To be frustrated with all of the anxiety I’m surrounded by?

[Biggedybongbing]

Yes this is a name change as I expect i will be flamed for this.

I’m in my 40’s, I have a pretty tight friendship group of around 5 couples that DH and I are part of. We don’t get to do nearly as much together these days as we did when we were younger but we still try and socialise as often as we can. Except it’s getting more difficult because virtually everyone seems to have anxiety about something or other. Anxiety about crowds, anxiety about unfamiliar situations, anxiety about travelling, anxiety about leaving the dog.

These are professional adults. Am I unreasonable to be utterly bored with this excuse of anxiety to not do stuff. Even the things we do manage to do together provokes a long discussion while at said event about how their anxiety almost prevented them from attending/made the run in difficult as they were so anxious.

i know talking about mental health is a good thing. But how come virtually every single adult I know in close quarters now seems to have a MH condition? It’s wearing.

im not saying I never get nervous about stuff, of course I do, but surely that’s normal, it’s not anxiety?

im just becoming frustrated about never being able to suggest things like concerts, dinner, the cinema without having to take multiple anxieties into account and eventually agreeing to a few drinks in someone’s house purely to actually see these people that i really do love.

OP “Everyone just seems so insular and incapable of normal life.”

we cross posted there. To me, normal life is more about seeing friends at home or in a relaxed place than it is about activities.

But maybe they are happy with their normal life. Just because you want to be going to certain places and doing certain things doesn’t mean they have to.

go where you want with people who want to be there!

Anxiety has affected my life since the age of 10 years old!! OP you sound ignorant

As someone who has diagnosed anxiety that I get psychiatrist help and meds for, and for decades before it became vogue, I completely agree with you. It minimizes and trivializes what people like me go through and what we have to do to function normally. Most people don't even know I have these issues. Yet I have to put up with people citing anxiety as a trump card for being rude and flaky. It's exhausting and horrible.

There are some unfortunate people who have an anxiety order. There are lots of people for whom anxiety is the ‘ailment du jour’.

Yanbu OP. I have (and to a greater or lesser extent, probably always will) suffer with anxiety. When it got to the point where I couldn't enter a shop, walk down the street, eat in public etc, I sought help. I put real effort into my recovery, pushing myself beyond my comfort zone. The worst thing to do is to pander to anxiety (although I suspect this will not be a popular view). Being anxious and having anxiety are not the same. Your friends sound either flaky or lazy I'm afraid. Either that or they do not understand anxiety as a mental health problem.

I have always had anxiety which got really bad one time. I started having panic attacks anywhere I felt trapped - like trains/planes etc I was so bad I felt like I didn’t want to live
The way I overcame it was to force myself to confront those situations continuously ( rather than hide away) I took a long haul flight - was torture ! I went on long train journeys at peak times.
my body and mind desensitised eventually and the attacks went away after a few months
often facing those fears can end them.
i do think anxiety, depression etc are used flippantly for general worry or feeling a bit stressed or down.

If someone does have these conditions properly my advice to them/your friends would be don’t feed it and fear it, face it and overcome it

It's tedious. Everyone has something wrong with them nowadays. It never used to be like that. We've become so weak.

Anxiety and depression are normal human emotions.

I'm kinda with you OP and I'm diagnosed and on medication for anxiety.

You have to push threw anxiety as much as you can. I spent weeks getting on and off busses to try and help manage the anxiety. For a period of a year I was completely agoraphobic. I did little things every day, to push myself.

There are still a couple of things I won't do (fly and heights) but I won't let anxiety rule my life.

@ChagSameachDoreen i disagree. I think in the past it was hidden from everyone. Looking back, I definitely recognise mental health issues in family members from the previous generation, but there was no way anyone would admit to it, or even know what it was or how to treat it.
Now it’s openly talked about. You’re don’t fear losing your kids, your job or your friends because you have depression or another mh condition. There’s better (still not great) support available.
i also think life is tougher than previous generations in many ways. Both parents needing to work, constant economic crises, environmental Issues, the advent of social media and all the negatives that has brought. Once, you had a parent at home and one at work, you could afford a house on one wage, your day finished when you left school or the office, focus was on family, friends and real life and not phones, instagram etc etc

You should try dealing with young girls. Every single one of them has unspecified 'anxiety' which prevents them doing anything that requires effort. I wonder how the hell teachers deal with it.

