Why anxiety isn’t always bad

AlArabiya English

Not all anxiety is bad, and it might even boost your performance, Dr. Jon Goldin, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, tells Al Arabiya News.

Transcript

00:00So you're saying millennials and younger generations are talking more openly about mental health.

00:04Do you also think therapy and mental health tools have become more normalized among younger

00:10generations? This is compared to older generations, or are they facing, are they still facing some

00:16stigmas? I think there's still some stigma associated with it, and we need to continue

00:21to sort of challenge the stigma of having mental health difficulties. I mean, everyone is prone to

00:27having mental health difficulties at different points in their lives. We need to distinguish

00:32normal unhappiness and sadness and normal kind of anxiety from pathological depression or anxiety

00:40disorder. And the ways that we distinguish that are things like how much is it impacting on your life?

00:46And I think it's really important that we do say to young people and to each other that being

00:50anxious sometimes is a perfectly normal thing to do. In fact, it's actually a helpful thing to be

00:55anxious when you're facing an exam because, for example, or a sports event or something that you

01:00need to perform at because anxiety helps increase your performance to a certain extent. But if you

01:06have too much anxiety, it can impact on your day to day functioning and it can become a kind of

01:12disorder which needs the right help and support. I think young people are more open to receiving

01:17therapy, to receiving help than perhaps the previous generation 20 or 30 years ago were. And that's a

01:23really positive thing.

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