Quieting Anxiety

Overlapping crises have made many of us jumpy. But how do you know when you have slipped into a more serious problem and need help?

- By Rebecca Philps

Five years ago, Meredith Arthur, a 45-year-old San Francisco resident and an employee of the social media company Pinterest, arrived at a neurologist appointment in a distraught state. She spoke a mile a minute, rattling through her extensive research on the vagus cranial nerve and explaining why she thought it might hold clues to her crippling shoulder and neck pain, frequent dizziness, nausea, and chronic migraines. “I was presenting my inexpert case to an expert, who stopped me and said, ‘I know what’s wrong. You have generalized anxiety disorder.’ ”

For Arthur, the diagnosis was a shock. She had been so focused on her debilitating physical symptoms that she hadn’t considered that they could be linked to her mental health. Almost immediately, it clicked.

“My brain was always in overdrive,” Arthur recalls. “I wanted to work all the time and solve everything.”

She would never have described herself as a worrier, however, and certainly didn’t connect her perfectionism to anxiety or its effect on her body. But, in fact, physical discomfort—not distressing thoughts—is most often what drives people with anxiety to seek treatment.

“The diagnosis changed everything,” says Arthur. “It’s like somebody picked me up off the earth, turned me around 180 degrees, and put me back down. It was the same world, but everything looked a little different.”