Anxiety

I feel as though I'm meeting more people in my adult life who have been diagnosed or possibly self diagnosed with some sort of anxiety. I dont know if it has something to do with people being more comfortable talking about it, or maybe people are becoming aware of the symptoms, but it seems like almost half of everyone I know admits to having some amount of anxiety and or depression and half of them are taking some kind of medication for it.

Do more people have anxiety now than in previous years? Ive heard people can get anxiety from traumatic events in their life. Where else does it come from? Can it be hereditary? Any home remedies or prevention tips?

I ask because my wife deals with it and it can be a very obtrusive mental condition to manage in her day-to-day life. Ive been hearing lately of younger children dealing with anxiety and stress at young ages like as early as 6 years old. I might be starting a family in the near future and the condition is still pretty alien to me, but I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Just curious of anybody is aware of any serious studies about it, or some preventative tips to keeping my future sons/daughters from dealing with it.

I'm no expert and less so on the professional diagnosis aspect, but I would believe it became more apparent once it was officially noted as a clinical diagnosis. I may have to look this up, as again I do not know.

One thing that I heard which surprised me was about people reacting to LSD when taking it for the first time. Apparently a lot of bad trips could be attributed to the subjects experiencing anxiety for the first time, something they had not experienced before. As a tangent I'm willing to believe that, anxiety - while well known and widespread as an emotion - is something many people have not experienced until later in their lives (i.e. feeling anxiety for the first time after taking drugs). Again I'm mostly talking out of my ass until I do more research but I would believe that we are finding more people with anxiety issues because they are experiencing it later in life without having any knowledge or personal experience with it whatsoever, leading to them not understanding how to handle it and eventually seeking professional help leading to a diagnosis.

Trauma is a big factor as you mentioned but I am unaware of hereditary issues personally. It would be interesting to look into other common factors and see if genetics can play a part (I want to say that it can, but I have no idea).

I think a lot of people would rather chalk up some of their social ineptitudes to anxiety/some disorder rather than try to work on their issues. I really think that anxiety is a term that is thrown around way too loosely.

As someone who has been diagnosed...the best advice I can give is to just remind your wife that you love her and you are always there for her when she needs you. People with anxiety know what will help them, and sometime when people try to help, they just make it worse.

Honestly I think more people are getting stressed confused with anxiety, which is an inevitable aspect of human life. No, I dont think that theres an anxiety breakout, the reason why you might be hearing people say they suffer from anxiety more than before is probably because it wasn't really something people would like to bring up about themselves, but now we're more open to discuss such topics.

Psychological symptoms of illness are now recognized as "real" symptoms. Before we were able to study physiological symptoms only.

Doctors used to recognize anxiety and prescribe treatments for it, going back to the 1800s and quite a bit earlier. In men it would be diagnosed as exhaustion or anxiety. In women it would be diagnosed as nerves, anxiety, or exhaustion. Men would get the diagnosis due to conditions at work. Women would get the diagnosis because of the stress of running the household and being worried about their children.

Nowadays, we have cut open a lot of brains and understand the brain is a mixture of electricity and chemical signals. And we also recognize we probably know very little about it. We learn a lot by observation and knowledge of chemistry.

If I remember correctly high sugar diets are common in people with anxiety.

^Well...I took in a lot of sugar daily until recently. Let's see if my feelings of anxiety go away or tone down after a few weeks of low sugar intake.

Anxiety is more than just the ever-increasing pace and complexity of modern life. What's your diet like? Do you meditate? Do you exercise? Do you get enough sleep? How in tune with nature are you? Are you constantly overstimulated? What sort of harmful narratives about reality does your left brain come up with? These questions can assist is understanding personal anxiety.

I've been diagnosed with severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder by three different doctors and two different psychotherapists. So I think it's safe to say that I have anxiety issues ;^)

One thing I've noticed is that older people tend to call it "nerves," so I think part of it may just be a change in popular terminology. Someone saying they have anxiety issues is like someone older saying, "It's my nerves." But that's different from having an anxiety disorder. Everyone gets anxious sometimes, it's natural and healthy. Sometimes people may get anxious more often even, but unless it impacts your daily life severely enough that you, say, start losing jobs or cutting or whatever, it's not a disorder.

So I guess it's partially a language issue. We don't differentiate enough between stressful times in our life where we are anxious, and severe anxiety disorders.

Slight disclaimer: I just woke up, so I may not be forming my thoughts correctly here lol

I'm not sure but unless you've had a doctor or other mental health specialist diagnose you with it I wouldn't really believe it. In my eyes there seems to be quite a lot of people who self-diagnose themselves with horrible mental health issues just for attention.

I have an anxiety disorder diagnosed by different doctors, and for me personally it's the kind that of anxiety that focuses on one thing, keeps building up and building up, until I eventually start having a full blown panic attack.

