Demystifying Mental Health: Decoding Anxiety

Elgin Davis

Published in

Winter Hearth Studios

9 min readSep 17, 2019

What is this generation constantly getting wrong about anxiety?

What’s New This Week

Welcome back and thanks for joining us in Volume 2 of the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, where each week we explore the human experience through different mediums, seeking to spark positive, empathetic, and meaningful conversation around mental and emotional health.

This is the first week of Volume 2, and I’m beyond excited for all of the content that we’ll explore together throughout the series. As I noted in the introductory message to this series, lots of misunderstanding,
miscommunication, and misrepresentation cloud the public perception of mental health, especially as it relates to mental illness. I want to kick off this series by explaining what exactly I aim to achieve.

I want people to understand that “mental health” is just as important as physical health, and that it is not some taboo, untouchable thing that we should shy away from in conversation and avoid at all costs when it comes to members of our society. By better understanding different forms that mental health disorders can take, we will be better positioned to empathize with and assist others in our community who need our help. At the root of empathy is curiosity — curiosity to ask questions, and to seek to understand the thoughts and experiences of another person. It is this same curiosity that has brought you here to learn more about mental health, and I’m excited to learn and grow alongside you over the course of the series.

I put a lot of elbow grease into this edition and it’s packed with information, so be sure to save it for later reference.

What is Anxiety?

Nearly 40 million people in the U.S. (about 18% of the population) experience an anxiety disorder in a given year, and that figure is based only on information that has been reported. Imagine how many people suffer with anxiety disorders that go undocumented, undiagnosed, and unaddressed. In fact, only 1 out of 3 people who suffer from an anxiety disorder receive treatment, though the disorders are highly treatable. The World Health Organization reports that anxiety disorders are the most common and pervasive mental disorders worldwide (ADAA 2018), but they are so widely misunderstood.

So what exactly is anxiety? The dictionary defines anxiety as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome”. Anxiety is a fairly misused term in our society, which in turn actually leads to invalidation of the experiences that so many people actually suffer from every day. People who say things like “I have anxiety” or “I’m having an anxiety attack” must be careful not to confuse the two, because most people do not understand that being anxious and having an anxiety disorder are not the same thing. Anxiety disorders are specific psychiatric disorders that tend to involve crippling fear, worry, or apprehension, typically accompanied by compulsive behavior or panic attacks.

So what’s the difference? Basically, common anxiety is something that we all feel, as when we are about to perform in front of a crowd, or a deadline is coming up soon at work that we are worried we might not meet, or there’s a cute girl in our math class that we’re too afraid to talk to. You might also fear certain things, like spiders or learning that you sat in gum and have been walking around sporting your new saliva-and-sugar-stained jeans all day.

A wiggling GIF image of anxiety, very anxious-looking and shaky

Take a moment here to note how anxiety is usually characterized by a worry about future/impending events, while fear is often a reaction to current events.

Okay, so we all get a little anxious from time to time. That is not quite an anxiety disorder. An anxiety disorder is usually debilitating, paralyzing, or crippling, and can leave the victim unable to carry on in their every day life. Examples include:

people who avoid social situations altogether for fear of being embarrassed, humiliated, or judged;
people who experience unprovoked panic attacks and are constantly preoccupied with having another;
people who have irrational fear of an object, place, person, or situation that in reality poses little or no threat of actual danger;
and people who suffer from recurring nightmares, flashbacks or emotional numbing related to a traumatic event that happened months or even years before.

Person looking back and forth between semi-closed fingers, hiding from the outside world

Hopefully this was a helpful (and sufficiently brief) overview of anxiety, anxiety disorders, and the stark differences between the two. There are actually 5 commonly classified types of anxiety disorders: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder (also known as Social Phobia). If you are familiar with any of these disorders, you may have recognized some of the characteristics in the above examples. We’ll leave those definitions for another time, but this section should give you a pretty good insight as to what exactly comes into play when we speak of “anxiety” as a whole.

A little anxiety monster, a furry creature with an old skull covering its face. It is also holding a pocket watch — *Anxiety, created and owned by Toby Allen*

Anxiety Abstracted

When I first started researching for the content of Volume 2, I came across the work of Toby Allen. Allen is an illustrator who has created depictions of these different mental health disorders in order to make mental illness appear “more manageable”.

