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[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

It's Not the Job Market

The three real reasons why Americans are more anxious than ever before.

By Taylor Clark

Why are college students so stressed?

When a team of UCLA researchers released its latest annual report on the mindset of America's university students last week, one finding screamed out for red-alert media attention: Our college kids are more stressed out and anxious than ever before. In the researchers' surveys of more than 200,000 incoming freshmen, students reported all-time lows in overall mental health and emotional stability, and this news sent the media on a high-strung spree of its own. ABC World News ran footage of harried-looking teenagers rushing around campus, Time wondered "Why Are College Students Reporting Record High Levels of Stress?," and the New York Times story on the report vaulted to the top of the paper's most-e-mailed list.

The culprit for this soaring stress, the stories unanimously declared, is the horrendous job market—a thoroughly lame explanation. I don't know about your college experience, but when I got to school a dozen years ago, my classmates spent about as much time pondering the future "job market" as they spent leafing through calculus textbooks for fun. These news stories have missed the truth because they've overlooked one crucial fact: Students are becoming more anxious because, for many years now, we've all been growing more anxious. This isn't just a campus issue. It's an American issue.

Over the last several decades, both through good economic times and bad, the United States has transformed into the planet's undisputed worry champion. Around the turn of the millennium, anxiety flew past depression as the most prominent mental health issue in America, and it's never looked back: With more than 18 percent of adults suffering from an anxiety disorder in any given year, the United States is now the most anxious nation in the world, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Stress-related ailments cost the nation $300 billion every year in medical bills and lost productivity, while our usage of sedative drugs keeps skyrocketing; just between 1997 and 2004, Americans more than doubled their spending on anti-anxiety medications like Xanax and Valium, from $900 million to $2.1 billion. And this anxious strain hits us well before we reach college. As psychologist Robert Leahy points out: "The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s."

 

This national surge in nerves is somewhat baffling because we're actually safer from true danger than we've ever been. A century ago, psychologist William James wrote that modernity had insulated us so well from grave threats like grizzly bear attacks that "in civilized life … it has at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear." Yet James might have been surprised to learn that even as our streets become safer, our cars more crash-proof, and our food and drugs better regulated, we still keep finding ways to become more tense. And don't assume that this is a problem that affects all nations equally: According to the 2002 World Mental Health Survey, people in developing-world countries such as Nigeria are up to five times less likely to show clinically significant anxiety levels than Americans, despite having more basic life-necessities to worry about. What's more, when these less-anxious developing-world citizens emigrate to the United States, they tend to get just as anxious as Americans. Something about our particular way of life, then, is making us less calm and composed.

So what's behind our ballooning issues with anxiety and stress? This is a thorny question, obviously, and one that can't be solved with any single answer. We could blame our cutthroat work environment, for example, yet work stress alone can't explain our fretfulness, since anxiety hits housewives and the idle rich just as hard. We might point the finger at the sputtering economy, but we kept growing more anxious even in boom times. When I was researching my new book on how people deal best with fear, stress, and pressure, however, I spoke with scores of psychologists and neuroscientists about this question, and I picked up three main themes in their replies. Together, this trio of answers offers a solid start toward explaining the rise in our national nervousness.

For the experts, one particularly egregious offender is America's increasing loss of community, what we might call the "Bowling Alone" effect. Human contact and kinship help alleviate anxiety (our evolutionary ancestors, of course, were always safer in numbers), yet as we leave family behind to migrate all over the country, often settling in insular suburbs where our closest pal is our plasma-screen TV, we miss out on this all-important element of in-person connection. As fear researcher Michael Davis of Emory University told me: "If you've lost the extended family and lost the sense of community, you're going to have fewer people you can depend on, and therefore you'll be more anxious. Other cultures have much more social support and are better off psychologically because of it." Another factor that adds to this problem—especially among young people—is our growing reliance on texting and social media for community, which many psychologists say is no substitute for real human interaction. When you're feeling most dreadful, you don't run to your Facebook profile for consolation; you run to a flesh-and-blood friend.

Continuing with this tech theme, the next culprit the experts mentioned was the torrent of (often nerve-racking) information we now consume. For one thing, the amount of data we take in each day has jumped dramatically—the average Sunday newspaper contains more raw information than people in earlier eras would absorb over the course of a few years—and some neuroscientists believe that our brains simply weren't designed to handle this kind of volume. But even worse, this avalanche of data is increasingly of the alarmist, fear-igniting variety. If a TV newscast isn't covering a grisly double homicide, the anchor is teasing a story about the hidden threat in your own home. "The media does this to us," explained Evelyn Behar, a worry expert who teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "It's always reporting that this thing causes cancer or that thing can kill you. We live in a culture where fear is used to motivate us."

