Anxiety has become our society’s gateway to taking the easy way out. We’ve taken the emotion and propelled it into a disease – laboring under it as a melodramatic excuse to pop pills that allegedly make everything better. Not only has it stretched to ridiculous proportions, but its foundation is inherently false – and frankly, stupid.

Let me first disclaim that I acknowledge anxiety as a psychological issue, and when it is actualized, it can be debilitating. My issue is with over-diagnosis. My issue is with every Tom, Dick and Harry with a Web MD app on his iPhone.

We’re a generation obsessed with psychiatry – of attributing each and every one of our neuroses to some overwhelming, crippling psychological disorder. Newsflash: pressure, nerves and stress aren’t cured by the bottom of a pill bottle. They should be dealt with, just as everyone has dealt with them before the invention of Xanax.

Apparently anxiety is the most common mental illness in the US, affecting more than 40 million people over the age of 18 years old — which just so happens to be close to 20% of the general population. Prescriptions also cost this country more than $42 billion dollars a year.

Given that the statistics of anxiety are so massively heavy in the United States over any other nation, and that the general problems and poverty of this nation are significantly less than many other countries, might just lead to the assertion that anxiety is a disease of luxury. Instead of squaring ourselves and reaching within us to quell these emotions, we resort to the simplest means of satisfying ourselves.

It’s time to man up, grow a pair of balls and stop being such a crybaby. The fact that 34% of Americans take one prescription pill a day is quite alarming — these pills are short-term solutions and are quite possibly taking years off our lives as we have no clue what the side effects will be twenty years down the line.

When you look back in time and centuries ago, people didn’t have pills to take or a happy pill that could make all their problems go away, they just simply dealt with it like a mature adult, they did not run away from it – but that resilience hasn’t seemed to carry over into this generation.

Yes anxiety is a real disorder that people do have and need treatment for, but there are way too many young people out there that are falling into the trap of thinking that their mild problems and stress are the same thing. This issue is rooted in our being babied when we were children because our parents have worked so hard to create simpler lives for us that they didn’t have the luxury to have.

This has left us sheltered from the real world and causes great amounts of stress that no one knows how to deal with – because it’s not the same stress as it was in college, before exams – it’s getting a good job and paying your own rent. So everyone just rushes to blame anxiety right away.

If something is wrong in their lives or is not magically going the way they want it to, people today automatically blame anxiety and say that it is too much for them to handle. We are severely lacking the work ethic of generations prior – we are lazy.

A generation that says work hard, play hard, but rather plays harder than the bare minimum of work they actually do. They take the easy way out and think that because they feel entitled, the world should bow down at their feet.

Life is simply not meant to go exactly the way you plan it to, it is not supposed to be perfect and it will test you from time to time, but it is all about how you deal with it. The solution is not to take a pill to make “everything better” and everything go away for the short period of time that you are high.

But rather to stop being a coward and afraid of what you have to face and actually handle it. If other people can do it then you can do it to, don’t be a coward and say your anxiety is making you unable to handle something and that life should take it a bit easier on you the next time around — sorry idiot, but it’s not that simple.

I constantly hear complaints about how much anxiety people have in trying to figure out life and which direction to go and how they are really unsure about what to do. The truth is that they don’t have anxiety, they are just nervous, which is a very common feeling that doesn’t need a pill to go away. We don’t suffer from anxiety, we’re just nervous. Most people are afraid of failure, afraid of being judged and are afraid about taking the wrong direction in life.

What they are not realizing is that they have allowed their insecurities that society has helped them build make them all fear the worst rather than trust themselves to make decisions based off their gut feeling and what they really want to do.

And that makes a coward, someone who is afraid to face his fears. So the nerves start taking over and that’s when there’s no Adderall that can get them an A on a test, but rather an anxiety pill to calm them down so that they can prolong their problems even more and run from them even faster.

What I am saying is that you don’t need a pill to solve all your issues and that you are capable enough to do it on your own. Stop being a crybaby and thinking you have anxiety, you’re making light of something that would be a lot more severe than feeling a little bit nervous and unsure. The good news is that everyone has to go through it and if life is too tough for you, get a helmet — not a pill.

Preston Waters | Elite.