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Why Is Anxiety So Common

How Common Is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Why anxiety is so common around menopause and natural ways to feel better

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is surprisingly common. 7.7 million people experience PTSD in any given year, due to the high number of rapes and PTSD from those that worked in military settings. PTSD affects approximately 6.8% of the those in the United States in their lifetime. Only 58% seek treatment, and of those, only 44% receive any adequate treatment.

Social phobia is also a very common condition. It affects 12.1% of the population in a person’s lifetime, and those numbers do not include those that simply feel shy. In any given year, 6.8% of the population experience social phobia, or about 15,000,000 people. Social phobia is rarely treated, with only 45.6% seeking treatment.

Perhaps most problematic is that only 38.2% of those with social phobia that seek treatment receive adequate treatment, so of those currently living with social phobia, only 17% is receiving some type of effective treatment or intervention.

Anxiety Caused By Lifestyle Habits

Never underestimate the effect your lifestyle can have on your anxiety levels. For example, some research has shown that those that do not exercise are more prone to developing anxiety, because their body has unused energy, and because they start producing less stress-coping hormones.

Similarly, although diet does not traditionally cause significant anxiety, it can still play a role. Caffeine, for example, can exacerbate mild anxiety symptoms. Unhealthy foods can cause you to feel unhealthy, which in turn causes stress that leads to anxiety. Drug use is frequently a cause of anxiety.

This is why even with therapy and medicine, a change to lifestyle habits is often necessary.

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Anxiety Disorder Statistics And Prevalence

Every country has its own unique mental health statistics, but for the purposes of this article, we’re going to use the statistics in the United States because those statistics are more readily available.

Remember, there is more than one anxiety disorder – from generalized anxiety disorder to panic disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder and more.

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What Is Generalized Anxiety Disorder

With GAD, you may feel extreme and unrealistic worry and tension even if theres nothing to trigger these feelings. Most days, you may worry a lot about various topics, including health, work, school and relationships. You may feel that the worry continues from one thing to the next.

Physical symptoms of GAD can include restlessness, difficulty concentrating and sleeping problems.

Our Work And Finances Aren’t Very Stable

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In the survey conducted by the APA, researchers found that job stability and money were two of the primary things millennials get anxious about. It’s not because we’re lazy and can’t keep a full-time job rather, many of us happened to be graduating college just as the economy collapsed, so we weren’t left with the best prospects. Maybe we had trouble finding work or got laid off unexpectedly. Whatever the case may be, we haven’t always had it easy when it comes to careers.

On top of that, your 20s aren’t the most financially stable decade of your life. Millennials are often stuck paying hefty student loans while also trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their enormous rent. Additionally, it was recently reported that one in every five young adults are financially supporting an aging parent, and these individuals spend an average of $18,250 a year doing so. And to put the icing on the cake, we’re simply not able to saving much money. No wonder we’re so stressed out.

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How Common Is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, may be an overly self-diagnosed, but underdiagnosed in the community. Many people can live with OCD without realizing it’s a problem, and many others claim they’re OCD because they have a few silly compulsions but they probably do not qualify for a disorder.

Obsessive compulsive disorder affects roughly 1% of the population at any given time, with more than half of the cases considered severe. 2.3% to 5% of the population will experience OCD at some point in their lives. It’s not known whether or not enough people are seeking adequate treatment, but it’s unlikely since obsessive compulsive disorder is the type of condition that often seems natural.

Learning From The Anxiety Statistics

Anxiety is incredibly common, but it’s not just the extremely high numbers that are relevant. It’s also a shockingly low number of people that seek out treatment, and the even lower number of people that actually receive an effective treatment.

Less than half of those with anxiety ever seek treatment, and only 14% of those with anxiety disorder receive treatment that is best described as “minimally adequate.” That means that of those with anxiety right now, 86% are either receiving no treatment or using one that doesn’t work.

