Running Away from Your Anxiety

Imagine a world where reality no longer matters. People are no longer motivated to be successful, to educate themselves or to work hard. Some will even toss their morals straight out the window. Reality will no longer matter because virtual reality will become the norm. Whether morning, noon or night, in this world, people will have fallen in love with the metaverse. They will longer feel alive in the real world. Religion? Forget about it. Virtual reality will become their newfound religion. The metaverse and mental health are going to cross paths in many ways. This article will focus on the metaverse and anxiety.

With all the anxiety that we’re already experiencing since March 2020, the metaverse will become an escape for the masses’ mental health problems. Who needs antidepressants for panic disorder when you have the metaverse? Why see a shrink when you can put on a headset and escape reality? When you feel like rushing out of a room due to a sense of doom from your panic, you will instead put on a headset and escape into VR. For all the good reasons why one should have to take care of their mental health, they will all vanish in an instant when the metaverse will go mainstream.

Some will do it consciously while others will not pay attention to it; running away from anxiety will become the norm for many. It will be easier to enter the metaverse when feeling anxious and waste countless hours in another state of consciousness. When returning back to reality, people will feel miserable because their anxiety will still be present. They will do the bare minimum to get by, thinking all day long about the metaverse until the first opportunity to reenter it. Reality will become a hurricane of anxiety! People will no longer have any motivation to treat their mental illness; the metaverse will be their medication.

The Metaverse is Not a Solution for Mental Illness

No virtual reality platform, video game or illicit and unstudied substance will ever be a proper treatment for mental illness. People will continue to use these avenues as ways to escape their suffering, but no shortcut has ever properly treated a mental illness. The treatment of a mental illness often requires three important factors:

The courage and desire to seek help

Therapy

And oftentimes, medication

The metaverse and substances will never be a treatment for mental illness, but more of an escapism. It will be easier for people to enter another world than to spend countless hours with a therapist or take a chance with psychotropics. I am not here to blame the metaverse, but only to spark food for thought. Many people abuse substances to attempt to treat anxiety and depression, but drugs only make their symptoms worse. Who is to say that people will not attempt to treat their illness with the metaverse?

Use the metaverse for entertainment and psychiatry for your mental health concerns; don’t mix the two.