And finally, we're especially vulnerable to this kind of manipulation because of the third factor: our intolerant attitude toward negative feelings. Put simply, Americans have developed habits for dealing with anxiety and stress that actually make them far worse. We vilify our aversive emotions and fight them, rather than letting them run their own course. We avoid situations that make us nervous. We try to bury uncomfortable feelings like anxiety and stress with alcohol or entertainment or shopping sprees. Psychologist Steven Hayes, creator of a highly effective anxiety treatment formula called acceptance and commitment therapy, told me that we've fallen victim to "feel-goodism," the false idea that "bad" feelings ought to be annihilated, controlled, or erased by a pill. This intolerance toward emotional pain puts us at loggerheads with a basic truth about being human: Sometimes we just feel bad, and there's nothing wrong with that—which is why struggling too hard to control our anxiety and stress only makes things more difficult.

Of course, loss of community, information overload, and a crummy attitude toward uncomfortable emotions aren't the final, all-encompassing answers for America's widespread case of nerves. They're simply a starting point for a more productive discussion. The good news here is that we have the tools to halt this trend, because in recent years psychologists and neuroscientists have given us a far better idea of how to deal well with anxiety and stress than ever before. So despite all of our worry and strain, America, fear not: With a bit of intelligently applied effort, any one of us can bring our anxieties back into a healthier balance. And maybe, just maybe, our college kids will one day be able to return to the state of appallingly irresponsible, beer-soaked carelessness that is their birthright.

www.slate.com/id/2283221

I think articles like this are especially interesting. Fear is a huge motivating factor for people, probably the biggest one there is.

I definitely agree with this article's premise that people often try to bury their anxiety or stress in booze/drugs/tv. As someone who has, unfortunately, had to deal with a random bought of anxiety attacks this past summer, I feel that merely trying to suppress these emotions is a disaster and a half. I feel like most people these days like a quick fix to something and don't want to actually work through their own emotions. They'd rather take a pill and be happy.

And that people too often believe emotions to be a state of reality as opposed to something temporary. I feel this causes a lot of our problems in intercommunication today, especially in politics. I also feel that the media is only interested in tapping into people's emotions at this point, especially fear and anxiety.

Do you think that most Americans are too needlessly anxious? Or do you think they have reason to be anxious? Should we let our emotions be so influential on our lives? How do you think people being guided by their emotions effects politics or communication in politics?

What about the idea of "feel goodism"? Do you think it's important to feel and acknowledge even negative emotions? Do you think it's wrong to try and ignore negative emotions in order to feel better? Or is it only natural to want to always feel good? Does it make us spoiled and naive as a people to want to always feel good? Or does it not matter?

Do you think that we have, as Americans, lost our sense of community?

edited to add tags.

 

Comments

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you understand what I mean when I say flashback and you say Emotions are something you can look at and say, "I will indulge in that emotion or I won't." There is nothing that absolutely forces you to act on an emotion in any situation.

[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

There is an obvious difference in a PTSD attack and a normal everyday emotion that you choose to indulge or not.

However I have a friend who suffered terribly from PTSD after he fought in the Gulf War, who basically blacked out and went berserk. He was able to stop that and become the functioning person that he is through today though meditation. I believe that most anxiety attacks can be conquered and lessened eventually, it will just take an extremely long time and a lot of effort.

As opposed to an everyday situation of anxiety and how someone chooses to react to it.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I think it takes time, support, healing, and often chemical intervention. And through that and even afterward, it changes your reality. (With my PTSD, I *see* the world differently than before the trauma. People who knew me before chastise me for not being as trusting/open/etc. But my reality did actually change.)

And I am a bit hesitant to write off emotions as "indulgences" and tell everyone with a disorder to go study meditation. I don't quite think that's the healthiest or sanest way to go about life.

[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, it absolutely takes those things as well.

I don't think emotions are only indulgences. I just don't think they are as set in stone as people think they are.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Very true ; but until ppl realize by themselves on a very deep and integrated level that those emotions of theirs are exactly that--emotions of theirs, to indulge, bend/redirect, or ignore as they please--they are set in stone. Because ppl think they are, or rather, have never learned to think otherwise.

I think more than bandying around the question of how modifiable emotions are a more valuable question would be : how do we come to the conclusion that they, or at least our reactions to them, are [modifiable/voluntary]?

