At the end of 2021 the US Surgeon General declared that a devestating mental health crisis was affecting the United States. The number of cases of anxiety and depression and other problems affecting the mental health of Americans, particular teenagers and young adults, had jumped during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The world today appears to be far more stressful than it was in the past. This article was written to help people get a better understanding of the number one problem affecting American's mental health, anxiety. It was originally posted on my Facebook page.
I have worked in the fields of mental health and child welfare and I know from working in these fields and from my own personal experience how anxiety and depression can interfere with people's lives. The local church, I believe, is in a good position to not only only provide a supportive community for individuals who are struggling with a problem like anxiety or depression and for their families but also to develop community resources that may help them as well as link them to existing community resources.
An article by Robin G. Jordan
One of my aims for posting links to a series of articles and videos about anxiety on my Facebook page is to help people better understand anxiety, a common problem for many people, including myself. Anxiety has been identified as the number one problem affecting people’s mental health in the United States. Our society has become more stressful, and more and more people are experiencing anxiety.
While those who experience anxiety may share a number of common symptoms, some individuals experiencing anxiety may have symptoms that are unique to themselves. We may have a stereotypical image of people who experience anxiety, an image which does not conform to reality. Anxiety can affect the thinking, feelings, and behavior of those who experience anxiety in a wide variety of ways. One of the purposes of posting the links to the articles and videos is to raise people’s awareness of the different ways that anxiety can manifest itself. The ways identified in the articles and videos are by no means exhaustive.
We experience anxiety when we experience the fight or flight response to a person or a situation. The fight or flight response is “an automatic physiological reaction” to a person or a situation “that is perceived as stressful or frightening.” We perceive the person or the situation as a threat to ourselves and this perception “activates the sympathetic nervous system and triggers an acute stress response that prepares the body to fight or flee.” The fight or flight response was originally intended to aid human survival in dangerous or threatening situations.
Key to understanding anxiety is that the person or situation that we perceive as a threat does not actually have to be a threat. We only have to see the person or the situation as a threat, to think of the person or situation as a threat. The person or the situation may be completely harmless. The person or the situation may pose no real threat to us. Our reaction to them may be irrational. We may realize that it is irrational, but this realization does not keep us from perceiving the person or the situation as a threat. We may experience a level of discomfort that is out of proportion to the circumstances.
We may continue to experience anxiety although we are no longer around the person or in the situation. Individuals who suffer from anxiety often think about the person or the situation that triggered their anxiety and thinking about that person or that situation further contributes to their anxiety.
The exact causes of anxiety are not known. Among some possible causes of anxiety are that a person may have been fearful as a child, and they continued to experience fearfulness as they grew older. They may have had a traumatic experience as a child or later in life. They may have had a parental figure who suffered from anxiety when they were a child, and they internalized the parental figure’s attitudes, feelings, and behavior.
People acquire all kinds of fears because a parent or parental figure was terrified of somebody or something. Fear in one area of their life may lead to anxiety in another area of their life.
Individuals who suffer from anxiety may have been the victim of parental disapproval and neglect or erratic parental behavior in their childhood. They may have as in my own case experienced bullying, rejection, and social isolation at a particular time in their childhood. All these factors have been found in individuals who suffer from anxiety.
While some individuals may experience anxiety twenty-four seven; others do not. Their anxiety comes and goes. They may have what is described as “high functioning anxiety.” It does not completely interfere with their lives. They can be quite productive individuals and other people may not suspect that they experience anxiety at all. They themselves may not recognize that they are suffering from anxiety.
I have worked as a counselor in a mental health center and a case worker in a child welfare agency, and I am familiar with the various ways of treating anxiety, not only from reading the literature on the subject, but also from working with people who were experiencing anxiety that was affecting their functioning, and from having undergone several years of group therapy to deal with my own anxiety. While I do not claim to be an expert on anxiety, its causes, and treatment, I do believe that I am better informed than many people on these subjects. I also try to keep abreast of the latest research findings and treatment approaches.
Among the treatment methods with which I have had some training are assertiveness training which teaches a person to substitute assertive behavior for avoidance or overly-aggressive behavior; cognitive behavioral therapy which includes systematic desensitization, a form of exposure therapy which seeks “to reduce anxiety, stress, and avoidance by gradually exposing a person to the source of their discomfort in a thoughtfully planned way;” rational-emotive therapy which can help a person “identify irrational beliefs and negative thought patterns that may lead to emotional or behavioral issues;” deep muscle relaxation which teaches a person how to relieve accumulated stress; and time management which can help a person better structure their time and in this way reduce their anxiety. These are just a few of the techniques that can be used to help someone who suffers from anxiety deal with their anxiety.
Some anxiety-sufferers have found physical activities such as dancing, jogging, martial arts, and walking helpful; others have benefited from labyrinth-walking, meditation, mindfulness, prayer, and yoga. Making art such as painting, drawing, sculpting, and clay modeling can help people to manage stress, reduce anxiety, and give expression to thoughts and feelings without verbalizing them. I have used art therapy with young children who were unable to put their thoughts and feelings into words. Playing a musical instrument and singing can also be beneficial.
One of the ways that we can be supportive of people who suffer from anxiety is to be clear in our communications with them, respond to them in a timely manner, and not leave them hanging, keeping them waiting for our decision or answer. Anxiety-sufferers do not handle uncertainty very well. They are apt to overthink, to think about something too much in way that makes them more anxious. They can be very self-critical, they may have a negative self-image, and they are prone to catastrophic thinking, believing that worst may be happening or may happen. They particularly fear the loss of acceptance and rejection.