“The project originated from imagining my own anxieties as inner demons and finding it to be a cathartic and healing process to draw them… It made them feel weaker, and I was able to look at my own anxiety comically with the help of these monster drawings… I hope it helps [people] see their illness in a different light, make it appear more manageable”. — Toby Allen

This idea intrigued me from the beginning, as I thought it was very interesting and also very effective to represent mental health disorders as being separate from the human, because as someone living with a mental illness, you are not your mental illness, nor are you defined by it, unless you choose to be. I loved the idea of giving life to these seemingly intangible concepts, giving us an easier, more accessible, and more visual empathy entry point. Playing with these characters in my mind personally makes it much easier to imagine what life experiences might look like for people struggling with various disorders. He has illustrated a number of these conditions, and there is an illustration that pairs with each one of the disorders we’ll be covering in this volume.

The description for the anxiety character represented above reads as follows:

“The anxiety monster is small enough to sit on its victim’s shoulder and whisper things in to their unconscious, eliciting fearful thoughts and irrational worries. The anxiety monster is often seen as weak in comparison to others, but it is one of the most common and is very hard to get rid of.
They often carry small objects linked to their victim’s anxieties such as clocks which represent a common but irrational fear of things that might never happen. No one has ever seen the face of the anxiety monster for it always wears a skull as a mask.”

A fish-eye view of a small, circular world with a lot of buildings — Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

Relevance in Our Community

As mentioned briefly above, there are a lot of stunning statistics surrounding anxiety and anxiety disorders. According to the World Heath Organization, 1 in 13 people globally suffer from anxiety. That’s about 2 kids in every elementary-through-high-school classroom, roughly 38 students in every 500-student lecture hall in college, and about 230 students in a population the size of my 3,000-student high school, on average. As I noted before, anxiety disorders are the most common and pervasive mental disorders in the U.S.

These statistics beg the question, “so what am I supposed to do with that information?” The first step is awareness, which, if you’ve tracked with me so far in this edition, I’d say you’re pretty aware of the scope of anxiety (but don’t stop here, keep learning!). The second step I’d suggest is to simply listen to those around you. Anxiety.org makes a really strong point when they note, “Not everyone understands that someone with an anxiety disorder cannot ‘just let things go’”. If you feel so inclined to tell someone to “just let [something] go”, consider taking a more empathetic approach instead. Ask more questions, listen to the answers, and seek to understand. Anxiety exists on a biological, genetic, and chemical level, and we as advocates should do our best to listen, learn, understand, and respect the limits of those who struggle with anxiety disorders of any kind.

Step three is to learn to recognize how anxiety disorder manifests itself in other people (which you can find more about here). Lastly, step four is to make the effort to address the needs of others who struggle with anxiety disorder. This may look like simply being present for someone as they struggle with their disorder, reaching out for professional help (you can find a list of treatment options here), or a host of other supportive options, including calming/breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, etc.

This Week’s Mental Health Hack

This week was loaded with content, so we’ll keep it light with our Mental Health Hack of the Week: Drink more water! It’s very easy to never drink straight H2O, since we usually get “enough” water to survive from our other nutritional sources, but drinking more water can substantially improve our mental health. For the sake of brevity, drinking more water allows more oxygen to reach our brain, which in turn allows us to think more clearly, make better judgements, and better assess our mental and emotional states.

A small boy looking at a large set of stairs in front of him — Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash

Weekly Challenge

This is a huge, and I mean HUGE, opportunity for building empathy right here. I challenge you to watch this video and choose one of the 1st-person accounts of life with an anxiety disorder. Pause the video after they have finished their story, close your eyes, and imagine living a day in their life as they just described. What do you hear? What do you see? How do you feel? Take note of this experience and use it to better understand what it’s like to live with an anxiety disorder. You’ll get out of it what you put into it, of course :)

Walk It, Talk it

Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this digest to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the digest.

This weekly personal development playbook is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, consider sharing it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world achieve a better human experience :)

Resources

Live an Epic Story

Until next time,
Elgin