Opinion

Claire Simpson: Always connected world has left us in the age of anxiety

Anger might help us in an age of anxiety
Anger might help us in an age of anxiety Anger might help us in an age of anxiety

We’re living in the age of anxiety. Figures released by the charity Childline have revealed that counselling sessions for children suffering from the condition have almost doubled in two years.

Children reported experiencing everything from panic attacks to self-harm. A separate recent study in the Republic showed that children as young as four were presenting with anxiety and self-harm issues.

And it’s worse for girls. Leading mind coach Aisling Cowan told The Irish News last month that she has noticed an increase in anxiety and issues around confidence among teenage girls. Social media, she said, has left many young people in emotional turmoil with phone notifications continually pulling us out of the present and into a false, alternative universe.

Neuroscientist Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore told Cheltenham Science Festival earlier this year that more adolescents are admitting that they suffer from anxiety and depression.

And she said smartphones, social media and technology played a part.

"There is a lot of stress about social media and cyberbullying and the need to constantly be in contact and get peer approval right throughout the night," she said. "Maybe that’s a factor."

The idea that our teenage girls feel the need to have constant approval from their peers is terrifying. It's human to want some form of acceptance or approbation but no one is going to agree with you all the time.

In fact, the need for every decision you make or word you say to be approved by a group of peers means that children and teenagers are effectively being subjected to a type of thought police.

In Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood's wonderful novel about childhood bullying and its devastating effects on a woman's life, the narrator tells us that girls "are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized". In other words, sometimes a child's peers can seem cute but to the child they can be a real threat. My friend still tells the story of how a group of girls at her primary school sneered at her clothes and ostracised her for years because she didn't own a Kylie and Jason bomber jacket - and that was long before the plague of instant messaging.

Hastily written messages rarely include much nuance. You only have to read Twitter or the comments section of most national newspapers to see how some seemingly benign comment can quickly be twisted into something which bears no resemblance to the original wording.

One of the most bizarre internet spats of recent years saw how a recipe for an ‘amazing rainbow tie-dye number surprise cake’ on the website of an Australian radio station prompted a frankly alarming series of comments including on the etymology of the word liberal and an argument about communism versus fascism.

We can't uninvent social media, more's the pity, but we can teach our girls to know their self-worth.

Girls cannot be insulated from the often toxic effects of cyberbullying, but they can be given tools to deal with hurtful comments - and they include getting angry.

Women are often taught from a young age not to get angry, to give other people space and allow others to have a voice at our expense. Yet anger can be a positive emotion: it clarifies what values are important to us and shows us who we want to be as human beings.

I wish that I’d been taught as a teenage girl that I didn’t have to seek anyone's approval, I didn't have to be nice to everyone, I didn’t have to be liked, that in fact it was perfectly fine and healthy for some people not to like you at all.

This is what we should teach our girls - to know their self-worth, set clear boundaries and not to allow anyone to make them feel small.

We may be in the age of anxiety but we could make it the age of anger. Properly expressed, anger can make change happen. It can be our teacher and guide. If we allow girls not to repress any signs of anger but to consider what underlying message that emotion is trying to reveal, then they will be better equipped to deal with the stresses of a world which demands we are always connected but never properly connect.

Passion and a commitment to what is good are the things we should strive for, not a toxic anxiety that leaves us trying to please everyone but ourselves.