Anxiety in many different forms is hitting the headlines at the moment and inevitably its consequences end up creating difficulties requiring therapeutic attention.
One therapist, Owen O’Kane, has recently had his book ‘Addicted to Anxiety – How to break the habit’ published by Penguin. In it he argues that
‘Anxiety is a normal and sometimes healthy process, but in a world that feels unsafe and unpredictable, many of us find ourselves in its grip for more than is comfortable or truly necessary. If you subconsciously believe that worrying or investing in your anxiety will keep you safe, it is easy to get unwittingly hooked on it’
Breaking that ‘addiction’ is far from easy but he has a number of top tips to help people to do so…
- Avoiding risk will not help your anxiety – it may make it worse.
- Learn to tolerate discomfort – more exposure to it will help
- Deactivate the physical symptoms of anxiety
- Reframe your relationship with anxiety – see it as an ally that is trying to help
- Realise that you cannot cure anxiety – but you can learn to live with it
- Recognise that the physical feeling of anxiety can be addictive
- Identify your triggers – and be kind to yourself in handling them
Another book focusing on anxiety is Jonathan Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation – How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’. The Focus of his research is the generation of children born after 1995, popularly known as Gen Z. This generation he argues are suffering from over-protective, risk averse parenting which has prevented them from growing into fully formed adults, He writes ‘like your trees exposed to wind, children who are routinely exposed to small risks grow up to become adults who can handle much larger risks without panicking’.
Some of his more sweeping statements particularly for instance on the degree of risk that is acceptable at different ages can rightly be challenged but much more persuasive are his observations on the effects that the advent of the smart phone is having on young people’s lives. He demonstrates this through a large number of graphs that plot the growth of mental illness against the widespread use of a phone technology that is used by many young people for several hours a day at a critical time in their development. Whilst agreeing that such a pattern could be co-relational rather than causal he uses his scientific background as a social psychologist to argue that one follows from the other. What is more when phone and app usage is reduced the benefits (eg in sleep patterns) are measurable.
At Coupleworks one issue that often comes up with couples is the time spent on devices particularly in the evenings. Couples find an improvement in the quality of their connection with each other when their connection to their phones is reduced.
One particular danger he sees lies in the world of the social media where young people can be drawn into measuring themselves against a supposedly perfect world or body-shape being projected by others. Nor does that stop at childhood. As one commentator pointed our recently there is such a thing as a ‘linked-in envy’ where you look at your peers and see how much better they are succeeding in their lives than you are.
Ideas of unattainable perfection creep into every aspect of life whether it is in bringing up children or a couple’s sex life and these ideas can often be very damaging to a relationship. They breed anxiety in its destructive mode and prevent good interaction and communication.
If Haidt is right the consequences for ‘The Anxious Generation’ are going to present a challenge to Gen Z for many years to come and we as therapists will need the wisdom of O’Kane and others to help couples to acknowledge the addictive behaviour it can form and then to address it.
Sarah Fletcher