Last night I finished reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. A theme of the book is that a sense of meaninglessness is often a driver of depression, and that it is up to each of us to find our unique meaning of life in order to become fulfilled.

He was fond of the Nietzsche quote: “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how”, and he supplements this idea with his experiences in surviving Auschwitz and helping others in his clinical work.

It wasn’t a focus of the book, but he also specifically mentioned helping clients overcome “anticipatory anxiety”. For example, one client was anxious about sweating too much in public, which would cause him to sweat even more.

Frankl’s solution was simple and ingenious: PARADOXICAL INTENTION. Anxiety is a vicious loop, but one way to break out of it is to willfully intend the thing which you fear. In the client’s case, he decided to intentionally try to sweat as much as humanly possible. The paradox: he stopped sweating.

I guess my point is that the mental health epidemic described in the article may be an epidemic of meaning, and also that titular “anticipatory anxiety” is a cycle that can be broken.