Anxiety and Age

One of the more preposterous things that defense experts (usually neuropsychologists) say is that symptoms aren't really caused by the brain injury, they're caused by anxiety.

There are two standard responses:

1. The injured person had well-managed anxiety before the collision and didn't have any of the current bedeviling symptoms.

2. The injured person didn't have anxiety before the collision and has it now. All roads lead to Rome. The collision caused current symptoms irrespective of whether they're traced to brain injury or anxiety caused by it.

But I ran across some "new" information in the Wall Street Journal.

Once I read the article it made perfect sense. And I realized it was something I already "knew" from my own life: stress drops steadily as we get older.

When we're younger, comparatively small things seem like big deals. Not only are there more of these stressors, we have fewer tools and experience to deal with them.

By the time we hit our 40s most of us are established in our careers. We have more financial security. And, most of all, we have way more agency than we ever had before.

(I think agency/self-determination was the biggest stress-reliever for me. I would much rather live with the consequences of my own mistakes than have someone else decide how things should turn out.)

As we move into our 50s we get better at navigating around potential conflicts and solving actual problems.

And once we're in our 50s there isn't a lot left to fear. We can live with a sense of tutto passa (everything passes; bad times are temporary).

Anxiety is a defense trope. Trying to apply it to people in their 50s and 60s is like driving a square peg in a round hole.

It makes the neuropsychologists who offer it as a defense in brain injury cases look primitive and, at best, unfamiliar with subject matter in their own fields.