While we may not be able to respond to them right away because we are occupied with something else or responding to them is not one of our priorities of the moment, they will agonize over our failure to respond. If we do not respond clearly to a question, an invitation, or a request, they will agonize over that too.
They may respond to our delayed response with a flurry of phone calls, texts, or emails. This activity, however, may not produce the response that they desire. In fact, it may have the opposite effect. We may become hesitant to respond to their original and subsequent communications. If we have just gotten to know them, we may decide that maybe they are not someone whom we want to know. We will do what they fear: we will reject them.
In relationships, even casual ones, individuals who suffer from anxiety may do things that may lead to their rejection. They may become stuck in a “push-pull” cycle in which they are always pushing for more while the other person is pulling way. The underlying motivation is their anxiety about the future of the relationship, their inability to deal with uncertainty and their fear of abandonment. The added pressure, whatever form it may take, may cause the other person to back further away from them and to eventually reject them. What they fear might happen comes true because they fear it will happen and their resulting behavior aligns to bring about what they fear. It is the psychological phenomenon known as “self-fulfilling prophesy.”
While we should not dismiss someone’s anxiety and treat their anxiety as a matter of no consequence, we should also be careful not to accommodate their anxiety, changing our behavior to suit their anxiety. When people who suffer from anxiety give into their anxiety and avoid people and situations that trigger their anxiety, their anxiety will grow worse. Their level of discomfort around these people or in these situations will increase.
Their level of discomfort has nothing to do with the person or the situation, which triggers their anxiety. It is tied to their reaction to the person or the situation, to what is going on inside them, to their thoughts and their feelings.
How we think and how we feel can influence our perceptions of a person or a situation. A person’s words and actions may be non-threatening, but we may perceive them as threatening. They may look at us out of puzzlement, but we may perceive their gaze as unfriendly or sexual. They may be trying to figure out what is going on with us. We may think that they are angry with us or that they have strong feelings of sexual attraction for us. We may overthink what they are doing and may make ourselves more uncomfortable. If they suffer from anxiety like we do, there is a good chance that they are doing the same thing, overthinking, thinking too much about something, and that is the reason they are looking at us. We, however, do not know that. Due to our anxiety, we may not have gone to the trouble of talking to them, fearing what might happen. Instead, we continue to misinterpret what they are doing and question their motives for doing it, keeping ourselves in a state of discomfort.
We can do the same thing with situations. We may be taking a voice class at the local university and must perform a song in front of the class. We may think that the other members of the class are judging our performance and criticizing it in their heads when in actuality they are anxiously thinking about how well they are going to do when their turn comes.
When we accommodate someone’s anxiety, we are likely to reinforce the thoughts and feelings that are causing them to feel anxious around a particular person or in a particular situation. We may believe that we are being helpful, but we are not. They may be judging the person or the situation wrongly. In accommodating their anxiety, we are likely to reinforce their misperceptions. They may in turn influence our perceptions of the person or the situation and we may also judge the person or the situation wrongly. This can develop into a harmful cyclical relationship in which our reaction to their anxiety not only reinforces their anxiety but contributes to its worsening. They may have an opinion about the person or the situation that is wrong or not accurate.
This kind of cyclical relationship is not only harmful because it exacerbates their anxiety, but it is also harmful because it produces what psychologists call secondary gains for them. These gains may motivate them not to do anything about their anxiety due the various ways they benefit from it. For example, family members, friends, and coworkers may show them more consideration than they might otherwise show them.
One of the things with which the person who suffers from anxiety must deal is the belief that their anxiety is so overwhelming that they cannot do anything about it. It is one of the ways that they avoid learning to control their anxiety rather than letting their anxiety control them. Rather than surrender to their anxiety, they need to work to overcome it.
Blaming their anxiety on a person or a situation is another way that they avoid dealing with it. In reality we cannot change that person or that situation. Avoiding them is not a healthy solution to our anxiety. We can, however, change ourselves and how we react to a person or a situation, which triggers our anxiety.
A trigger does not cause anxiety. It is simply the first in a chain of thoughts and feelings that may result in an anxiety reaction, a “response to fear or emotional distress, real or imagined.” This chain of thoughts and feelings can be interrupted to prevent such a reaction, the closer to the trigger the better. We can learn what our specific triggers are and what we do when we experience one. Rather than avoiding triggers, we can learn to stop what happens next, learning to keep a trigger from starting a chain of thoughts and feelings which leads to us feeling upset and frightened. This may involve giving up the secondary gains that we may get from our anxiety and substituting healthier ways of getting our needs met in their place.
I am planning to post links to more articles and videos about anxiety. I am also planning to post more links to articles and videos about depression, which has been identified as the second most common problem affecting people’s mental health in the United States.
One of the ways that we can be more supportive of church members and attendees who suffer from anxiety, depression, and other problems affecting their mental health is to learn more about these problems, to learn to distinguish the myths from the real facts, and to learn not to let our imaginations or our feelings run away with us. People are experiencing far greater levels of stress today than they have in the past. We can help reduce the stress in their lives by not letting our own fears get the best of us. We may not realize how much our own fears are influencing us and consequently we may stigmatize someone who is experiencing anxiety, depression, or some other problem that affects their mental health without intending to do so. For this reason, it important to assess what is going on inside us and how it affects the way we see someone who may have problems that are affecting their mental health and what we think of them. Otherwise, we may contribute to their difficulties.
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