If you've never had a panic attack, I hope you never do, because the feeling is really awful. The first time I ever had one I actually thought I was having a heart attack because my chest tightened up and hurt so badly and I felt like I couldn't breathe. It's like a huge wave of doom washing over you, like you're witnessing your final moments on earth.

Over the years I've developed some strategies to stop my panic attacks from happening. One of these is to simply "let it come" and what I mean by this is you have to pretty much welcome the panic attack. See, one of the biggest reasons you get them in the first place (at least for me) is because you know whats coming and that fear from the panic attack alone is the push it needs to come through. So, by killing that fear and just saying to yourself "alright, lets do it, lets get it over with" 90% of the time it kills whatever anxious momentum it would've had and it slowly goes down. Meds never helped me personally and I've tried many many many different ones so now I'm always willing to seek other methods of coping, and there are a lot out there.

As far as being hereditary, yes I personally believe it is. I believe I got it from my mother's side, I know that her mother and one of my mom's sisters has a diagnosed anxiety disorder and take medication for it.

yukib1t said:

So I guess it's partially a language issue. We don't differentiate enough between stressful times in our life where we are anxious, and severe anxiety disorders.

something something depression

Anxiety isn't real. It's just an illusion like stilettos or push-up bras.

40oz said:

Any home remedies or prevention tips?

L-theanine helps (and it's perfectly legal, extracted from green tea). Apparently the effects are synergistic with caffeine, so I take one with my morning coffee. Although, since I cut sugar out of my diet I don't really feel I need it so much any more.

The research described here is pretty convincing since it looked at symptoms and not people self-identifying as depressed or having an anxiety disorder:

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-have-been-getting-more-anxious-and-depressed.html

The reason given for a rise is the social fragmentation of advanced developed societies. Compare this to the often cited fact that people in third world countries recover from grave mental illnesses more quickly than those in the first world.

Diagnosis of both depression and general anxiety depend on consistency and severity of symptoms since elements of both are part of normal functioning. It's when they spread to affecting/controlling a large amount of someone's life, perhaps with little relation to what's happening in his/her life, that it points to a break down in the person's basic biological functioning.

I tend to think that these disorders are both becoming more prevalent, and people are becoming much more comfortable in talking about them; there's been a huge generational shift from maybe Gen X/Y and on.

I'd imagine a lot of the "more comfortable in talking about them" goes for a lot of things that seemed to have "spiked," like non-heterosexuality, transgenderism, quite a lot of mental illnesses, etc.

It also helps that there's becoming less and less of a stigma against talking about those things. Within my lifetime I can recall calling attention to mental illnesses on a online forum was a complete and utter faux pas, with the people who were the most "accepting" and "helpful" trying to tell the person bringing it up that they really shouldn't on the internet.

CARRiON said:

Over the years I've developed some strategies to stop my panic attacks from happening. One of these is to simply "let it come" and what I mean by this is you have to pretty much welcome the panic attack. See, one of the biggest reasons you get them in the first place (at least for me) is because you know whats coming and that fear from the panic attack alone is the push it needs to come through.

But this is probably not good general advice though, because what triggers panic attacks can be completely unique for every person. Fear of a panic attack itself being the trigger for a panic attack is not universal, however common. Then again, for those people that it is, it's honestly not terrible advice.

Gamer With Dignity said:

Anxiety isn't real. It's just an illusion like stilettos or push-up bras.

Uh, no.

Gamer With Dignity said:

Anxiety isn't real. It's just an illusion like stilettos or push-up bras.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Keep dreaming boy, never grow up.

Is there some sort of MRA or "nice guy" thing going around trying to disprove high heels and underwear, or would you guys think I was serious if I said "the sun doesn't exist because neither does Coca-Cola"?

Both Anxiety and depression run rampant in my family. My mother, uncle, aunt and grandmother where diagnosed with one or both and I was diagnosed with both. Funny enough hardcore substance abuse also runs in my family.

When someone says that one or the other isn't real, it kind of gets under my skin. But, I end up wishing that they could simply walk in my shoes for a couple of without meds. They would probably develop a massive drug or alcohol dependency like a lot of my family has. Because it can be pure hell with you are being hit with both at once and it gets so bad that you just might do anything to shut it off.

Gamer With Dignity said:

Anxiety isn't real. It's just an illusion like stilettos or push-up bras.

Feelings or symptoms of anxiety are products of fear and uncertainty. Don't be dumb.

Gamer With Dignity said:

Anxiety isn't real. It's just an illusion like stilettos or push-up bras.

no, i'm pretty sure anxiety is real.

Of course anxiety is real, everyone experience it at a certain moment in their life at different degree obviously... If you think it's not real, then you just never realized that you had anxiety at some point.

For me personally, I recently had a panic attack, due to anxious trouble and stress. it's scary, really. I had chest pain and others sympthom and at the moment i was scared of having a heart attack that would cause my death. It tooks a few days to heal. It's like you see everything in black and image the worst that can happen to yourself.