Epictetus opened his lecture on anxiety with a question that still sounds a little odd.
“When I see a man in anxiety, I say to myself, what can it be that this fellow wants?”
We would ask something else. We ask an anxious person what is wrong, or what they are afraid of, and often the true answer is that nothing has happened yet. That is close to the definition of the thing. Psychologists separate fear from anxiety by what each one is about. Fear is the response to a danger that is present and clear, like the car that pulls out in front of you. Anxiety is the response to something that might happen, has not happened yet, and may never happen at all. Fear ends when the car has passed. Anxiety has nothing to end it, because the thing it is waiting for is still undecided, and so it can go on for an afternoon or for ten years.
You can recognize it by what it makes you do. You rehearse a conversation that has not taken place, sometimes a dozen times. You read the message again after you have sent it. You ask someone whether they are sure it will be fine, feel better for ten minutes, and then want to ask again.
Your body responds to both in much the same way. The heart speeds up, the stomach tightens, sleep gets lighter and attention narrows onto the threat. That is a good arrangement for the few seconds it takes a car to pass. Kept up for months, it becomes the list of symptoms the World Health Organization gives for anxiety disorders, which includes trouble concentrating, irritability, a pounding heart, poor sleep and “a sense of impending danger, panic or doom.”
Think of it like a smoke alarm. An alarm that goes off when you burn the toast is a nuisance. An alarm that stays quiet during a real fire can kill you. So every sensible smoke alarm is built to go off too often, and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has argued that evolution set our own alarm the same way. For most of human history a false alarm cost a few minutes of a racing heart, while a missed danger could cost a life, and we are descended from the people whose alarms rang early. An anxious mind is in that sense working as designed. The trouble is that the alarm now sits in a house it was not built for.
It was built for dangers that were close, physical and quickly over. The phone in your pocket now reports every fire in the world, at any hour, and you can do nothing about almost any of them. There is also some evidence that the phone has made us worse at not knowing things. An analysis of fifty-two North American studies found that people’s reported difficulty with uncertainty rose between 1999 and 2014, in step with the spread of mobile phones and the internet. That is a correlation, and the researchers say so, but their explanation is hard to dismiss. A device that can settle any small doubt in seconds, whether it is where she is or what a symptom means, leaves us with less and less practice at leaving a doubt open.
The numbers point the same way. By the WHO’s latest count, 470 million people had an anxiety disorder in 2023, which makes it the most common mental disorder in the world, and only about one in four of them receives any treatment. In the United States, the share of adults who said they felt more anxious than the year before went from 32 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2023 and 43 percent in 2024. Those figures leave out everyone who gets through the day perfectly well and still declines the invitation, puts off the phone call, or decides not to apply. I think that is where anxiety costs the most for those of us who would never call it a disorder. We pay for it in the things we stop doing.
Almost all the advice we are given is about turning the alarm down. Breathe slowly, go for a walk, leave the phone in another room. It is good advice, and it treats the noise as the problem. But an alarm is a report about something else, and Epictetus was interested in the something else. He wanted to know what the alarm was guarding, which is why his question to an anxious person was what they wanted. He believed the answer was always the same kind of thing, whether the person in front of him was a singer with stage fright or, in one of his examples, a king waiting to meet a philosopher. He also believed that the answer shows you the one part of anxiety you can change.
Continue reading with a paid subscription to learn the Stoic answer to anxiety, including what Epictetus said every anxious person wants, why the early Stoics defined anxiety as the fear of what is still undecided, the line they drew between fear and caution, and the exercises from Epictetus and Seneca for the next time the anxiety alarm goes off.