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Just this past hour, I felt my anxiety level rising.

The TV in my office was blaring a story, "Why There's Growing Fear About a Terrorist Cyber Attack;" an e-mail arrived reminding me about a professional event I had agreed to go to but which I now couldn't imagine attending; there was another e-mail from "I am the Christ," warning of "the devil's plans to destroy our souls;" a rather large bill that had been hiding on my desk caught my eye; and my daughter phoned from university upset about her course load.

Only the last item was something I needed to pay immediate, soothing attention to. But they all upped the ante on what, for many of us, is a daily slog through anxiety, both generalized and specific.

Anxiety, after all, is a metaphor for modern life. It's also a psychiatric condition on the rise: The anti-anxiety drug Xanax continues to be one of the most prescribed drugs in the world, and the World Health Organization has decreed that anxiety is "the most prevalent mental health problem across the globe."

In her compulsively readable new book, A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours & Mine), Toronto author Patricia Pearson reports that more than 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety.

Ms. Pearson herself has battled her way back from debilitating anxiety attacks, one of which involved frantically ordering crates of freeze-dried vegetables in case the pandemic flu hit and there was no fresh food available.

After reading her book, rich in humour and insight, I came to the grateful conclusion that I was (barely) within the normal range of anxiety. I know people who are not so lucky, burdened with clinical anxiety that inhibits their lives.

But how did we all get so anxious? It can't all be from watching CNN.

Ms. Pearson thinks anxiety is spreading through our culture because "we need, on a collective, cultural and spiritual level, to grow." There's also the matter of control - we wish desperately to control what is going to happen to us, and if modern life has rammed home anything to us, it is that we have little control.

Workplace angst is a major component of this modern condition. Julie McCarthy, a professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, says new statistics show that "in North America, 25 per cent of workers feel anxious most days in a week and that 44 per cent are anxious about losing their jobs."

I can believe that. Our jobs are insecure, the demands of new technologies are overwhelming and our bosses, suffering from bottom-line anxiety themselves, just aren't very nice to us any more. Hence the feeling of working throughout the day with your stomach clenched.

Of course the flipside of workplace anxiety involves workaholics using their jobs to keep all their other anxieties at bay. Self-medication through BlackBerry use. If I'm at work, the feeling goes, I can control the universe. If I'm at work, I don't have to be thinking about all the other things in my life that make me anxious.

But it's the kids I'm really worried about.

They start exhibiting anxiety in preschool and by university many of them are waiting outside the doors of campus mental health centres asking for help.

Ms. Pearson argues that anxiety in young adults is about the search for emotional attachment, but my guess is that low-grade (and not clinical) anxiety is exacerbated by a number of factors - including seeing their parents worried about money, work and health all the time, not to mention transmitting a hyper-realized state of global anxiety (cyber-terrorist attacks, anyone?). Children's anxiety can also be heightened by overweening parenting. (I shudder when I remember how overprotective I was of my children, "streetproofing" them into such paranoia that they probably thought they were living in a Martin Scorsese movie).

And certainly there's the foreboding sense many kids of all ages have that they simply have to succeed. Or else. A long-time philosophy professor told me he has never seen such driven students as the ones today: "They know that the world is no longer their oyster, that they can't depend on it to validate them, and that they have to differentiate themselves."

It's no wonder, then, with all this anxiety, that people young and old are desperate for ways, pharmaceutical and otherwise, to calm down and cope.

Ms. Pearson, having given up on medication, hints that visiting her local church is doing her a world of good. Others look to yoga and its calming properties, and there are lineups to get into "mindfulness programs," which teach people how to find the "stillness" at the centre of their beings.

The birth of anxiety as the disease of our times has actually been a progression from the paranoia of the 1960s, which became the depression of the 1980s and 1990s, and is now presenting as anxiety in the 21st century. What's next?

It would be nice to think that all our relaxation techniques will eventually pay off, that serenity will rule and the calm will inherit the earth.

Unless, that is, a cyber-terrorist destroys it first.

jtimson@globeandmail.com