Feelings of Despair and Anxiety: Here’s Why Not To Worry
Feelings of despair and anxiety are common and often temporary human emotions. Take a closer look at these feelings to build your understanding of why we have them and when we should do something about it.
When we’re having feelings of despair and anxiety, it can feel like everything is falling apart around us. We might think that there is something “wrong” with us and that it will never end.
It is often important to pay attention to your emotions, take them seriously, and take appropriate actions. It can also be important to keep in mind that feelings like stress, sadness, disappointment, apprehension, shame, and worry are all normal human experiences.
Experiencing these emotions does not necessarily imply that something is “wrong” or that you need to take drastic action to try and feel better. Most of the time, these feelings are temporary and, while they don’t feel very good, it can be important to let ourselves sit with and learn from them.
In this article, we’ll have a closer look at despair and anxiety to build your understanding of why we have these feelings and when we should do something about it.
Causes of feelings despair and anxiety
Despair and anxiety are feelings that can arise when you believe that your life, or some situation, is out of your control. Anxiety is often related to uncertainties about what might happen. It is linked to our biologically-based fear response—our natural defense against threats to our wellbeing. Anxiety is the anticipation of a potentially threatening circumstance.
On the other hand, despair is more closely related to sadness, and often arises in response to challenging situations that have already occurred. It is more reflective, rather than anticipatory. Although, you can experience both despair and anxiety at once in situations that have ongoing difficulties.
Despair is the sense of helplessness you may feel when faced with a circumstance that is difficult or impossible to change.
Both despair and anxiety can cause us to want to withdraw from others, avoid situations, become agitated or emotionally reactive, or have a lot of negative thoughts. While unpleasant, these are common ways that our brains try to preserve and protect us.
Feelings of despair are very common
Just about everyone experiences some degree of despair and anxiety from time to time. Most of the time, these feelings are totally natural and justified, and may even be important emotions to feel in certain situations.
For instance, feeling anxious before a job interview is completely understandable and can even help you to stay motivated and focused. Feeling despair after a significant loss in your life is natural and might be a necessary part of the grieving process.
But of course, in the moment, despair can be all-consuming. We certainly do not intend to dismiss just how hard these feelings can be. What we are hoping for is to help you to validate your own feelings and build awareness of what they mean.
Our emotions influence our perception. When we feel bad about something, we might tend to focus on the bad or think that things are going to get worse and worse. This is so common it’s been given a name: catastrophizing.
From the outside, things might not be as bad as how we feel they are, or, even if it is truly bad, it might get better sooner than we expect. Feeling some stress or minor agitation does not necessarily mean we have clinical anxiety, just as feeling sad does not necessarily indicate clinical depression.
That said, of course clinical anxiety and depression are real conditions, and it can be helpful to be able to tell these apart from more common feelings, so that you can make informed decisions about what you need.
Despair and anxiety: Worry or not?
All clinical conditions in psychology have an important criterion: that it must cause significant distress or impairment in major areas of functioning. That is, it’s more than experiencing symptoms—it is only considered a clinical diagnosis if the symptoms cause serious disruptions to your daily life.
If you’re experiencing feelings of despair or anxiety that come and go and don’t majorly get in the way of living your life, then this may be the more common feelings that people can occasionally have, and not necessarily a clinical problem.
However, if you find that these feelings are hard to shake and are actually getting in the way of things, there may be more cause for concern.
When it comes to despair, a rule of thumb is that if you feel persistently down for more than 2 weeks and have noticed a change in your behavior (e.g., changes to sleep patterns, eating habits, or feeling like you don’t want to do things you used to like doing), it might be a good idea to get help.
If you are concerned about your mental wellbeing, then a good place to start can be to talk to your GP or call a mental health support line for advice.
Managing despair and anxiety: The boring advice you didn’t want to hear
When we’re feeling persistent or recurring negative feelings, many of us hope for a solution that will easily make it all better and leave us feeling amazing forever. But the truth of it is much more mundane.
Feelings of despair and anxiety will always come and go in life to some degree, the best we can do is take care of ourselves in a way that helps to prevent these feelings from occurring too often and get through them when they do arise.
It’s not necessarily quick and easy—the core of taking care of mental health involves a dedication to continuously upholding an all-round healthy lifestyle as best we can. This means eating well, having goals (fitness, career, leisure, etc.), and maintaining nurturing relationships with others. It also means not putting too much pressure on ourselves to get everything right all of the time.
Building our self-awareness can help us to better evaluate our situation and understand our needs.
When things do start to feel overwhelming, some tips for dealing with despair can include grounding ourselves in the moment, questioning our thought patterns, practicing gratitude to help notice the good, or even just taking a quiet moment to do something that feels good for us.
You can find a range of exercises to guide you through these techniques and more, wherever and whenever you need them, in the Mind Ease app. Download and give it a try today!
