You may have heard of existential anxiety – since a famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard kind of invented it, many others talked about this malaise, and for a good reason. It may help you understand why you sometimes have that funny feeling in your tummy that may grow so much that it is not funny anymore. However, a certain ambiguity still surrounds the term, so let’s start by shedding some light on what it really means.

Nobody likes to feel like a failure. Like you’re nothing but a loser in this strange game of life. We all want to feel good about ourselves at the end of the day, like we are deserving of affection and the good things in life. Unfortunately, in today’s culture, so many of us have fallen victim to an ego-boosting addiction, constantly seeking confirmation of our value from the outside world. Social media has played a huge role in this.

I think most of us think about depression from time to time, so I’d like you to share your thoughts about this topic with me. Let’s start with clarifying the terminology: a lot of people face some kind of depressive mood from time to time. Is there a serious difference between “feeling depressive” (now or today or this afternoon) and “have depression“?

Overthinking important decisions or situations is something we all do from time to time, but for some of us it can go to such extremes that it can really start to mess our life up.

It can keep us up at night for hours, playing reruns of the same film over and over again in our mind, or visualizing the worst possible scenarios of things soon to come. The tendency to overthink everything can even lead us down a treacherous path of anxiety and depression.

It’s like redlining a car’s engine with the parking brake pulled while the front wheels just spin in place. You burn out with a lot of smoke, but it gets you nowhere.

Overthinking is essentially being trapped in our own heads, overanalysing every little detail of a situation until we’re so far gone that we’re unable to take any action. When it gets really bad, it becomes what is called “paralysis by analysis”.

Anger is linked to various health problems such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, as well as increased cortisol levels which can weaken the overall efficiency of our immune system. Needless to say, a compromised immune system is the last thing you need during a pandemic.
So, let’s take a look at some of the ways we can deal with it.

During this time of lockdown due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, our household has experienced varying levels of irritability. On one level this is unsurprising. We have all experienced profound changes to our routines, curbs on our freedoms and are unused to spending so much time together in one space.

The worldwide coronavirus pandemic is affecting all our lives, raising many questions. Will we, or our loved ones, get ill? Will we have enough money, and food to eat? How long will all this last, and what will be at the end of it? Nobody knows the answers to these questions, the situation changes daily.

We are living in a gaping hole of uncertainty, and uncertainty is the favourite breeding ground for anxiety. For all of us these are difficult times, but for people who suffer with anxiety this moment in time is very scary and can be crippling.

Boring. Boredom. What do these words mean? What is the feeling of boredom for? I was thinking about this as I vacuumed the stairs this morning. Vacuuming the stairs is a boring task. It is mindless and mechanical. It only takes five minutes, and yet I put it off, and off, and off… until the dust starts to gather in balls in the corners of each step. Why do I put off this task? Not because I don’t have the time – I can always find five minutes – but because it is boring.