Notes

Anxiety - Mental MEDICAL CONDITION Or a Normal Mental State?
Anxiety can affect the mental health of individuals and appears to be a large and growing problem in the Western world.

First let us ask if feeling anxious a normal state for human beings? The answer this is a definite yes. Anxiety serves to help keep us safe from possible perceived threats that we need to process. It is an early on warning system that tells us we need to observe the environment differently and pay special attention at least until we have more information and know how to handle a situation. Very often this early warning system enables us to take appropriate action before an issue gets worse.

What is worrying in today's world is however that the word anxiety now denotes a mental disorder. You merely need to Google in the word anxiety to realise that a lot of people feel it is something that they need to get over. What's less apparent on the internet is anxiety skills training. It is almost as if it is by chance that we learn how to deal with our own anxiety. Few of us know how to process our anxiety - one of the cognitive skills that is sadly lacking from our educational curriculum.

Anxiety can be seen on a continuum. At one end anxiety arises if you find a perceived threat that needs processing and at another end may be the person whose anxiety mechanism is out of control which leaves them in a state of heightened anxiety most of the time. This end of the anxiety continuum includes a hugely negative effect on a persons' life.

However there is another continuum. That is the continuum of people's ability to process anxiety and cope with it effectively. At one end is the person who always appears to be in a position to stay calm, react appropriately and resolve the anxiety inducing situation. At another end is the person who is very controlled by the unpleasant feelings and physical symptoms connected with extreme anxiety.

Added to those two situations is the fact that anxiety is taught to us by out society, and certainly as children we can develop very negative reactions to anxiety producing situations if this is the behavior we see around us. Throw set for good measure our personalities and our personal environmental experiences and perhaps we have a valid case for teaching anxiety appropriate skills as part of our educational system.

This might just go a long way to reducing the incidence of anxiety from becoming a mental medical condition. Worth thinking about!

Veronica Mauvis includes a background in medicine and psychology and spent 25 years considering education and development in the Third World. You can read more about anxiety and its complications at her site
Here's my website: https://myspace.com/batemangillespie3