Caroline’s high school result is going to be declared tomorrow and here she is lying awake with wide eyes at 1:00 A.M. in the night desperately worried, what if she doesn’t perform well, what if she doesn’t get admission in the course of her choice, what if she is forced to stay away at an alien college away from her friends. For you and me, it is a pretty ordinary situation but for Caroline it may mean the end of the world to her.
Anxiety must be a very harmless looking condition to a person who has never experienced it ever in his life. It is well said that only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. Just ask a person who has been suffering from anxiety for past several years. The endless sleepless nights spent, the frequent bouts of anxiety experienced, the constant fear nagging him etc. can be well understood only by a person who has ever experienced the condition of anxiety in his life or has come across somebody close to him with a similar condition.
It is a general perception among the common public that anxiety is something which is always attached with the grown ups or the elderly. But they are gravely wrong in their perception. Anxiety can be experienced just by any person, be it a child, a teenager, a girl, a boy, an adult or an elderly.
What we are going to discuss here is the anxiety suffered by the teenagers, or teenage-anxiety. A 13 year old child may be staying awake till 2:00 a.m. in the night worrying for his English or Math test. He might be worrying over a fight with a dear friend of his. Might even worry himself to death thinking about what if the constant fights of his parents lead them to a divorce. A teenager may also start worrying unnecessarily if he is going on his first date or for that matter attending the Prom night with his fellow buddies. For an ordinary person situations like these can be pretty harmless but for a teenager who is suffering from anxiety, situations like these can trigger bouts of anxiety which can often become troublesome if not checked or monitored. Thus it is wrong to assume that only the grown ups have reasons to worry. Anxiety is a mental disorder which depends on many factors.
A teenager may be suffering from anxiety more than a fellow teenager of his age due to many factors such as personal factors, genetic factors, the brain chemistry of that teenager etc. A teenager who has a parent suffering from anxiety has a high chance of developing anxiety disorder as compared to the other teenagers. Sometimes the constant problems in one’s life start troubling a tender mind which is more sensitive than the others. Some teenagers are more susceptible to anxiety because of the chemical imbalance in their brain. Anxious teenagers are more likely to indulge in smoking, drinking alcohol etc. and there are even instances of drug-abuse in an anxious teenager.
A brain has neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are in fact the chemical messengers which communicate with the neurons of the brain. There are basically two kinds of chemicals in the brain, dopamine and norepinephrine which are responsible for a person’s ‘feeling low’. In the face of any danger our brain is accustomed to act in a way where we can either fight the danger or can defend ourselves by running. People who are sensitive create an artificial danger like situation for the brain due to which the brain reacts,
thinking that the body is in danger, and hence starts getting anxious for the fear of a possible attack. Every fearful situation in the brain is recorded so that whenever any similar situation occurs the brain may be all set to send caution signal to the body. An oversensitive person sends signals to the brain that the body is in danger and hence the brain acts accordingly causing an imbalance in the neurotransmitters- dopamine and norepinephrine. This causes the person to become over anxious and feel overtly worried and concerned in a specific situation although in reality the situation may not be really that bad.
There are possible ways to check anxiety in teenagers. At first a teenager should be taken to a physician who can examine and monitor the particular person and suggest a possible treatment method for him or her. Initially they should be made to go for non-medicinal therapies like cognitive behavior therapy, meditation etc. In cognitive behavior therapy, the teenagers should be told how to remove the cause of their anxiety, that is, their worrisome thoughts by changing their way of thinking. Alternative therapies like meditation can also do wonders in maintaining the inner calm of the person. All this goes a long way in the removal of the ‘what if’ fear syndrome in the teenagers which in fact is one of the prime factors for giving rise to the unnecessary anxiety in them. If the situation is beyond any control then the physician may be likely to prescribe CNS depressants like Xanax which calm down the brain activity.