Editor's note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of Seeking Serenity: The quest for well-being and life balance in stressful times.

One of the most stressful things about having a health crisis, aside from the fear of death, is the lingering paranoia.

It’s like that houseguest from hell who invites himself for a visit and then decides he will never leave. Because here you are, trucking along for 30-some-odd years, assuming that that the achy back is from the Kundalini yoga move gone awry and that lingering cough is from the cold you caught from your frenemy.

But once you’ve sparred with a serious illness like cancer, almost overnight you start seeing conspiracies to off you everywhere. Joyful, grateful and almost giddy you are to have survived at all, you bob up and down in constant waves of stress and anxiety. They can build to near-tsunami proportions each time you lose another friend who got her diagnosis at the same time as you or sat there beside you while you both received chemo or chatted with you in the waiting room during radiation.

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Editor's note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of Seeking serenity: The quest for well-being and life balance in stressful times.

Happiness - or rather, the quest for happiness - was in the air at this year’s Aspen Ideas Fest as the topic was examined rather earnestly from every angle: the history of happiness, its psychology, neuroscience, economics and geography.

There was even a session on how to recognize happiness, though fairly certain of my abilities on that front, I played hooky in favor of pedaling around town on a bicycle.

And truth be told, Aspen in the summertime is rather easy to be happy in: 360 degrees of opulent white-flecked mountains covered with shocks of gorgeous green in at least a dozen shades, vast sweeps of vivid wildflowers swaggering on every corner, the freshest air completely devoid of frizz-inducing humidity and rather frequent sightings of chipmunks and celebrity types.

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Editor's note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of Seeking Serenity: The quest for well-being and life balance in stressful time.

I vowed that I would not sit down to write this piece until I cleared some of the clutter around my house. Alas, two weeks passed and the piles remained. With a deadline and the wrath of my editor looming, I swallowed the angst of potential hypocrisy and began writing.

I’m no hoarder, mind you, just your average run-of-the-mill pack rat. And it is quite likely that to a lesser or greater degree, you are one too.

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Editor's note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of Seeking Serenity: The quest for well-being and life balance in stressful time.

Graduation just passed, but I still have no job. And in a few weeks, I’ll have nowhere to live either, and so I’m moving back in with my parents to continue my job search, which I first started almost a year ago. I am so stressed out that I haven’t been sleeping. Sometimes I get so anxious, I have difficulty breathing.

That’s a direct quote from a recent college graduate in New York who did not even want his first name used. “I’m so wigged out, I’m feeling paranoid,” he said.

What was remarkable was that in almost a dozen conversations I had with graduates from all over the country these past few weeks, many kept using virtually the same language over and over again. The commonality of sentiments among people who did not know one another was striking. And though there was a smattering here and there of the hopeful - those who had jobs secured - they seemed by far the exception.

There is stress - and a lot of it - rampant among a population that might normally be quite exuberant right about now: four carefree years of college behind them, hard-earned degrees in hand, a warm breeze blowing through their still-full heads of not-graying hair as they embark upon that heady adventure known as the rest of their lives.

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