What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a body response akin to stress. The stress response typically occurs when a situation presents one or more of the following characteristics:
The stress response mobilizes the body and mind to deal with the situation.Anxiety, on the other hand, can be defined as the body's permanent response to imprecise or diffuse stress. Anxiety creates the same state of alert as stress, but without the situation being clear or the danger imminent.
Anxiety therefore creates a quasi-permanent state of stress, in the face of vague, vague situations that the individual can't really cope with, or in the face of thoughts that are often distorted, catastrophic and invasive.
Anxiety is therefore an emotion characterized by a feeling of intense concern, fear or apprehension about future events or uncertain situations perceived as threatening.
Anxiety can range in intensity from mild worry to extreme anguish, can invade the mind and paralyze the individual, and can significantly interfere with a person's daily functioning and well-being.
Avoidance: The holding mechanism
Anxiety arises systematically with its maintenance mechanism : avoidance. Since anxiety creates discomfort, even a profound sense of unease in the individual, he or she will systematically try to re-establish peace and well-being by avoiding anxiety-provoking situations (such as a social situation, a responsibility, a phobia, etc.).
This mechanism may seem effective in the short term, as it allows the person to temporarily withdraw from the source of anxiety, which feels good. However, in the long term, avoidance maintains and amplifies anxiety by preventing the person from gradually confronting and overcoming their fears.
Moreover, avoidance can act like a mental cage, restricting a person's freedom by limiting opportunities and affecting social relationships, schooling, work and other aspects of life.
But what about young people?
It's hard to find a single explanation for this phenomenon, which seems to be hitting Generation Z (born more or less between 1995 and 2010) hard. Here are a few points to ponder:
Overprotecting young people
Our greatest internal resource against anxiety is called the "sense of self-efficacy" (SEP). We could define SEP as our self-perception, in which we evaluate ourselves as good, strong, competent, and capable of facing and overcoming an obstacle.
To develop our MS we need to have encountered obstacles and difficulties, and we need to have managed to get through them.
You need to have experienced negative emotions such as grief, anger and frustration, and you need to have lived through situations of injustice and failure.
Then you realize that you've come out of it stronger and better equipped! Is it possible that the young people of Generation "Z" have been overprotected from obstacles and negative emotions, preventing them from equipping themselves to deal with them?
The years of prosperity
In Western countries, one thing that distinguishes Generation Z from previous generations is the ease with which they were raised. Apart from the economic crisis of 2008, which in the end mainly affected our neighbors to the south in the USA, the 2000s were free of financial stress or even significant political tensions.
Many children have grown up in affluent socio-economic environments, and will have seen their parents get what they wanted, when they wanted it. Life probably always seemed very simple and easy for many of these children. Many will never have seen their parents worry about overcoming obstacles and difficulties.
Until, for the first time, a world situation destabilizes this long, quiet river and confronts them with a problem: the pandemic...
The COVID-19 pandemic
The pandemic will have hit teenagers right in the bull's eye, in their specific teenage issues, completely destabilizing this period of their development. Here are the issues of adolescence, and the impact of the pandemic on them:
- Break free from parents and become autonomous and independent. While teenagers need to work on distancing their ties with their parents in order to become autonomous adults, the pandemic has instead forced them to stay at home and interact only with their immediate family.
- Building a social network. For the teenager, friendships are essential because they replace the ties that the teenager breaks or distances himself from his parents, and form the teenager's new safety net. At no other time in life will friends be as important as in adolescence.
The pandemic temporarily prevented the development of this social network under construction.
- Fulfillment in a sport or art. Many young people find fulfillment in an extracurricular activity such as a sport or art. It's a time when teenagers dream of reaching elite levels and believe that anything is possible in achieving their goals.
The pandemic that paralyzed sports teams led to the decline of many young athletes, who abandoned their sport after two years of restrictions and confinement.
Online games and social networks
There's a lot of talk about this new reality among our young people. Online games lead some young people to live a parallel life in a parallel world that they find much more rewarding than the real world. In the world of their online game, they have a big, strong, handsome character who interacts with other characters (behind whom there are real humans) with whom they can talk and interact.
These games create an exciting world, where they receive constant reinforcement, and experience great success, all of which provides an escape from the real world in which they live, which provides them with far less excitement and reward.
Returning to the real world can therefore be extremely anxiety-provoking. Social networks also present a skewed vision of other people's lives, and thus a kind of imaginary world too. A world in which everyone is beautiful, well-coiffed and made-up, a world in which love relationships are perfect and everyone seems to be experiencing sporting or academic feats.
Because it's only these moments that are published online. Not the failures, not the arguments, not the flaws. Having to achieve such high standards of success can also be anxiety-provoking for young people.
