The Best Therapy for Our Anxiety Epidemic

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To note that a mental-health crisis is hitting American adolescents and young adults is hardly news—data to that effect emerge almost every day. The latest confirmation, in April, comes from a survey that I was grateful to help develop: This major survey, sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation and fielded by Gallup, revealed that some 38 percent of respondents aged 12 to 26 had received a formal diagnosis of anxiety or depression. That finding broke down by gender as 29 percent of young men and 45 percent of young women. Even among those who have not received a diagnosis, about half say they often feel anxious; a quarter say they often feel depressed.

In a search for answers and solutions, Jonathan Haidt’s recent best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, ascribed blame to the overuse of screens and social media. The Gallup/Walton data support his argument: Among adolescents and young adults who spent more than 20 hours a week on social media, 65 percent said they felt anxiety “a lot of the day yesterday” (as opposed to 49 percent of those who spent 20 hours or less so engaged); 49 percent of the heavy social-media users felt sadness for a lot of the day before (versus 26 percent of non-heavy users); and 80 percent of them felt a lot of stress (against 59 percent of those other users).

But I believe a deeper philosophical problem affects the lives of young people today as well, and of many people who are no longer young. Folks lack a sense of meaning; they don’t feel they know the “why” of their lives. Worse, evidence suggests that they’re not even looking for it, nor are we encouraging them to do so. This creates a feeling of hollowness and futility, especially when times are inevitably rough, and that encourages a culture that strives to provide a sense of security that is doomed to prove false and can only make the problem worse. If you see this syndrome taking effect in your life or in the life of someone you love, here is how to apprehend and address it.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The meaning of life is surprisingly simple]

I have written about the meaning of life, including the way to understand and define it, in a past column. In my research, I often refer to the work of the psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger, who have defined meaning in life as a combination of three elements: coherence (how events fit together), purpose (having goals and direction), and significance (a sense of the inherent value of one’s existence). I find this conception helpful because it takes a huge, amorphous problem (What is the meaning of life?) and breaks it down into three categories that, though they still require a lot of work, are more manageable. The big question thus becomes three smaller, more specific ones: Why do things happen the way they do? What are my goals in life? Why does it matter that I am alive?

A quite similar version of these questions appears in the Gallup survey, and the answers map powerfully onto the findings about unhappiness, depression, and anxiety. After my team and I investigated the survey’s microdata concerning the 18-to-26-year-olds, we found that 20 percent of them rarely or never felt that “things in my life happen for a reason” (the coherence measure). These young adults were 16 percentage points less likely to say they were “very happy” than their peers who often or always felt things happened for a reason (7 percent versus 23 percent); they were also 11 percentage points more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression (48 percent versus 37 percent). Similar patterns applied among the young adults who answered “rarely” or “never” on the purpose and significance questions.

One explanation for this pattern might be that, for some reason, depressed and anxious young people simply can’t come up with answers for these questions. But it’s also possible that these are the ones who simply aren’t looking. Consider the longitudinal survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA showing that, over a 40-year period starting in the mid-1960s and ending in 2006, the percentage of American undergraduate freshmen students that reported that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” is a “very important” or “essential” personal goal fell from 86 percent to less than 50 percent, where it has remained to this day.

Haidt’s work on the dramatic rise in people’s screen time and internet use shows that the problems began in the mid-2000s, almost certainly making any quest for meaning cognitively harder. Notably, neuroscientists have found that the default-mode network—the set of brain regions that become active when we are mentally at rest—is crucial for finding high-level meaning, memory, future contemplation, and daydreaming. Other studies have demonstrated that this neuro-network exhibits disrupted or abnormal functioning during tasks that require external focused attention, which would surely include heavy internet usage.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Three paths toward the meaning of life]

One very obvious implication from all of this is that to seek meaning in life in order to lower symptoms of depression and anxiety, we should stop spending so many hours online. But that still leaves unresolved the issue for those who have forgotten how to find meaning—or never learned in the first place—of getting started. How do you search for meaning? Where should you look?

Reframing the problem is a helpful way to begin: Try putting yourself not in the position of the asker but of the asked. This was the technique proposed by the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who wrote the influential Man’s Search for Meaning and created “logotherapy,” a clinical method based on identifying a personal sense of meaning. Frankl’s approach starts by inverting the original question: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” In other words, put aside your need to find a formula for your own gratification and instead see the world’s need for you to find meaning—so that you can do more with your life and benefit the world.

In that spirit of service, Frankl put forward three practical ways of discovering meaning. First, create something or accomplish a significant task—you will make meaning simply in the process of striving for an accomplishment. Second, experience something fully or love someone deeply, which is to say: Stop thinking about yourself and dive into an external experience or a relationship with another person. Third, adopt an attitude of strength and courage toward unavoidable suffering, and resolve to learn from your pain.

An alternative approach involves breaking down the quest for meaning into the components identified by Martela and Steger. Enquiring into coherence, purpose, and significance naturally elicits serious reflection on life and death—why your limited time on Earth matters and what you’re supposed to do with it. In my own work, I’ve found that this centers on trying to answer these two big questions: Why am I alive? And for what would I give my life? A sustained effort to find answers to those will reveal your life’s coherence, purpose, and significance.

Your search might also illuminate just why you feel so hollow. For example, if your best answer to the first question is “a sperm found an egg,” and to the second you say “nothing,” that could explain why life seems random and trivial to you. If you find yourself in that position, the right strategy might be to decide to live in a way that provides more existentially substantive answers. That, in turn, may well lead you to purposely adopt a set of beliefs to live by. You might, say, decide to live with the conviction that you have the gift of life in order to serve others, and you might also decide that a cause you would die for is your family’s safety and survival.

Of course, these issues are intensely personal and individual, which is why you’ll find no substitute for the deep introspective work you’ll need to do to arrive at your own right answers. And there’s no substitute for using screens and social media responsibly so that you can do that work. But as Frankl taught us, the work itself is an exciting, productive adventure.

[Jonathan Haidt: End the phone-based childhood now]

One last point I’d make is that having meaning in life can protect you to a degree when suffering inevitably comes your way. A theme that emerges throughout Haidt’s work is a critique of “safetyism,” the belief that safety is a sacred value, and of the trend among parents and schools to elevate this value above others. Safetyism, in his analysis, is a direct consequence of a decline in people’s sense of life’s meaning, because meaning makes sense of suffering—so if you lack meaning to help you cope with suffering, then safetyism is the reflexive response, to try to provide a shield against suffering.

In other words, when pain has no seeming purpose, the only logical course of action is to fight against it. In a doomed effort to forestall suffering, we protect our kids from conflict, danger, and anything that might offend or alarm them. This strategy has proven catastrophic for happiness: It leaves young people ill-prepared for the inevitable threats and challenges that everyone has to face, and for the suffering that is impossible to avoid in our highly complex world. The only reliable way to travel through that world with courage and hope is to do the work to find meaning, and encourage those we love to do so as well.