How common are anxiety disorders?
Anxiety and mood disorders are quite common. In fact, right now in Canada 11% of adults report living with an anxiety/mood disorder. Over 32% of people living in the United States have had an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. 1

Why do I feel alone struggling?
It is a common reaction to feel alone in your struggles with your anxiety. Feeling lost inside your own anxious thoughts (and emotions) can be isolating and scary.

Most of the clients we treat that struggle with anxiety report that they lose themselves almost daily in their mind by overthinking and worrying about the future. Slowly, they tend to report having difficulty being present in their lives and feeling disconnected from the outside world. Disconnection and feeling isolated often emphasizes fear and a sense of loneliness, which can contribute to symptoms of depression.

It’s important to acknowledge when you’re struggling, so that you can take this first step and find out how to get help.

Can anxiety actually be helpful?
Having anxiety is not necessarily a “bad” thing. In fact, physiological symptoms of anxiety in certain contexts are designed for our survival, as it could motivate action. If our ancestors were confronted with a lion in the wilderness, one would hope that their sympathetic nervous system would activate to narrow their attention to threatening stimuli, increase heart rate, and prepare their body for fight or flight. In a modern context, you might have noticed that anxiety tends to arise in areas of your life that are particularly important to you. Thus, if turned to with a sense of curiosity and understanding, anxiety can help motivate us to attend to the parts of our life that we deeply value and care about. For example, it could help motivate you to keep plugging away on a work assignment because you care about keeping a job for financial means to travel with friends.

It is also true that we will all feel nervous or anxious at different points in our lives.
We often forget that our own brains were evolved to serve one primary purpose, that is to protect us for survival. Indeed, our ancestors that were able to think about the worst case scenario (e.g. “That lion is going to eat me.”) had a higher likelihood of surviving and consequently, passing off their “anxious” or “negative biased” brains to us. Today, our brains often produce thoughts to help protect us from danger.

In fact, a study by the National Science Foundation (2005)2 found that up to 80% of our thoughts throughout the day are negative. Therefore, it is quite common to get wrapped up in a brain that perceives most external and internal stimuli as a threat to our survival.