The cure for "Americanitis"
While the health of Americans didn't truly begin to nosedive until the 1970s, a malaise known as "Americanitis" was identified by physicians visiting from Europe as early as 1890, long before the broad industrial corruption of our food supply.
The constant march towards progress, pace of economic activity, the opportunity and the future of an unlimited West seemed to be overstraining the nerves of susceptible individuals, yielding symptoms that sound all too familiar today.
In her book Power Through Repose (1891), Annie Payson Call highlighted this distinct phenomenon:
"Extreme nervous tension seems to be so peculiarly American, that a German physician coming to this country to practise became puzzled by the variety of nervous disorders he was called upon to help, and finally announced his discovery of a new disease which he chose to call 'Americanitis'."
In 2025, we are battling environmental irritants and psychological agitation beyond these writers’ wildest dreams. Yet the fact remains, your own psychological reaction to the stress, be it bad food, a triggering news event, or a fight with a loved one is entirely under the control of your will.
The importance of realizing when you are digging yourself into a deeper hole through literal muscular tension and nervous anguish in response to stress is key to thriving whatever the circumstances.
Writing in 1899 in his essay "The Gospel of Relaxation", William James offered this broad advice on the root of our exhaustion:
"I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns...
but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied.
Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good."
Whatever you’re going through, learning to relax likely won’t make it worse.
- Reduce unnecessary physical tension that is irrelevant to the task at hand
- Take pauses for diaphragmatic breathing, 5x5 or box breathing throughout the day
- Reduce screen time, get outdoors
- Reframe your sources of anxiety and worry, the book below and essays above are helpful resources here.
The sources above were compiled from Dale Carnegie's timeless classic "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" published in 1948, in the wake of the traumas of WWII.
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