Anxiety is very common. Situational anxiety is adaptive. It revs us up and can bring us to higher levels of performance. Even so, we all need to know how to calm ourselves too.
It is basic human nature to presume that others experience emotions pretty much as we do. This is usually the case; however, more than 40 million adults have anxiety disorders. Said another way, if you have a dozen friends, one of your friends probably has persistent anxieties that can disrupt their lives.
In normal situations (such as speaking in public or taking tests), anxiety involves an elevated heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, and possibly also some sense of fatigue. Disorders run a spectrum of intensity, extending from nearly normal to clinically debilitating. The clinically recognizable anxiety includes internal symptoms of nearly constant nervous feeling, a sense of helplessness, a fear of danger, impending panic, or doom, and obsession focused on one’s triggers for anxiety. But internal symptoms can be hidden for years for many of us.
Untreated anxiety disorders can become expressed as uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts or behaviors; chronic tension with little or no trigger; episodes of intense fear with chest pain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, or abdominal distress; flashbacks of traumatic events; or excessive self-consciousness in everyday social situations. We all may feel some of these sensations at some times in our lives, but for those of us who must live with these anxieties we often get little sympathy and no help.
The other aspect of anxiety that we need to recognize is that anxiety is emotionally contagious. When we feel anxious, we can make others around us feel anxious. Social dimensions of anxiety can either intensify or relax our own feelings of anxiety. These tensions are affected not only through our direct person-to-person interactions (or lack of interaction) but also through the media that we are exposed … both mainstream and social media.
Globally, anxiety is intensifying. Locally, we draw ourselves into social networks that provide us the greatest sense of relief from our anxieties. Here is our current crisis in behavioral health: health is a function of our biology, our individual capacities, and the environment within which we live. Some biological causes can be addressed medically. Some personal capacity causes can be addressed with training. Yet little so far seems sufficient to reduce our environmental anxieties. This means that we cannot hope for happy lives for our own loved ones if they will be living in a world of increasingly anxious others. And we all play roles in shaping the anxiety environment for our anxious loved ones.
Our discussions will focus on a brief presentation by an expert (in physiology, psychology, or sociology) on one specific aspect of our anxiety crisis. We then will share our reaction to that view as well as to our own experiences related to that view. We will share some of our struggles and some of our successes, not to prescribe what will work for others, but to draw attention to different experiences that may prompt us to rethink our own situations.