I was an anxious teenager. For me, the issue was always worry: excessive, awful, irrational thoughts that started when I was about 10 and reached their crescendo when I was an undergraduate, when things fell apart entirely and I needed a lot of treatment to be able to function again. Before I got help, I had no language to describe how I felt and no adults around me who understood what was happening.
As the public conversation about anxiety continues to swell, I’ve been asking myself: would I have been better off as an anxious teenager today? Despite all the recent awareness-raising efforts, the reduction in stigma, the lessons in schools – and despite how hard it was navigating my own anxiety in silence – I find myself answering “no”.
On the one hand, of course it’s better today. I didn’t even know the word “anxiety” until I was about 20. If my parents and my school had understood what was happening, my life could have been very different. I have no doubt that getting proper help would have made life far easier then, and would also have prevented things from escalating so badly later on.
But growing up now would only be better if it meant access to support, and I’m not sure most teenagers have that. Awareness-raising efforts in schools, online and elsewhere have flooded teenagers’ minds with the concept of anxiety, but funding for services has not caught up, and light-touch school interventions often aren’t enough. We are now in a situation where many teens know or believe they are anxious but aren’t getting the help they need to manage it. I’m not sure that is better than not having the awareness at all.
Adolescence is a period of identity development for everyone. Like many teenagers, I was introspective and ruminative. My friends and I dissected our personalities, thoughts and behaviours all the time. If I had repeatedly been offered the word “anxiety”, without any decent one-to-one treatment, I think it would have been cemented into my self-concept before I had even turned 13.
Critically, I think that would have changed my behaviour in a really unhelpful way. Today, as an academic psychologist, I am frequently emailed by teachers, clinicians and university staff who say there has been a huge increase in the number of young people who ask not to do things because they are anxious – and these requests are being granted. The people who email me are concerned that, in the long run, this is setting young people up to fail, and I agree with them.
Teachers tell me that there are multiple students in each class to whom they cannot direct questions on the grounds of anxiety. Extensions to assessment deadlines are granted freely. One teacher said that there are so many teenagers who want to sit exams away from their peers that they have run out of rooms to accommodate them. A clinical psychologist working in schools told me that these adjustments are often put in place with no intention to review them, ever, as though the young person’s anxiety will unquestioningly be there – and should be accommodated – for ever, rather than being treated.
Sometimes, yes, permanent adjustments are necessary. If a child is being so badly bullied or is so overwhelmed that they are terrified to go to school, of course alternative arrangements are needed. Some neurodivergent young people may also need more permanent adjustments to help them cope and succeed at school. But in many other cases, automatic adjustments make things worse, because they rob young people of a vital opportunity.
When I was a teenager, avoidance was not an option. Sometimes, I would just resolutely not do things, because I was physically unable to. But many, many other times I just had to do the things that made me feel anxious. I’m not advocating for this approach entirely: believe me, sometimes nothing good came of it. But sometimes, and this is the really important bit, I did what made me anxious – and good things happened. Interesting things. Exhilarating things. Hilarious things. Useful things, too: GCSEs, A-levels, getting a driving licence, a place at university. If I had been told from the age of 10 that I could get out of doing things that worried me, I would simply never have done anything at all.
People talk about the runner’s high, but I think there is an equivalent for people prone to anxiety – let’s call it the worrier’s high. I still feel it regularly now. It’s the truly amazing feeling of doing something you are scared of and coming out the other side. Every anxious teenager deserves the opportunity to feel this high, again and again, and to watch their comfort zone expand a little bit every time that they do.
Of course, the solution here is not to push anxious teenagers off the cliff of their own worst nightmares and force them to do what scares them. When that was done to me, it felt horrendous. But the solution cannot be to let the anxiety win either. The real solution is to help the young person break down what is scaring them, and help them face things gradually and kindly, step by step. The solution is to help young people see that the label of anxiety is a starting point to challenging themselves and being brave, not an endpoint that will dictate their limitations for ever.
That is why I think we need to strike a balance with how we manage anxiety in teenagers today. Yes, give them the language they need and encourage them to talk about how they feel. Fund one-to-one therapy and make it accessible as soon as possible. Teach adults what anxiety looks like in young people and tell them how they can help. But as much as possible, avoid treating anxiety as if it is a permanent personality trait. And where possible, treat adjustments and avoidance as temporary measures, in the service of gradually helping young people tolerate and face their fears.
When I was a fragile mess in the final year of my undergraduate degree, too scared to leave the house or do anything by myself, I had a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt stuck to the wall above my laptop. It kept me going then, and it is still etched in my brain today, especially the final sentence.
I wish I could share it, with the most kindness and compassion possible, with every young person who is anxious today: “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Dr Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford, leading research into mental health and social development in adolescence, and author of What Mental Illness Really Is (and what it isn’t)