Not being argumentative, here, just trying to contribute to what looks like a productive exchange. (Glad I could have the pleasure of reading it!)

[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

Very true ; but until ppl realize by themselves on a very deep and integrated level that those emotions of theirs are exactly that--emotions of theirs, to indulge, bend/redirect, or ignore as they please--they are set in stone. Because ppl think they are, or rather, have never learned to think otherwise.

Yes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. :)

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Each generation of veterans seems to suffer from their own unique forms of PTSD, and the hell of it is that they're actually founded on what are very reasonable fears within the context of their own wars. Many of the "original" Gulf War veterans of the 1990s developed a really pervasive paranoia of contamination and infection, which was dismissed by many civilians as mere hypochondria until the government finally admitted that "Gulf War syndrome" is an actual physical thing, caused by the delightful cocktail of toxic chemicals to which so many of those service members were exposed (because who would have expected anything bad to happen by sending them into burning oil-fields?) that WASN'T just "all in their heads." Likewise, one of the more crippling side-effects of the PTSD that's unique to many veterans of the current Gulf War is an absolute inability to deal with traffic jams, because unlike Vietnam or the '90s Gulf War, the service members who went to Iraq as part of our "War on Terror" did much of their fighting in cities, and one of the most dangerous places for any of them was in convoys going down city streets, where well-placed mines or grenades or other shots to the first and last vehicles in the convoy would turn the rest of the vehicles in the line into a kill-box.

Even among the civilian population, I suspect that PTSD is both more subtle and more pervasive than most of us realize, and when coupled with the "feel-goodism" alluded to by the original article, it can lead to a population that's largely pathological in how its majority responds to any sort of negative situation. As you say, it takes not not only a lot of time and effort, but also a significant amount of self-awareness to combat the symptoms of PTSD, and given that Americans as a culture are so willfully ANTI-self-aware that we would install Photoshop on our own mirrors if we could, I don't see this turning around any time soon.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Ironically this issue is very, very ancient. The first PTSD experience on the wide scale was after the US Civil War. http://psychology.about.com/od/ptsd/a/irritableheart.htm. The truly horrible thing was that nobody learned from this and it took a full century for people to recognize it as what it was and to try to deal with it.

In short "everything you've said, but moreso."

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you mentioned traffic jams.

It drove my ex girlfriend (and many others on the road) nuts that I always leave ATLEAST a car-length (preferably more) between myself and the next vehicle. I don't remember doing this before my first deployment, nor do I remember ever making a concious choice to begin doing it. It just seems that overtime I picked up a subtle form of "Vehicular clautrophobia".

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

You picked up what was a very smart behavior for the environment that you were in. What everybody forgets is that there's an evolutionary reason why humans even have a "fight-or-flight" response in the first place. In a very real sense, you're supposed to get scared of things that prove themselves to be harmful to you, and one of the biggest problems with medicating all our woes away is that, while people who suffer from clinical depression do indeed deserve to feel some measure of joy, there are also a number of occasions in which getting depressed is actually the most logical response to how profoundly fucked a situation is.

The first time I remember getting seriously depressed was when I was in grade school, when I started reading the newspaper on a regular basis, because between AIDS and acid rain and Ayatollahs and the arms race, all I could think was, "Oh my God, all the adults are insane." It's a conviction that's stuck with me ever since.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

You picked up what was a very smart behavior for the environment that you were in.

Yes I suppose I did.

What I found interesting is that I had never really thought about it until reading your comment.

There are the behaviors that were consciously adopted, things like Situational Awareness, and military bearing/posture. There are sounds, smells, and images that still trigger an intense reaction. What many would consider more stereotypical "scarring". The thing is that these are things that I've always been actively aware of, I wonder how many other ticks and quirks that I've picked up that I'm not aware of.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

We're all pathological to an extent. I STILL have to wage war against my own fight-or-flight response, because after enough bullying in school, my switch flipped permanently from "flight" to "fight" somewhere around high school.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Well if there is nowhere to run to the choice has already been made, hasn't it?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for your friend but...

Certain sounds and smells trigger intense reactions, I find the sound of jets and helicopters oddly soothing yet the sound of a car-door slamming will wake me from the deepest sleep catapult nightmare style (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CatapultNightmare).