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Family Hierarchies Are Out Of Whack

Although kids give the impression that they’d like to be in charge, deep down they know they aren’t capable of making good decisions. They want their parents to be leadersâeven when there is dissension in the ranks. And when the hierarchy gets muddledâor even flipped upside downâtheir anxiety skyrockets.

What Biological Factors Influence Anxiety

Why is Anxiety So Common?

The state of a persons health, past or present, plays a large role in triggering anxiety. Those with chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease are at risk of constant worry about getting sick or sudden death. In fact, having a heart attack is known to raise the risk of health anxiety by 20 to 30 percent. People with breathing problems such as asthma or who have severe allergies to common substances may live with chronic worry about exposure to triggering substances. Some people are highly sensitive to internal body sensationsinteroceptionand may devote so much mental energy to monitoring, say, their heartbeats that every variation becomes a source of doubt and concern. A large number of peoplein some estimates, as many as 20 percent of the populationare said to be highly sensitive having a low threshold of nervous system arousal, they overrespond to both internal and external stimuli and can be easily overwhelmed emotionally. Their reactivity is linked to the personality trait of neuroticism, one of the strongest risk factors for anxiety.

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Parents Are Getting Caught Up In The Rat Race

Many parents have become like personal assistants to their teenagers. They work hard to ensure their teens can compete: They hire tutors and private sports coaches and pay for expensive SAT prep courses. They make it their job to help their teens build transcripts that will impress a top school. And they send the message that their teen must excel at everything in order to land a coveted spot at such a college.

Why Is Anxiety And Depression So Common In Students These Days

Today, the world has become fast-paced and every has indulges in high intensity competitions. Because of this the two words- anxiety and depression have become household names. Both anxiety and depression are related to each other. A person might not suffer from both, but there are chances of one illness leading to another.

What is anxiety?

In medical terms anxiety is a mental health disorder that erupts feelings of worry and fear that are strong and frequent enough and eventually interfere with peoples daily activities. Examples of anxiety are panic attacks, PTSD, restlessness and an inability to move aside a worry.

What is depression?

Depression is a mental health disorder that leads to one feeling low or unhappy during activities. His phase of being low prevails for a long time if one is facing chronic depression. Depression severely causes impairment in daily life.

But now we are hearing these terms more than often in our daily lives. Children especially students being a trap to depression and anxiety has become regular news. There have been cases of suicide by children suffering with these mental health diseases. Their lives are being ruined and how! But why so? Why are children falling trap to these illnesses regularly?

Here are some of the reasons why anxiety and depression have become common in students:

Peer pressure:

Increased exposure to technology:

Usage of social media:

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Electronics Offer An Unhealthy Escape

Constant access to digital devices lets kids escape uncomfortable emotions like boredom, loneliness, or sadness by immersing themselves in games when they are in the car or by chatting on social media when they are sent to their rooms.

And now we’re seeing what happens when an entire generation has spent their childhoods avoiding discomfort. Their electronics replaced opportunities to develop mental strength, and they didn’t gain the coping skills they need to handle everyday challenges.

Anxiety Disorders: An Overview

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In an anxiety-related disorder, your fear or worry does not go away and can get worse over time. It can influence your life to the extent that it can interfere with daily activities like school, work and/or relationships. Fear, stress, and anxiety are “normal feelings and experiences” but they are completely different than suffering from any of the seven diagnosable disorders plus substance-induced anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and trauma- or stressor-related disorders.

Anxiety disorders keep people from sleeping, concentrating, talking to others, or even leaving their home. Anxiety that may need treatment is often irrational, overwhelming, and disproportionate to the situation. It makes sufferers feel as though they have no control over their feelings, and it can involve severe physical symptoms like headaches, nausea, or trembling. It becomes classified as a disorder when normal anxiety becomes irrational and begins to recur and interfere with daily life.

