computer and its become impossible to organise your own personal life without using websites and online apps. Added to this, the nefarious compulsion of social media means that many people, especially younger ones, will no longer fit into their social circles unless they continuously participate in online chat groups.

But without the benefit of the non-verbal signals we use in personal interactions, online communications can be easily misunderstood causing personal stress and these misunderstandings are often viewed by whole groups instead of handled one-on-one.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the internet’s anonymity allows trolls to be brutal in their judgements and criticism of others when they would never get away with being so cruel in person.

And finally, the constant pings, updates and links to other material means that most users absorb enormous amounts of irrelevant and sometimes distorted or disturbing information.

In fact, given the growing evidence of how damaging social media is to people’s, particularly young people’s, minds, it is extraordinary that it is allowed to continue without adequate protections.

And, just to complete the scope of our current mental challenges, the growing and imminent specter of ever-greater mass surveillance and censorship means that this picture can only get worse.

Its not people's minds that are the problem, its the modern social environment

Given the huge amounts of mental pressure on most people it is hardly surprising that their mental health is suffering so much. There is nothing wrong with these people’s minds, its just the overwhelming amount and type of information they take in and how much of it is left percolating in their brains because they don’t have the time or ability to finish processing most of it, leaving their brains constantly overloaded, constantly demanding stimulants to keep them going and never at rest.

And rest is really important for our minds. When not absorbing more information or taking part in yet more mentally-absorbing activities, mental rest allows us to finish processing incomplete thoughts. With less agitating thoughts at the front of our minds, we can then see our issues in more context, we can stand back from them and make more considered, wiser decisions.

Research shows that meta-awareness, the ability to stand back from your thoughts and observe them rather than be controlled by them, is essential for good mental health. The practice most associated with meta-awareness is meditation, but few people with agitated minds have the ability to sit still and watch their thoughts. In fact, its often the hardest and least appealing thing they can do.

If meditation isn't easy, then the most obvious first step in reclaiming your mental well being, is to simply stop adding more unnecessary information to your life and give your brain time to relax and clean up all its incomplete thoughts.

Such a mental detox would typically involve not watching or reading the news for a few weeks, taking a holiday from social media, only answering emails at particular times or only communicating in person or on the phone.

But, whilst these mental detoxes can give short-term relief from brain overload, in the end, the only way to have a more relaxed life in this increasingly crazy world, is to choose a job, social circle and way of life that is more out of the fast lane, than in it.

And, the only way that governments can stop the runaway train of mental ill-health is by effectively dealing with its causes. Instead, not wanting to rock the world of big business and big tech, they prefer to refer their stressed citizens to the massively understaffed and underfunded mental health services, which do nothing to address the cause of people’s mental problems.

Of course doctors now have a range of antidepressants that they can prescribe, but these also fail to address the causes and instead tend to just numb a person's brain, plus, like all medicines, they come with unwelcome side-effects and with their own long-term health consequences.

As an alternative to years of taking antidepressants, there is actually now a better way to dial down your rational thinking and move into a more meta-aware state, i.e. with the careful use of psychedelic substances such as Psilocybin. Growing research is showing that these supposedly recreational drugs can actually be an extremely successful treatment for anxiety and depression, even after only one dose. Recent studies show that if used properly, these substances, far from being a danger to society, could actually be one of the most helpful medicines for modern mental problems. Allowing them to be used for medicinal purposes and disassociating them from other more dangerous ‘drugs’ seems obvious to everyone who studies them and yet for most governments they remain on the ‘illegal’ list.

Short of government’s ever waking up to the problem and possible solutions, it is therefore left to individuals to try to protect their own mental health and if you haven't got a mind made of steel, then avoiding mental overload seems to be the only 'available' cure.

In the 'Take Action' section of this website, you will find a course called ‘enlightened thinking’ which can help you better understand how your brain works, how to ameliorate the worst effects of modern mental stresses and build better mental resilience and meta-awareness.