Sometimes I wonder if there are increasing levels of anxiety around in a post pandemic social environment. Perhaps we got more accustomed to managing our environment when there were lockdowns and less people about in the course of everyday life. We might have become more relaxed working from home and perhaps felt more autonomous when not having to deal with so many people face to face. Now that the opening up economy is well advanced, and with trains busy again, we are gradually being reacquainted with a noisier, more frenetic and at times more chaotic world. Lockdowns may have presented their own challenges and negatives, as anyone who suffered loss during that period will testify in addition to those more at risk of domestic violence, but it might also have inadvertently offered a sense of autonomy and power in managing one’s social world. That sense of personal autonomy might now be under threat when having to negotiate your personal space again in a busier social world.
Anxiety tends to get worse when we seek to avoid situations or when we seek to overly control our environment. A lot of the time anxiety grows almost directly from the very attempts to control a social environment. When we perceive threats we risk having our flight/flight system activated and can be presented by the challenges of personal triggers. Triggers tend to be the things in the social world that cause us to feel less secure. For more on this subject see my latest article on living better with social anxiety or listen to audio version. https://podomatic.com/embed/html5/episode/10390211?autoplay=false
Noel Bell is a UKCP accredited psychotherapist based in London and can be contacted on 07852407140.