But, as an example, what if someone will not leave their home for extended periods of time because they are afraid of being in a crowd or being reminded of a past traumatic event. That is not a “normal feeling or experience.”

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Anxiety Caused By Anxiety

Anxiety is also self-sustaining. Earlier we mentioned panic attacks, and how they can often be caused by periods of stress that become overwhelming. But once youve had your first panic attack, you may get them again and again because of a fear of panic attacks, or because your body becomes more attuned to how it feels, which ultimately triggers them in the future.

We see this in other ways too:

  • If you found yourself nervous about a plane ride, you might be fearful on future plane rides.
  • If you find yourself worried about a negative thought, you may have that thought more often.
  • If you experienced severe anxiety symptoms, you may be anxious about experiencing them again.

Essentially, anxiety and a fear of anxiety symptoms can create more anxiety in the future. They become their own self-sustaining cycle. So even justifiable anxiety can lead to unprompted anxiety.

Prevention Of Anxiety And Depression

It is not known exactly why some children develop anxiety or depression. Many factors may play a role, including biology and temperament. But it is also known that some children are more likely to develop anxiety or depression when they experience trauma or stress, when they are maltreated, when they are bullied or rejected by other children, or when their own parents have anxiety or depression.

Although these factors appear to increase the risk for anxiety or depression, there are ways to decrease the chance that children experience them. Learn about public health approaches to prevent these risks:

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Why Is Anxiety So Common Among Twentysomethings

Mention the word “anxiety” to almost any millennial and you’re bound to see a glimmer of familiarity in their eyes. Even if they don’t suffer from an anxiety disorder themselves, odds are that they either know someone who does, or they’ve at least encountered a bit of anxiety in their adult years. We’re a generation well acquainted with anxiety âin fact, a few years ago, young adults took the award home for most anxious, stressed out people in America. A 2013 report from the American Psychological Association found that individuals between the ages of 18 and 33 showed the highest levels of stress. On a scale of one to 10, they averaged a score of 5.4. And 39 percent of these anxious millennials said their stress levels had raised significantly just in the past year.

In 2016, those numbers changed a little â middle-aged folks between 40 and 59 were found to be the least happy and the most anxious, according to a study from the Office of National Statistics. Bustle spoke with Jodi Aman, a licensed psychotherapist with more than two decades of experience and the author of You 1 Anxiety 0, who told us, “Anxiety increases as people age.” But anxiety remains a huge concern for many young adults, especially since, as this new information indicates, it won’t simply go away as we age. Anxiety is still pretty commonplace among young adults, and Aman says it’s an issue that shouldn’t be taken lightly, since it can affect our overall health and wellbeing.

Anxiety Disorders Can Have Serious Effects

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An anxiety disorder may lead to social isolation and clinical depression, and can impair a persons ability to work, study and do routine activities. It may also hurt relationships with friends, family and colleagues. Its common for depression and anxiety to happen at the same time. Depression can be a serious illness with a high risk of self-harm and suicide.

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What Is Social Anxiety

While social anxiety typically appears in the early to mid-teens, it can also form in young adults.

Social anxiety has effects on your body and your mind. In a social situation when your anxiety level is high, you feel your heart beating fast. Sweating, trembling and blushing are also common symptoms. You can even feel that your stomach is upset or that you are having nausea.

Because people with social anxiety are aware of the signs their body is sending, they fear they may be judged by others. Socially anxious individuals fear that the signs of their anxiety are obvious and worry they will be placed in humiliating situations. And so, they begin to avoid situations that arouse these kinds of negative emotions.

People with social anxiety can begin to avoid situations where they are the center of attention or that involve speaking with strangers. They will often spend time after such events analyzing their behavior and identifying their flaws.

This type of thinking facilitates the appearance of negative emotions. And while negative emotions help us adapt, the intensity can be so high that people stop feeling the positive emotions.

They start to avoid social situations and end up isolating themselves. Social anxiety can affect your relationships, friendships, and even family bonds.

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