Anxiety, especially among adolescents, is at an all-time high. For parents and young adults, understanding how anxiety functions, and strategies to address it, are the first steps to a less anxious future.
The first thing to understand is that anxiety is a natural psychological and physiological phenomenon. Anxiety evolved to keep us safe from danger. For social animals like human beings, being accepted by our social group was essential for survival. This means that being worried about what others think of us, the core of social anxiety, can trigger the same reaction in the body as other survival threats. That said, we no longer live in the world of our ancestors, where sources of anxiety are limited to physical dangers or our immediate tribal group.
Symbolic threats to our safety now come from every corner of the globe (e.g. climate change, political instability), while the expectations and rejection threat of social groups has been supercharged by the internet and social media. In this new environment, the anxiety reaction that has protected us for thousands of years is being ramped up to an unhealthy level. The important thing to remember is that we often feel broken or defective because of our anxiety, but the truth is, anxiety is natural. We just need to learn how to recognize and manage it.
The next thing to remember is that adolescence is a tough period of life, especially these days. It’s easy to look at adolescents with few responsibilities and plenty of leisure time and imagine that their life is easy. Sometimes we lose sight of how much has changed for them over the past few years. Their bodies have just changed drastically, and with that comes the immensely socially and emotionally complex world of dating and intimate relationships. On top of that, the complexity of their entire social world has been rapidly increasing, with new expectations and norms to navigate.
This new stage of life also brings with it new and complex emotions, while at the same time, behavioural expectations around emotional regulation increase considerably. Roles in the home and in the world are also changing for them with no clear guide for what they should be, which introduces a lot of instability and uncertainty. Further, while academic expectations and importance are ramped up, adolescents are now expected to be planning for their future, which can put considerable pressure on them. It is also important to keep in mind that everything I just mentioned is new and unfamiliar. They are navigating all of it for the first time, which is uncertain and scary.
Another important consideration is social media. Anxiety is just one of the many mental health issues that have been associated with social media use. Messages about how adolescents should think, act, look, and behave are being consumed daily by the majority of young people. As they scroll through the fabricated fantasy lives on social media, the opportunities to feel inadequate and insecure are plentiful, and insecurity can be a major driver of anxiety. This is complicated by the fact that social media has become essential for a modern person’s social life, so complete prohibition is likely not realistic.
The next post will be addressing some strategies that are useful in dealing with adolescent anxiety, but it’s important to start from a place of understanding and empathy. Feeling understood and cared for creates the safety that can, in itself, regulate anxiety. To sum up, the biggest things to understand are that anxiety is natural and not a sign of dysfunction or disorder (excluding diagnosed anxiety disorders), and that adolescents are dealing with a whole lot of new things, so anxiety is appropriate in a lot of ways. Receiving the message that they are not broken and someone understands how difficult things can get, can lay the foundation for a better future.
David
Simply Counselling Services