That approach most certainly doesn’t work for everyone. Brilliant it worked for you but jumping in feet first like you suggested would be exceptionally counterproductive for many.

for me anything pushing out of my comfort zone takes a lot of planning and working towards, even then I still struggle and have emergency medication to take to help. If I am forced into a situation without that prework it can knock me back for weeks.

I can see both sides. Yes I agree people pathologise anxiety.

But is this behaviour from your friends since Covid-ish? Because I think the last few years has been very heavy in terms of background noise - the pandemic, Brexit, Ukraine/Russia, supermarket and fuel shortages, cost of living crisis, climate change, the heatwave and fires, politics not providing any sense of leadership/stability etc - even if these things haven’t directly affected people’s lives. It’s a lot.

I think people are just worn out - or their stress capacity is at least partly filled with all of this collective anxiety - and they might just be looking for ways to simplify their lives play things safe and easy.

If you’re the type of person who’s judgemental about how people cope (which your OP suggests you might be) they probably won’t open up to you about how they’re really feeling. So all you hear are the surface excuses.

I think that your friends are probably not using ''anxiety' in its mental health sense. They just mean that they are worried or uncomfortable with a particular situation or activity. Dog owners may have good reasons for not wanting to leave their dog alone. Some people don't like crowds; some don't like travel or find it difficult; etc. It's one thing if something is your job; but if something is supposed to be a relaxing evening out, people have a point in not choosing something that makes them uncomfortable.

Where you may be U is in expecting all leisure activities to be done as a group. That way, it may be difficult to accommodate EVERYONE's preferences and needs: the dog-owner might not mind travel; the person who dislikes travel may not mind crowdsl; etc. But if you have to accommodate everyone's restrictions, it ends up quite restrictive.

So perhaps you could have 'a few drinks at someone's house' for all couples together; and say 'I'm seeing film X at the Y cinema on Friday evening- anyone wants to join me?' for other activities.

But I don't think it's fair to demand that non-adventurous people become adventurous, which is what the 'anxiety' issue may refer to.

I do agree that lengthy discussions about 'why i nearly couldn't come' can be rather a bore - rather like those travellers (pre-Covid), who would go into such detail about the minutiae of their ticket- and accommodation-booking that they had no time to talk about the actual trip. Perhaps you could deflect these by saying 'Well, I'm glad that you could come!' and bring up some other topic of conversation.

Of course YABU.
I hope you at least keep your thoughts to yourself.
At least don’t bully them and make things worse.

Why don't all the perfect people set up a club, leave us fuckwits to it? I try not to judge others toouch because I have my faults. I assume you are perfect.

*too much

Just to clarify these friends have been in my life for a long long time. They haven’t always been like this and I definitely think covid hasn’t helped at all and may well have been a catalyst for a lot of this ‘anxiety’ or certainly this pathologising of nervousness.

im also not trying to corale 10 people at a time to the cinema or to a gig or whatever I promise.

Also I try very very hard not to be judgemental.

@carefullycourageous yes because that’s what I said wasn’t it.

I think it's just become something people say, like when people say they have flu when they mean a cold, or a migraine when they have a headache.

It is totally normal to feel nervous about some things, we all do, yet people are now saying they have anxiety when they actually mean nerves

Bollocks. Total bollocks. We deal with more now, in some ways, and talk more openly.

YANBU OP, I'm surrounded by it too. It's wearing when friends become their anxiety, and friendships descend into a very one sided relationship. I ended a friendship after supporting as much as I could (for y) but received no such support when I needed it after a huge life event. I don't deny anxiety, and related disorders exist, of course they do. But it's not always healthy to stay in a friendship like mine was.

You sound like a really shit friend tbh. It was a sarcastic response but I bet you are a twat in your own ways. You're certainly very judgemental.

It’s not really, you just sound intolerant. Maybe they know what you’re like and possibly choose not to share what’s going on with them as they think you would judge them. And they’d be right. If I was dealing with anxiety and had someone in my life like you, I might make a comment about having anxiety and so don’t want to go to a concert but I certainly wouldn’t share thing with you.