What---Me Worry?

We seem to live in a world filled with anxiety.

A lot of people find a lot to worry about.

In the United States, the National Institute of Mental Health reports that 19% of Americans have some type of anxiety disorder annually.

A third of Americans will deal with an anxiety disorder some time in their lives.

Young people are much more likely to experience some form of anxiety disorder than older people according to CDC data from 2019.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db378.htm

Anxiety is also more prevalent in females (19.0%) compared to males (11.9%).

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db378.htm

Anxiety has also increased in recent years driven by increases in rates in younger adults.

Rates among those Age 50+ have remained stable.

Source: https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2024/05/28/prevalence-of-anxiety-by-age-generation-in-the-us/

Consider all of this anxiety and then compare it to this factoid that I recently came across from Brandon Luu, MD.

91.4% of those things that people worry about that causes anxiety never materialize.

If fact, the most common occurrence in those who worry is that none of it actually happens.

Is this the reason that older people have less anxiety?

Have they learned over the years that many worries are not worth worrying about?

What is worrying is the increase in anxiety among young adults.

Notice that it began to spike in conjunction with the introduction of the iPhone.

Jonathan Haidt wrote a book that argues that the rewiring of childhood from "play-based" to "phone-based" has been responsible for a collapse in the mental health of young people.

Source: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. 

Perhaps it is time to return to a simpler time when young people of my era in the 1960's were reading the satirical humour publication, Mad magazine, and taking to heart the advice of its fictional mascot and cover boy Alfred E. Neuman.