Anxiety is often a rational reaction to an irrational environment

Haig's central move is to stop treating anxiety purely as an individual malfunction and start asking what in the surrounding world would produce it in a reasonably healthy person. A brain bombarded with constant notifications, curated comparison, and a nonstop stream of distant crises is responding sensibly to genuine overstimulation, even if the response feels disproportionate to any single trigger.

This reframing doesn't excuse away all suffering or replace clinical care, but it shifts some of the weight off the individual and onto the conditions producing the feeling. If the environment is the accelerant, then solutions logically include changing exposure to that environment, not just changing the person absorbing it.

Haig draws on his own lived experience with anxiety to make this less abstract, describing how ordinary daily inputs — headlines, feeds, comparisons — measurably worsened his own baseline unease, which is evidence he trusts more than any single study.

Takeaway: before assuming something is wrong with you, ask what in your daily environment would make anyone feel this way.