Chapter 1

Defining Anxiety (The nasty sibling of fear and uncertainty)

“Anxiety is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness” – Richard Carlson

The economies worldwide might be currently facing a slowdown with all efforts being made to inject some life force by the finance heads of nearly all the state heads but the word anxiety or depression is on a boom since quite a long time. People are easily and frequently using “depression” or “stress” as a term that can define their irritated state of mind and cause of the miserable state of personal affairs. Even school going children can be heard saying that they are having stress. Before twenty years when I was entering college, I had never heard of the term “educational psychologists” but today we have educational psychologists even in schools. This conveys a story, because the supply of treatment is only done where the demand is. Anxiety is such a hot selling buzzword these days. From people working in offices to public sector units, everyone is self proclaiming that he/she is under so much pressure and is suffering from either anxiety or depression.

 

The National Mental Health Survey 2015-16 , conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, under the purview of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, reveals that 9.8 million teenagers in the age group 13-17 years suffer depression and other mental health disorders and are “in need of active intervention”⁽¹³⁾. This statistic tells the story of depression hit youth of India by itself.

 

 

Stress- Is it natural?

The real question of concern is, is there really a situation calling for you to have stress and anxiety? Our bodies are equipped with stress hormone releasing organs given by mother nature. Fear hormones are secreted by the adrenal gland, an endocrine gland located on top of our kidneys. The sole purpose of these organs is to secrete the stress hormone adrenaline, also called the fight or flight hormone in an actual alarming situation so that the body gets the signal that it has to be in alert mode because there is an emergency. Well, this makes sense till now. After all, mother nature knows it all. But what if we ourselves create an imaginary, horrifying and alarming picture in our mind, about something that actually doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened yet and start anticipating that something bad will happen in the future, a point will arise where our mind starts believing that definitely something not so good will happen and give the signal to the body to release the stress hormones. Our mind is also a very fascinating creation of Almighty. Although the mind can estimate the distance between the Earth and Mars accurately but the poor thing does not have the ability to recognize whether a situation running inside it on its picture screen is real or imaginary. Since the mind cannot differentiate between an event for being real or imaginary, the only signal that the mind knows to send the body is secrete stress hormones, secrete stress hormones!

 

Unfortunately, we take some or the other stress almost all day, so parallely the stress hormones are released during the entire day. These flight or fight hormones enter and keep circulating in our bloodstream and cause disease, also called anxiety disorder or panic attacks. To make matters worse, the principles of quantum physics and the famous Law of Attraction says, what you anticipate and believe in continuation, materializes itself into reality! So it is a matter of clinical inquiry whether someone is actually going through a medical anxiety condition or not.