Personnaly I've never understood those who freak out as my "flash-backs" have always been more subtle in nature (http://firstashore.livejournal.com/693577.html#comments). Perhapse it is my own damage shining through but to me the anxiety attacks were just like any other emotion. (indulge or don't)

Then again the primary reason that my girlfriend of 3 years is now my "ex" is that I was "emotionally distant" and getting accused of being a complete monster as a result.

[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I don't quite know enough about it.

He's told me stories of him, still in active duty, where he would suddenly black out and go berserk. The only reason he knew this is because one time a friend of his was filming when it happened. He just suddenly started tearing things apart, including his boots with his bare hands and the door.

I don't think he ever had a specific trigger. He had just, during the war, seen something that made his logical processes snap and that was the result. At this point, he doesn't even get triggered anymore.

But he is a very unique case in the way that he processes in sort of stress into intense aggression.

[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

Admittedly though, my friend is a psychopath of the highest order, which he thinks explains why he was able to deal with PTSD rather quickly. At least to the point where he could function in society.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the military trains you to bottle up your feelings about enduring a lot of harsh shit, so any mental or emotional issues he started out with were only going to get compounded by that, even if he'd never gone to war.

Compared to a lot of folks, my military experience was a walk in the park. I never camped out in the sand and I never got shot at. I'm technically a veteran of two foreign wars, but I served both of 'em on the decks of an aircraft carrier, where we watched birds launch off our bow with full payloads and come back empty - it was a video-game war to us.

And yet? I also did 159 days at sea without seeing dry land, and my typical work day ranged from 12-18 hours (on Sundays, our "day off," we only worked six hours). Back when I was still in the service and stationed overseas, after a near-fatal car accident that left me with the nice little facial scar that you can see in comical cartoon form in my avatar, I had a dream that I'd actually died in that car wreck without ever realizing it (yes, like The Sixth Sense) and that the only reason I still thought I was alive was because my ghost was still communicating with my loved ones back home through e-mail and the Internet.

I've been out of the service for seven years, and I still wake up with a start from nightmares where I've been recalled to duty. It never really goes away. You never really get over it. If you're lucky, it just sort of ... fades, slowly, over time.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the military trains you to bottle up your feelings about enduring a lot of harsh shit, so any mental or emotional issues he started out with were only going to get compounded by that, even if he'd never gone to war.

I don't know your story(or his) but I don't think it's that intentional and perhapse that's what makes it more insideous.

Essentialy we're in a (sub)culture that puts a great deal of value on physical/mental discipline and self control. To admit that you might not be as "in control" as you appear is to admit a deep character flaw. People in general tend to be quite touchy in such situations. Even now, I find it exceptionally difficult to ask for, or accept, help from anyone.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure we're disagreeing all that much, although I suppose that, to a civilian, it could seem like I was being all OH NOES about it, when in fact my "vocal tone" when I wrote it was very matter-of-fact.

I mean, it's like boot camp; in boot camp, they scream in your face and call you a pigfucker and make you exercise until you're ready to puke, but it's really not personal, and as with the fight-or-flight mechanism, there's a very good reason for it, and it's the fact that they can't test your combat readiness by just throwing you into some Thunderdome shit with a bunch of other recruit motherfuckers and seeing which ones of you survive the free-for-all carnage, so barring that, they need to know that you can handle the pressures of war by putting you through as close to Hell as they can legally manage. It's far better for you to wash out as a recruit than to choke in the field, after all.

The problem with this, though, is just as you say — it trains you to disregard your own pain (which IS intentional on the military's part), even to the point where you arguably shouldn't ignore it (which ISN'T an intentional side-effect, I don't think), especially with regard to your mental and emotional health (which are far harder to quantify than any physical problems you might be having), all out of the fear of appearing vulnerable or not entirely self-reliant. So, especially if you're a young guy who doesn't exactly have a deep emotional vocabulary to express how you're feeling, which is true of a lot of recruits, then the message you're going to get is, "Just suck it up and move on." This is a necessary response to many things in the military, but there are also instances where it's the exact opposite of beneficial.

[kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the military trains you to bottle up your feelings about enduring a lot of harsh shit, so any mental or emotional issues he started out with were only going to get compounded by that, even if he'd never gone to war.

I'm hesitant to think that's the case here, if only because my friend doesn't really experience emotions, except when in the company of a few very specific people.

If anything, from what he's told me, his time in the military honed his psychopathic and manipulative skills and made him a more stable person in general. It was a very specific incident, that caused his logical processes to basically shot circuit, that led to his PTSD attacks.

But I can definitely understand that even an "unfought" war can be very traumatic to someone and have lasting effects.