It\u2019s no secret: Anxiety is spreading in society. In its latest official data, the World Health Organization said 301 million people lived with an anxiety disorder in 2019. And it reported more than a 25% increase in depression and anxiety in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020.<\/p>\n
The term \u201cmorning anxiety\u201d began appearing in news sources about the same time. University of Virginia psychology professor Bethany Teachman explains what it is and offers advice on managing those early morning feelings of unease and, sometimes, dread.<\/p>\n
Q. What is morning anxiety?<\/strong><\/p>\n A. Morning anxiety is that feeling where you wake up and feel this elevated level of apprehension, discomfort or nervousness before it even seems like much has happened that would trigger those feelings.<\/p>\n I want to clarify. It\u2019s not a diagnosis or something we think is a super distinct category from anxiety that happens at other times during the day. Different people are prone to anxiety at different times of the day.<\/p>\n Q. Why do some people experience morning anxiety?<\/strong><\/p>\n A. It can be for a lot of different reasons. I encourage people, when that\u2019s happening as a pattern for them, to look at how they\u2019re reacting to their thoughts. Is it that things are coming to mind about what\u2019s going to happen that day, and they\u2019re already anticipating the worst? Is it that they\u2019re really focused on what happened the night before, and so they\u2019re sort of ruminating on that? For other people, it can be that they\u2019re really reactive to their bodily changes, so they wake up and something feels different in their body. It\u2019s really just that they have this sort of tendency to either focus on future patterns, or because they\u2019re not involved in another distracting task at that time.<\/p>\n Q. How can people manage morning anxiety?<\/strong><\/p>\n A. One of the best ways to respond to anxiety so it doesn\u2019t spiral and escalate to panic or ruin your day is to recognize it is just an emotion and \u2026 that you can ride that wave and don\u2019t have to think of it as something that means something really horrible or dangerous is happening. If we can normalize the experience, it tends to actually help keep anxiety in its place.<\/p>\n If there really is a danger, that\u2019s a different situation. That\u2019s where anxiety is super adaptive. But the morning anxiety and things we\u2019re talking about are really more in that false alarm category, where there isn\u2019t an urgent need to address a real objective danger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s no secret: Anxiety is spreading in society. In its latest official data, the World Health Organization said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,218,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-304346","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114943136129150037","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}