One thing that seems true and likely, is that anxiety is (definitely reported to be) worse now than it has ever been. I cannot claim to know why this is through any personal collection of empirical data, but I can deduce that the increase in reported anxiety seems to align with the ‘rise’ of the internet and social media. Just speculating….
Whatever the cause of its increase, anxiety is of course real and for many people, it makes their lives quite uncomfortable. Managing anxiety (without medication) needs us to: want to address it, be prepared to believe we can address it, be open to making changes, have some resolve and dedication towards addressing it, practising and increasing self-awareness – amongst other things. Ironically, when we’re anxious, we’re less likely to have the openness needed to make changes.
Here I outline much of what I have learned about anxiety (from books, from experience, from working with many different people who struggle with anxiety, from successfully reducing my own levels of anxiety etc.) which some of you might find interesting, helpful and/or suitable as prompts for chats about anxiety with children and young people.
Anxiety is in the fear family of emotions
We evolved fear so we can attentively deal with danger immediately and we evolved anxiety to make us alert at times when a danger might be a possibility – any minute soon. Fear tends to last a short time and is about giving us an energy boost to get to safety quickly. Anxiety can last longer, as it is about keeping us alert, just in case a danger appears.
Anxiety was an excellent adaptation to hunter-gatherer times as it kept us on ‘high-alert’ when we had to move to new terrain. To remain attentive, tuned into and narrowly focused on potential dangers, until we had mapped out our new territory, was excellent for our survival. We would only relax in our new chosen place-of-settlement once we knew where the cliff was located, the snake pit was and the lions tended to hang out etc.
Fear and anxiety evolved for when the dangers we encountered carried a greater risk of actually harming us
Unfortunately, this ‘old system’ isn’t well suited to modern life. It can be triggered frequently, even though most of us rarely face real physical danger that could harm us. Our (simple) minds and bodies struggle to tell the difference between genuine threats and things we simply find frightening – like a spider, the dark or talking to a room full of strangers. Add in regular uncertainty of a busy life, the unsure-footedness of constant challenge or continuous changes that we might find in our workplace, a sense of threat that the future’s security cannot be relied upon and the extraordinary amount of gloom and doom delivered to us via media, it’s no surprise our anxiety can be triggered easily and frequently. Many of us are on the high alert warranted of new terrain much of the time!
There are ways we tend to react, think, and behave when we are anxious.
Anxiety causes physical and mental reactions/symptoms. e.g. a constant feeling of agitation, an upset stomach, broken sleep, an inability to focus on anything other than what is triggering anxiety, become controlling and/or obsessive etc. Anxiety can make us ruminate (think unsettling thoughts over and over again) and catastrophise (assume that everything that could go wrong, will go wrong). When we are anxious, we can’t always see what we’re doing or even that it’s anxiety triggering us to do these thing. We can just suffer.
You need not feel anxious about feeling anxiety
Some people become anxious about feeling anxiety and its symptoms. Anxiety is a natural response and although really uncomfortable, it is not designed to harm us, it’s designed to protect us. It can help children to hear this!
Anxiety is normal
Anxiety is a normal reaction to things that trigger worry. It gives brain energy and focus on the thing that makes you anxious. Anxiety only becomes a problem if it becomes extremely intense, lasts a very long time and gets in the way of getting on with day-to-day things.
Anxiety and worries
Some worries are about concrete things we can actually do something about and others are our brain running away with itself. It’s a helpful skill to separate the things you have some control or influence over (focusing on these can help) from those you can do nothing about (which are best let go of). The anxious brain can hook you into searching for things to worry about – it’s what it’s wired to do. It’s the brain sensing uncertainty and therefore putting itself on high alert to anticipate any possible dangers – even though they won’t actually harm you and are not definitely going to happen.
Some people get so carried away with catastrophising, they can make up abstract material to worry about: a ‘what if’ chain of extreme catastrophising. A good gauge, if you think you’re prone to this, is to ask yourself, ‘would I be a bit embarrassed to share this worry with someone else?’ If the answer is yes, it’s almost definitely a step-too-far in fabricating things to worry about!
Addiction to anxiety
This might sound odd to some, but people can become addicted to worrying. There is often an underlying belief (driving the worrying) along the lines that worrying is necessary and that if it’s not done, things are bound to go wrong. The worrying and searching for any possible risk can be an attempt to try to make things certain (which is impossible). It can become part of some people’s identity and they will resign themselves to ‘just being a worrier’. This can make working out how to reduce anxiety and manage it less likely. Doing our best to accept that we cannot be certain about everything, can help!
Anxiety and change
When we face changes, especially those that have a big impact on us, we often feel at least a little anxious. This is because change means we face uncertainty (‘new terrain’), can feel out of control and possibly don’t trust ourselves to cope. When a change is on the horizon, it can really help to remember similar times of change when we did cope – to remind to ourselves that getting through and surviving whatever is making us anxious, is the most likely outcome. Even if things go wrong – we are still more likely to cope than not. It seems bizarre that an anxious brain can make us blind to this and consume us with irrational and exaggerated worry.
Most things do actually turn out well. It’s only our anxious brain that stops us seeing this objective reality.
Anxiety and physical health
It’s something we’d all love to deny (and happily resist believing so we don’t have take responsibility and to make changes!) but our physical health has an impact on our mental resilience. Most of us experience hangover payback, for example, where we can feel low and/or anxious. Eating well, getting plenty of sleep and relaxation and exercise all help reduce anxiety.
