If you’re like most civilized people of contemporary times, the first thing you do upon waking up is check your phone to log onto Facebook. This means that by the time you’ve scrolled to the end of your newsfeed, your mind has a book worth of stimuli to process.
These stimuli would typically include, several of your acquaintances getting hitched, a friends enrollment at a decent university overseas, a few gory pictures of a terrorist attack in some part of the world and if you’re lucky, a video of somebody yelling “Bright Karein”.
By the time you’ve reached the bathroom to brush your teeth, you have a ton of emotions to process. You bemuse at the video, you sigh at the graphic images of war shoved in your face before even having breakfast and then wonder when you’ll get married because even Sarah’s married, whose last memory you have is of a toddler learning to ride a tricycle. You comfort yourself by shrugging Sarah off as someone without ambition and say that you would rather go abroad and study first like Hassan, but Hassan’s dad owns half of Islamabad, so you better go the scholars4dev website and check out scholarship updates.
As your mind whirlpools in ponder, a zit stares right back at you from the mirror.
Welcome to the age of anxiety, where an average person’s mind is filled with more information than it can process. It is enough to interfere with one’s endless to-do lists. Other than the information overload, one can attribute modern-day anxiety to coming of age, desire of perfectionism, disturbances in the economy, long working hours, societal pressures and future uncertainties, etc.
It is no secret that modern life begs the proper management of one’s stress levels. While we all have unique ways of managing stress, some are universal and then some are packaged and presented to us with a price tag. These include yoga, meditation, and the latest stress-relieving tool: “Adult Colouring Books”. Yes you heard it right.