Im just having a genuinely hard time placing the feeling “anxiety”. The explanations I’ve seen have seemed like very normal behavior like feeling unmotivated about something or nervous of meeting someone.
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Anxiety is synonym with stress. It’s actually the same physiological reactions taking place when you’re anxious, when you’re stressed and when you’re scared. The difference is just semantics. Anxiety refers to fear of what’s coming, fear refers to when you’re in physical danger (or believe you are) and stress is fear a fear of failure that arise when a person believes (s)he doesn’t have the resources (s)he needs to solve a problem.
The current consensus is that we’ve evolved for so long, that if each generation were to be represented by a person, you’d have a crowd of 10 000 people. Out of all those 10 000, only 6 are alive today. Two of these generations have grown up surrounded by electronics and only one of those generations started to get in contact with electronic devices as toddlers. Humans have as for back as we have archaeological records been leading a nomadic lifestyle, walking and running in a dangerous environment. And despite a clear forward moving trend thanks to technological advancement (just over a century ago there were still horses trafficking the streets) we have not been in it long enough to adapt to this modern lifestyle. So the same primitive system that kept us alive on the savanna now responds as intensely to the trivial problems of our modern life. Another issue is that information travels so fast now, which gives advertisers a lot of reach. In stead of watching a YouTube video you end up also watching 2-6 commercials. And while 10 seconds here and there isn’t very much, the continuous bombardment of information we receive on a daily basis is *unparallelled* in human history up until this point. Population density is also at its peak. Since we’re not equipped to deal with this overwhelming amount of information and relations we become stressed. Some crash, some become addicts, some become anxious.
I also believe all these screens have impacted our ability to sociolise and regulate our emotions. These are skills we learn when we interact with others, and studies have shown that there is a correlation.
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