Anxiety in adults
Anxiety in adults generally manifests itself through a variety of emotional, cognitive, physical and behavioral symptoms. The following is a description of common aspects of anxiety in adults:
- Emotional symptoms:
- Feeling of constant worry and apprehension. Persistent feeling of fear and anxiety.
- Irritability, mood swings, easily irritated or annoyed.
- Feelings of powerlessness or insecurity. Fear of being unable to cope with challenges or situations. Insecurity about the future.
- Hypersensitivity: Amplified emotional reactions to stressful stimuli.
- Cognitive symptoms:
- Anxious thoughts, excessive, persistent and intrusive worries. Mental rumination about events, potential dangers or negative consequences.
- Difficulty concentrating: Inability to focus on a task due to intrusive anxious thoughts.
- Catastrophic anticipation: Negative anticipation of future events, imagining the worst possible scenario for future situations.
- Hypervigilance: Constant monitoring of the environment to detect potential threats.
- Physical symptoms:
- Gastrointestinal disorders: nausea, stomach upset, diarrhea.
- Cardiovascular symptoms: palpitations, accelerated heart rate.
- Muscle tension: trembling, sweating, muscle tightness, muscle pain.
- Respiratory disorders: rapid or difficult breathing, sensation of suffocation.
- Neurological symptoms: Vertigo, dizziness, sensation of empty head, headaches.
- Behavioral symptoms:
- Avoidance: Tendency to avoid situations, places or activities that trigger anxiety. Avoidance of stressful responsibilities. Avoidance can lead to withdrawal from social participation, work or daily activities.
- Compulsive behaviours: Repetition of behaviours designed to reduce anxiety (e.g., repeated checking, rituals).
- Addictive behaviors: Excessive use of substances (alcohol, drugs, medication) or behaviors (gambling, shopping) to relieve anxiety.
General impact
Anxiety can have a significant impact on an adult's overall quality of life. It can interfere with interpersonal relationships, work, academic performance, decision-making, and other aspects of daily life.
It's important to note that everyone experiences anxiety at some point, but when it becomes excessive, persistent and disruptive to daily functioning, it may be necessary to seek professional support, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or other adapted forms of treatment.
The importance of a good diagnosis
At CERC, our psychologists and neuropsychologists are able toassess the different psycho-affective disorders such as anxiety, as well as the different personality disorders that can have an impact on anxiety and its maintenance mechanisms.
We can also make a differential diagnosis to determine whether attention and concentration difficulties are due to ADHD, for example, or to mental overload caused by anxious thoughts. Establishing the right diagnosis enables us to direct the individual (child, adolescent or adult) towards the right interventions.
Interventions
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is proving highly effective in reducing anxiety symptoms. There are five main areas of intervention within this approach:
- Psycho-education on anxiety. The aim here is to understand the symptoms, why they exist, as well as understanding the mechanisms by which anxiety is maintained.
- Self-observation and monitoring. This stage involves keeping a diary detailing the onset of anxiety symptoms, associated thoughts and events, as well as the individual's natural reaction and behaviors to manage anxiety.
- Problem-solving tools. Increase the sense of personal effectiveness (SEP). Help the individual feel strong and competent in the face of the problems and difficulties he or she encounters or may encounter.
- Progressive exposure exercises with contingent reinforcement. Here, we take anxiety-provoking situations and gradually confront them. The aim is to regain ground on the anxiety and make it recede. Reinforcement comes when we are proud of our achievements in the face of an anxiety-provoking situation, or in the face of intrusive, anxiety-provoking thoughts.
- Modification of cognitive biases and distortions. Anxiety is associated with internal discourse that is often false, biased, distorted or exaggerated in relation to objective reality. In particular, this internal discourse leads to catastrophic thoughts. By restructuring these thoughts, the internal discourse becomes more realistic and rational, and therefore less anxiety-provoking and invasive.
At CERC, our psychologists, psychotherapists and psychoeducators can help you overcome anxiety and its symptoms.
Smartphone application
Available in English and French, Anxiety Canada's Mindshift CBT app is an excellent resource, based on cognitive-behavioral therapy, for the self-management of anxiety on a daily basis. https://www.anxietycanada.com/fr/resources/mindshift-tcc/
Different anxiety disorders
- Generalized anxiety disorder: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/generalized-anxiety-disorder-in-adults/
- Panic disorder: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/panic-disorder/
- Agoraphobia: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/agoraphobie/
- Specific phobias: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/specific-phobia-in-children/
- Social anxiety disorder (or social phobia): https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/social-anxiety-in-adults/
- Separation anxiety disorder
- For children: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/separation-anxiety-in-children/
- Adults: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/separation-anxiety-in-adults/
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/le-syndrome-de-stress-post-traumatique/
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/obsessive-compulsive-disorder/
- Selective Mutism: https: //www.anxietycanada.com/fr/troubles/mutisme-selectif/