Sleep and anxiety
Often anxiety means that people struggle to sleep well at night. People suffering with anxiety can find themselves awake in the middle of the night with their brains whirring, unable to resist going over-and-over the same agitating thoughts.
When this happens there are different things we can try to help us get back to sleep. These include:
- Getting up until we feel sleepy again. The act of getting up often stops the rumination. We can try reading a book if we feel wide awake.
- Writing a list to empty out the thoughts in our head.
- Doing a body scan for relaxation.
- Focusing on our breathing – perhaps visualising the breath filling up, and then leaving, our body.
- We can try hypnosis. There are plenty of relaxation sessions on YouTube.
- We can create a boring list in our head, such as: countries that begin with A, then B etc. Using the same list every night means it becomes more and more boring.
- Do a mental tour of our childhood home – or where you live now.
- Remember the sequence of events on a holiday. Use the same holiday each night so it becomes increasingly boring.
- Repeat a mantra in time to your breath – e.g. ‘I will be OK’ or ‘I’m safe and warm and ready to sleep.’
The thing that always worked best for me after a stressful day was to meditate. This seemed to have the effect of processing the stress of the day so it was far less likely to suddenly re-appear in the middle of the night!
There are things we can do that help us when we’re anxious, but we have to be a tad determined to do them!
Helping ourselves manage anxiety often involves changing our thinking and behaviour as well as finding ways to relax (or trigger our soothing, parasympathetic system). We can find things that soothe us to give our minds and bodies a clear message that there is no danger and this can reduce our anxiety.
- Changing our mindset
There are mindsets that make anxiety more likely. These include:
- Always comparing ourselves to other people.
- Trying to be in control (and gun for certainty) as much as possible.
- Perfectionism.
- A very loud negative voice in our heads which gets really loud any time we make a mistake.
It’s good to make ourselves conscious of any of these we might do, challenge them and ‘practise’ mindsets that make anxiety less likely. These include:
- Taking time to acknowledge the things we are grateful for.
- Trusting ourselves to cope.
- Replacing the negative voice in our head with a friend’s voice.
- Allowing some allocated time to worry, catastrophise and ruminate and then tell ourselves, we will achieve no more by continuing to worry. Say a loud ‘stop’ in our heads if we catch ourselves doing it again.
- If we’re anxious about something coming up, visualise it all going well. It can help!
- Accepting ourselves as ‘good enough’.
- Always seeing the bigger perspective. e.g. I am unlikely to be thinking about this in six months time? Is it really that important? What’s the worst case scenario and can I face that?
2. Finding ways to soothe ourselves
I have mentioned coping strategies in several posts but for example:
As a younger person I used to find tensing different parts of the body and then relaxing them useful, visualising a dot moving in a circular motion – up as I breathed in, down as I breathed out and trying to get the dot to run smoothly, walking outdoors when possible and yoga. I think most of us can find something that helps- it’s often just about remembering, and having the resolve, to do it.
3. Expanding our comfort zone
Anxiety can prevent us from trying those things we anticipate will trigger anxiety and other unenjoyable emotions. If we always avoid the things that trigger anxiety, our brain will persist in believing they are scary – even if they 1) won’t actually harm us and 2) would ultimately be beneficial. When you find yourself refusing to do something because of anxiety, it’s a good idea to take a stepped approach to move yourself slightly further out of your comfort zone to address this. Each step you manage tells your brain not to be so scared next time. In the long run, this reduces anxiety.
Take speaking in public. The steps could be:
Messing up helps us!
The more times we find ourselves in challenging situations that we survive and sort out for ourselves, the less anxious we become over time. When we believe we will cope, survive and can be self-reliant, we become less anxious.
And finally…
Is there more anxiety than there used to be?
There are strong arguments for there being an increase in anxiety and it not just being an increase in how much is reported. Possible reasons for this include:
- Internet addiction. The content of the internet wants to keep us hooked and offers us clickbait that’s often shocking, extreme, triggers outrage and indignation etc. This content alone can be very unsettling but the process of consistently triggering our dopamine/reward drive has a payback of low mood and agitation. (Addiction is an obvious example for where our old biological systems – designed for survival and not happiness – have been tampered with as we no longer live in times of scarcity.)
- Social media This is linked to the previous point but add the comparisons social media can instigate and there’s an added agitation. Direct negative comments, lack of consent and bullying can also happen easily online and cause lasting distress. (I have just finished writing a resource for teenagers on IBSA and this is a clear example of the use of digital media having gone awry).
- Portrayal of the future The forecast for the future is presented regularly as potentially catastrophic and many of us people are very aware of this – being hyper-connected online. We are bombarded with extremely negative and disturbing news that is distilled from the globe and delivered to us in a fast and furious way.
- Overprotection It comes from a place of love but some parents/carers have overprotected their children in a way that has left them believing they cannot cope or be self-reliant which makes them more anxious in the long term.
- Individualism After the post war generation who tended to be more ‘in it together’ and just getting on with what ‘authority’ told them to do, the 1960s saw a necessary challenge to just doing what we were told. Sixty years on and we might have gone too far! Individualism has encouraged us to be somewhat self-focused which can lead to isolation and less connection, when research tells us connection with others reduces anxiety. There’s also much research that focusing on others more, helps us develop more positive mental health. Community and families living in the same area have also diminished adding to this sense of isolation.
So yes, I am inclined to think there’s probably more without needing the evidence that proves it!