to wonder why so many people have anxiety nowadays ?

[littlepaddypaws]

it seems a lot of posters suffer from it and i wonder why that is, having mn problems myself i can relate to how difficult it is and life can be limited for those with anxiety it in the worse scenario can keep you housebound.
it's good the mh is dicussed more openly but i'm curious, is modern life stress more people out ? don't recall so much on here a year or so ago.

Lifestyle. Poor diet. Drugs. Alcohol. Lack of sleep. Watching too many screens and not letting our brains wind down.

Pretty much of all which we are personally responsible for.

I also think it's a bandwagon that people like to jump on, especially on MN. Fresh air is triggering to some

I doubt much has actually changed in regard to anxiety and mental health.

I imagine that a great many of the people who had to live through two world wars were fairly stressed and anxious.

People didn't talk about these things years ago and so many poor people must have just suffered in silence and lived their lives in 'quiet desperation'.

So much has changed in regard to emotions and mental health within the fairly recent past.

Thankfully, mental health problems are, albeit slowly, losing their stigma and are no longer seen as a sign of weakness and something to be ashamed of and hidden.

Not anxiety, but I remember around 30 years ago, in a social setting, hearing the father of a friend of my exh who was a local GP say, that in his opinion, schizophrenics were 'the scum of the earth'.

Ignorance on that level from someone talking about suffers of a major mental illness, someone moreover, who would have been the first port of call for anyone with any mh problem coming to his surgery, is just chilling.

If someone presented at his surgery with anxiety, I imagine he would have told them to stop wasting his time, to pull themselves together and then sent them away.

I do think MH issues have become more diagnosed and (hopefully) more discussed and accepted.

My mum was a 'war baby' and died 10 years ago. She was always described as highly strung, a nervous wreck, a worry wart, anti social. It was justv'the way she was'. Looking back now, after speaking to friends who have been diagnosed with anxiety disorders, I can see their behaviours/coping mechanisms in my mum. She would never have sought diagnosis, but I do think she self medicated to some extent (ie shot if whisky to help her sleep). She also had RA and I believe she could have had more/earlier treatment but she wouldn't go to hospital overnight. I think her condition contributed to general anxiety. I also believe she was suffering from depression after her mum died, but again never sought help as it wasn't something she would ever consider seeing a dr for, whereas now she would be able to access grief counselling etc without a stigma.

More awareness but less support.

No NHS counselling for love nor money these days IME. Only a bit of faffy CBT for 6 weeks if you're lucky.

It's mainly for access to the increased benefits, sadly one of the drawbacks of de-stigmatising mental health issues is the huge increase in people fraudulently claiming to be suffering, to the detriment of those genuine cases.

I think in the past there wasn’t as much language to describe it. ‘Anxiety’ also covers a lot of different things. But also as PP have said, life is often isolated and uncertain and pressured for a lot of people. That can encourage anxiety.

I think a factor is lack of faith.

Say what you like about organised religion - and, believe me, I have! - theres a great comfort to being able to place your worries 'in Gods Hands' everything from worries about a misbehaving child, to a driving test, to life after death. That feeling of accepting what is, accepting what may or may not come to be, hope of better but not expectation, is what a lot of counsellors and therapists are trying to in instil, imo.

Power, too. When psychiatry was first being established as a discipline, they noticed that helplessness and lack of control were drivers of 'hysteria' and 'neurosis'. They noticed it among powerless ladies trapped in respectable drawing rooms and returning soldiers, trapped in trenches. WW1 was a new kind of war, different to men lined up facing each other with hand weapons, and your actions had an effect.

To get back to the religious angle, the power if prayer was a more pervasive belief even 30 years ago. And prayer is a kind of action, psychologically speaking. Like the way pressing the button for the green man at a crossing in frustration stops you dashing across the road in frustration instead

A faith is psychologically comforting.

@sall74
That’s a valid point, my eldest DD says the sick lines handed into her at work have some surprising reasons 🙄

There is a legitimate concern, which has been expressed on here previously, that an awful lot of people claim to have anxiety when they really don't, and that that causes difficulties for people who genuinely do. There are indeed occasions when people claim that their anxiety is being massively exacerbated just by being expected to do something sensible to help themselves, or when it's suggested that their behaviour isn't reasonable. When people see too many incidences of anxiety being used as an all-purpose get-out clause they then start distrusting all references to it, which is simply unfair for people who genuinely suffer from it as a recognised condition.

I think there has always been anxiety but people didn't talk about it. My nan had a full on nervous breakdown in the 40s but it was swept under the carpet and no one talked about it. @7Days She was the most religious person I've ever known but struggled with anxiety her entire life.

Yes Northern Alchohol and smoking are very prevalent in people with MH issues. I've just finished reading Elton John's bio and cocaine use is terrifying too!.

DH gets anxious when he's had too much coffee too, making it harder to sleep.

I recently did some training regarding children and teens with anxiety.

This current theory seems to come down to trauma in very early childhood, the kind of age we often think they aren't much aware of what's going on around them.

Then, the way they are parented and learn to self soothe. e.g. an example given was a parent who was determined her children would never suffer from anything, so she had bottles warmed, changed nappies etc before the child cried. This meant the child never learned that bad things happen and then things are OK again.

