On Edge by Andrea Petersen

Author:Andrea Petersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

It may seem strange that I’ve chosen to be a reporter, a profession characterized by deadlines, not to mention one that requires cold-calling sometimes hostile strangers. My job often makes me anxious. During my years covering technology news, I lived in fear of being beaten on a story by competitors. I opened the New York Times with dread.

But this kind of anxiety is rooted in reality. And it has helped me to cope with the amorphous anxiety that doesn’t seem to have a good reason.

Looking through the data on anxiety disorders and the workplace, I feel extraordinarily lucky. Many people don’t fare so well. A 2005 study by Australian researchers found that a staggering 47 percent of those aged fifteen to sixty-four with anxiety disorders were not working. By comparison, about 20 percent of those in a control group (people without disabilities or chronic health problems) weren’t in the labor force. People with anxiety disorders were also more likely to work from home, to be self-employed, or to be employed by the government. They also more often said that they “accomplished less” and “took less care than usual” in their jobs during the previous month.

Maybe that study is an outlier. While both anxiety disorders and depression are associated with short-term and long-term absences from work, once people get better, only past depression is still linked to absenteeism. After people’s anxiety disorders remit, they don’t miss more work than healthy people do. (Of course, many people suffer from both depression and anxiety.)

This reality is reflected in data on disability benefits. Of the more than ten million Americans receiving disability benefits in 2015, less than 3 percent got them because of an anxiety disorder, whereas about 14 percent received them because of mood disorders, and about 29 percent (the biggest chunk by far) for musculoskeletal and connective tissue problems.

In a lot of ways, my work has been like constant exposure therapy. I’ve used it to get close to what scares me the most: illness, madness, and death. I’ve sought out stories about hospice patients and spent many hours with the dying. There have been ridiculous episodes, too: me, working on a story about carbon monoxide poisoning, conducting an interview with my head between my knees. It was via phone, thankfully. During the conversation, I could have sworn that I felt every symptom the doctor I was talking to described.

When I was younger, anxiety sometimes flat-out crippled my ability to work. In second grade that took the form of those math-fueled panic attacks. In college, I had to drop classes when I had my breakdown and relapse. The only reason I was able to graduate on time was because I took a couple of classes during the summer and received college credit for AP courses I’d taken in high school.

Anxiety has also had subtler, more insidious effects on my work. During my school years, it fueled procrastination. For me, procrastination seems tied up with perfectionism. Scientists define perfectionism as the will to achieve high standards combined with excessive self-criticism.

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