It’s easy to tell when someone is physically hurt, but when it comes to something like a mental illness like anxiety, it’s nearly impossible to see their suffering on the surface.
According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety is a problem that affects 18 percent of the population. That means 40 million adults over the age of 18 suffer from this particular mental illness that has people afflicted by constant thoughts of excessive and unrealistic concern about anything and everything they might encounter in their everyday life.
Anxiety isn’t always something that is stuck with someone their entire lives, it can develop at any point in a person’s life. Common factors or triggers include family and life experiences, as stress points that begin the development of anxiety.
As something so common in society, some wonder why it is a problem people don’t seem to talk about. It’s actually pretty simple: No one likes to talk about it, especially those struggling to live with it.
Here’s five things someone like anxiety probably won’t tell you about living with it:
5. That they are suffering at all.
It’s hard to prove a mental illness like anxiety. It’s something that goes on in your head that people won’t always see the connection between the varying thoughts crashing into each other and making someone stressed. It’s easily brushed off despite it affecting millions of Americans every day. Sometimes people can feel even worse about mentioning that they feel like their mind is breaking itself constantly, and it just doesn’t seem to want ever get fixed.
4. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world, because it doesn’t always make sense.
The human mind doesn’t always make sense. It could be a small comment about how the weather is, and then anxiety could kick in and make rational thinking all the more difficult. Even people familiar with their triggers can still get shaken up by an unexpected comment or sight in their everyday life.
3. Telling us to get over it literally helps no one.
The world is hard enough trying to figure out how to get through our lives with things like taxes, rent, relationships, and so much more going on. Trust us, if we could just easily stop thinking about our anxiety or just get over it, we would have done that a lot sooner. No one asks for their personal demons to constantly be banging about in their heads; if it was a simple as putting a band aid on it, it wouldn’t be as big of a problem as it is today.
2. Talking about what stresses us out doesn’t always help.
“Just talk about it.” Sometimes, it’s near impossible for a person to just turn their thoughts into coherent words that make sense to anyone else. As supportive as someone asking to talk about it can be, it can become even more stressful if one is constantly badgered to talk about their problems. Also, you never know if someone had a bad experience telling someone previously and was just told that “it can’t be that bad.”
1. Just because someone’s life seems to get better doesn’t mean that their anxiety has gone away.
A person’s success or accomplishments might give off the idea that anxiety is no longer an issue. It’s actually more likely that the anxiety is kicked into overdrive and is even more relentless. There might be more reasons to smile on the outside, but anxiety doesn’t ever really stop, people just get better at holding themselves together.
The main reason why a person with anxiety won’t ever tell you this is that people can still function on an every day capacity when their anxiety is at a constant bearable level. People with anxiety just want to try to live their lives to the best of their capacity and some days it’s extremely difficult to even get out of bed.
For more information on understanding how anxiety and other mental illnesses like depression affect people and what can be done to help others, go to www.adaa.org.
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