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It was a rare night out with a girlfriend, and over fancy cocktails we asked each other, "So, how are you?" My friend, who from the outside would seem to lead an utterly charmed life, told me about how frustrated she was with her husband, her kids, her stalled home renovations, how stressed out about finding a good pre-K spot in a public school, how nervous about going to back to work in her creative field—and then caught herself, laughed, and said, "You know, yuppie problems." We are lucky, she and I. Our families are healthy. We have access to clean drinking water. And plentiful soy lattes. Still, we are anxious; we are well-fed, comfortably-housed, not living in war zones...and nervous wrecks. Why?

We haven't quite been able to figure that out, but there's some solace in knowing we aren't the only ones: as Daniel Smith writes in the New York Times Opinionator Blog, we are living in the Age of Anxiety. Smith, author of the memoir The Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, writes, "it is undeniable that ours is an age in which an enormous and growing number of people suffer from anxiety...anxiety [is] the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin, and one for which we are increasingly well-medicated. Just because our anxiety is heavily diagnosed and medicated, however, doesn’t mean that we are more anxious than our forebears. It might simply mean that we are better treated."

Even without medication, the anxious among us can control our feelings, or at least our reactions to them. As Smith writes, "Anxiety begins with a single worry, and the more you concentrate on that worry, the more powerful it gets, and the more you worry. One of the best things you can do is learn to let go: to disempower the worry altogether." Public pre-K spots be damned! In the words of my favorite (underrated!) reality TV star, "Everything is going to allllllll right."

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