As adults most of us can understand that yes, we will face problems but we will come out the other side, some people never learn that. It was an interesting session.

I take your point Sally, ... just speaking from my observations really of relatives from years back who had objectively hard lives but great resilience which did seem to stem from a sense of ...I dunno, a cosmic order?

More work pressures, societal pressures, social media etc.

@7Days Yes I agree to an extent. I know my nan's faith was a great comfort during difficult times.

• It's recognised and diagnosed now
• People are more lonely and isolated because of factors like family and community breakdown (including fewer people going to church, where they would at least find a sense of community)
• Bad diet and lack of exercise - convenience foods don't promote good mental health; exercise switches on the 'happy hormones'
• Social media and thinking everyone else has it better

I don't think things were great in the past, especially those who lived through the war(s) because they had to bottle things up and/or turn to antidepressants given out like smarties, or self-medicate with booze.

Amongst my friends aged around 25-30, you parents, the three reasons for anxiety disorders a few of them have been diagnosed and medicated for are:

Birth control pills affecting person physically and mentally - these factors culminated in anxiety response

Older parents (70s) passing away or having illnesses - this applies to two of my friends - they were born in the 90s to older parents who had access to IVF. Therefore they had a childhood with more money and stability and very involved parents but with older parents has come increased illness and increased need to support the parents when contrasted to friends in the group who have parents in their late 40s-50’s.

Social media pressure - being single and online dating creating a constant loop of communication, stress thinking of what to say all the time, Stress over dating essentially strangers on a weekly basis, stress over being ghosted etc coupled with stress of comparing their lives on social media when being single and feeling societal pressure to live a perfect life. Also one friend who has had to do total social media detox after giving birth to first child as it has caused total anxiety and stress when comparing her parenting and life to what she sees on social media. Can’t separate the idea that it’s all a construct from the fact that she is ‘lesser’ because she can’t post what she sees others posting.

So... birth control isn’t new, older parents or parents who need more support aren’t new, dating isn’t new and comparing yourself to others isn’t new. I think it’s all just AMPLIFIED these days.

I don't think anxiety is more common now, it's just that people are more open about it.

*young parents

I read an interesting paper recently flagging up a rise in children presenting with anxiety.

Surprisingly, one influencing factor was the sheer amount of choice children are given. This ranged from giving children choice of what to wear, where to go, a range of food options offered and involving children in all day to day decisions.

It was argued that children feel more secure and less anxious when they aren't given responsibility to choose all the time or be burdened with making the "right" choice.
They want the adult to take control and give them rigid boundaries.

I was actually shocked at what peri menopause did to my mental health in my late 30's and how badly diagnosed things are. I had never been an overly anxious person before then. It's unreal what chemical/hormonal imbalances can do. Was fobbed off as being too young.

I thought I was going insane. Luckily reading posts on here made me see it was unfortunately a common problem.

I think in the past people were more likely to be described as “bad with their nerves” and it was like there was no real solution to be found. It was perceived as just their personality and drugs “nerve pills” were given out more frequently e.g. Valium!
Now the emphasis is more on recovery and therapies so people have more awareness of it and it can be a transient thing, which people can develop tools to manage, rather than a life sentence.

Actually two of the people with the worst mental health I'm aware of are very religious. I have a certain amount of faith in a greater good and fate, things working out for the best etc and I agree that can be very helpful. Organised religion promotes feelings of guilt, which seems harmful to me.

I'm afraid I think it's down to overly pandering parenting. In the course of a generation (maybe two) we've moved from a position where children were second class citizens and parents wants and needs were very much prioritised (who else couldn't interrupt Dad while he was reading the paper?) to a world where the child's demands form family life. All done with the best of intentions but people don't learn that things don't always go your way or how to cope/recover when things go badly.

Modern life can be hard, but life has always been hard for many people? Prospect of the workhouse? Husband being away at War for 4 years? Long periods of strikes with no income coming in? No doubt people in those eras did feel anxious too but to say they had more to cope with than modern suffers seems a bit odd to me.

Life gets the better of us. It's so stressful. Jobs, money, housing, kids, political issues and uncertainty. Social media making daily life worse for us by promoting a fake side of life we can't attain. Awful world to be bringing kids into really.

@ConcernedAuntie

Are you sure your niece isn't suffering from broader anxiety, so blamed the driving test as that's something that's logical? You're right that driving test nerves isn't the same as anxiety, but things like a test can bring to the surface other stuff. Perhaps she's anxious about the responsibility of being a Mum, or of being grown up, or afraid of failure on a much bigger scale... and so all that big stuff gets funneled into that one 'test nerves'.

I developed anxiety about such a specific illness, quite randomly, after a scare - and it was only because the anxiety was so sudden and debilitating that I got help, and unpackaged a whole host of fears and worries and trauma that I'd basically been ignoring (literally blocking from my consciousness) for the previous decade.
Initially, even to me, it seemed like a really weird, illogical overreaction - but it was my way of finding a 'reason' for feeling anxious, to avoid facing all the pileup of MH stuff. (Then as soon as I did face all that, the anxiety massively diminished).

So do be kind to her. There's possibly a load going on behind someone appearing to mistake nerves for anxiety.