Does anyone happen to know if there are any free sessions going at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous? Can you get a discount for a block booking?<\/p>\n
No need to Google\u2014that institute exists only in the fevered imagination of Mel Brooks, who created it for his 1977 comedy thriller High Anxiety. It came to mind recently after another hard day of, well, of watching the news and seeing what is going on.<\/p>\n
A new noun (new to me anyway) is being deployed to capture the spirit of these times: overwhelm. That feeling of it all being too much, of a sea of troubles constantly lapping over you\u2026 this is the overwhelm experience. Perhaps no-one is truly immune. The Kremlin suggested the other day that even President Trump might be a sufferer. His criticism of Vladimir Putin was \u201cconnected to an emotional overload of everyone involved\u201d, a spokesman said<\/a>.<\/p>\n It affects people of all ages. The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt has won a lot of attention with his latest book<\/a>, The Anxious Generation, which looks particularly at younger people and their use of mobile phones. But perhaps each generation is currently anxious in its own way.\u00a0<\/p>\n To be clear, I am not attempting to discuss serious mental illness and depression here, or offering any \u201cquack\u201d remedies. There is too much of that sort of thing about already, not least on TikTok, where apparently around half<\/a> of all the mental health advice being proffered is dodgy.\u00a0<\/p>\n And as Eva Wiseman pointed out<\/a> recently in the Observer, a steady flow of mental health \u201cawareness weeks\u201d has not necessarily helped promote useful action.\u00a0<\/p>\n I merely note and report that the relentlessness and intensity of unsettling news events continues, and that even the most robust and intellectually well-equipped are finding this hard hard (unless they are practising \u201cnews avoidance\u201d, of course.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University in the US, wrote<\/a> on his Substack last month: \u201cEven after a brief respite the news starts dogpiling on one\u2019s cerebral cortex faster than can be processed\u2026 this week has been a fucking horror show.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The investment guru Barry Ritzholz told<\/a> Paul Krugman in a recent interview that all the current talk of \u201cuncertainty\u201d was really a cover or euphemism for something much more serious.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cRandomness is such a big part of our lives,\u201d he said, \u201cthe future is always uncertain. What has changed is your ability to lie to yourself that you know what\u2019s going to happen. And so whenever I hear someone say \u2018uncertainty\u2019, to me it means that guy\u2019s scared shitless. He can\u2019t bullshit himself any more.\u201d<\/p>\n Krugman tends to agree, and sees the current inhabitant of the White House as a primary cause of the disarray. \u201cTrump is a virus\u201d, he wrote<\/a>, \u201cand there won\u2019t be a vaccine coming to our rescue\u2026 we\u2019re stuck with this chaos agent for three years and three months.\u201d Recent events\u2014the Trump\/Elon Musk bust-up, the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles and the feeble military birthday parade in Washington DC\u2014bear Krugman\u2019s forecfast out. Business leaders are bamboozled. A senior executive I spoke to recently described the constant on-again, off-again tariff announcements as the equivalent of another Covid moment for the business world.<\/p>\n How might we face up to these difficult times? I remember reading a hopeful analysis in a book<\/a> from a few years ago called Just Enough Anxiety: The Hidden Driver of Business Success. \u00a0It was written by an American psychologist called Robert Rosen and published in 2008. \u201cIt\u2019s time to embrace change, uncertainty and anxiety as facts of life,\u201d he wrote back then.\u2009\u201cWe can use our healthy anxiety as a positive force for growth.\u201d<\/p>\n I am not sure that this advice will do in the summer of 2025. More practical and down-to-earth guidance (for the workplace at least) is on offer from Maria Amato, who is a senior client partner at the consulting firm Korn Ferry. \u201cManagers should communicate what they know and focus on the implications for employees,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s important for managers to help employees to focus on the things that they can control.\u201d<\/p>\n Facing up to reality is necessary. The management guru Jim Collins has long argued that we need to \u201cconfront the brutal facts\u201d before we can make progress. Optimism may sometimes be mere wishful thinking, but grounded hope can be more substantial and more effective. \u201cHope doesn\u2019t need a crystal ball, it needs a to-do list\u201d, as the writer Eric Barker has said<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n