Are Teens an Anxiety Generation?

Misplaced attention to causes and remedies

Inside Out 2, a new Pixar film, revisits the main character of Inside Out, Riley, as a budding teenager. The same personified emotions from childhood (represented in Inside Out) are still there—Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust. But they are joined by Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui (boredom), which are presented as a normal part of adolescent development. In the film, Anxiety takes over. Anxiety is defined as a diffuse sense of unease, of fearfulness about the future, well depicted in the film.  The film represents adolescence generally as Sturm und Drang (storm and stress), a discredited understanding of adolescence that is not true for most adolescents.

The focus on anxiety in adolescence is also the focus of a new book, The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt. He presents slices of data pointing to social media, experienced primarily on smartphones, as a primary cause of teen anxiety. However, according to researchers in the field, the data linking mental health and smartphone/social media are weak, with negative effects only on a small subset of teens. They do not show the causal effect of “more social media” = “more anxiety.”

Both the film and the book make generalizations based on small sets of people—WEIRD societies (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) which represent about 12% of the world’s population. They are also focused on a minority of teens within those societies. Not all teens are suffering from the effects of social media; many benefit from it.

Of course, I’m not saying ‘have at it’ and immerse yourself in social media. Human nature development relies on enjoyable face-to-face experiences with others, with Nature, to grow us into healthy embodiment. That does not happen through screens. The transformation of being and consciousness needed today requires being physically present and receptive to others, human and other-than-human. At every age, physical play draws out our spirit and entangles us in the process of presence.

Although it is a common belief in WEIRD cultures, generalized anxiety does not plague all human beings—adolescents or otherwise. That is, generalized anxiety is not a baseline aspect of humanity in our ancestral context, hunter-gatherer civilization, where playfulness filled lives.

Instead, the generalized fearfulness of anxiety is associated with the epigenetics of stress. Through epigenetics, the plastic shaping of gene function by experience, anxiety takes root in the individual. There are several possible sources.

·       Parent or grandparent toxic stress experiences can be transferred through epigenetic inheritance.

·       Stress during gestation in the womb sensitizes the stress response system.

·       Babyhood experiences of distress—toxic stress—interfere with the healthy development of physiological systems.

Babies cannot self-regulate. When a baby is severely frightened, e.g., by white noise and lack of comforting, or quiets down after extensive crying without caregiver comforting, they show a state of toxic stress.

Toxic stress causes inflammation, the root of all disease.

During the establishment of primal health in early babyhood, toxic stress fosters inflammation undermining healthy growth in all sorts of systems. Physiologically, anxiety is associated with inflammation that can follow one throughout life, making illnesses of various kinds more prevalent.

In babyhood particularly, our physiological systems are intertwined—immune system, digestion, brain function, etc. For proper set up, these systems require a warmly responsive mother or caregiver.

Thus, too often anxiety is seeded in babyhood. Industrialized nations are very good at sowing it in their young, especially in the USA where there is no universal paid parental leave and maternal work is vital for family standards of living. Mothers are reluctant to bond with their babies when the have to return to work within days or a few weeks.

Strangely, few sources on anxious adolescents focus on these basic foundations. No doubt because it is hard to study them longterm (for lack of funding) and experiments cannot be done to systematically stress one set of babies and not another and see how they turn out in adolescence. (Actually, experimental studies have been done on animals and show just one hour of separation from mother after birth can affect health over the longterm and social fittedness in adolescence). We do have evidence that separation of human babies from mothers at birth impairs their relationship and the development of a variety of systems, like oxytocin which is vital for social relations (see this great new paper by Nils Bergman summarizing all sorts of research).

Human babies feel entitled to the kind of support they received in the womb: Nearly 24/7 touch, frequent nourishment from mother’s body, calming reassurance from the co-regulating presence of mother. A baby’s needs must be met immediately or else states of dysregulation can turn into traits. After all, compared to the newborns of virtually every other animal, human infants resemble fetuses for the first two years of life (!) So it is no surprise that humans evolved to provide 24/7 cooperative companionship care via evolved nest practices.  A nested babyhood will shape a neurobiology that is self-regulated and socially co-regulated, adaptable to the situation, easily calmed down.

However, if babyhood passes by without adequate (nested) support, subsequent experiences increase anxiety from a deficit of need satiation and ongoing frustration of needs being unmet from inadequate skills to get them met. Self-doubt accretes, getting one stuck in underdevelopment of various systems and making one more likely to use pre-human, primate forms of getting along with others—domination/submission—rather than the egalitarianism that ensues from nest provision and lifestyle.

In the USA, anxiety has become prevalent among all ages in comparison to about 70 years ago. What happened in those early years after World War II? Nearly universal hospital births, with mother sedated and unavailable to their newborns, infant formula replacing breastfeeding. These practices were taken up before randomized controlled trials would show their harms. In other words, institutional practices began to undermine child and maternal health, practices that continue to this day, leading to the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality among high income nations.

All this points to the need to restore our evolved nest to all children (and adults) to prevent inflammation in the first place, and the anxiety and ill health that can result from basic needs not being met. Perhaps we need a film called Outside In to get the point across.

References

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Bergman, N.J. (2005). More than a cuddle: Skin to skin contact is key. The Practicing Midwife, 8(9), 44.

Bergman, N.J. (2014). The neuroscience of birth – and the case for Zero Separation. Curationis, 37, 10.4102/curationis.v37i2.1440

Bergman, N.J.  (2019). Historical background to maternal-neonate separation and neonatal care. Birth Defects Research, 111(15),1081-1086. doi: 10.1002/bdr2.1528.

Bergman, N.J. (2024). New policies on skin-to-skin contact warrant an oxytocin-based perspective on perinatal health care. Frontiers Psychology, 15, 1385320. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1385320

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Mariani Wigley, I. L. C., Mascheroni, E., Bonichini, S., & Montirosso, R. (2022). Epigenetic protection: Maternal touch and DNA-methylation in early life. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 43, 111–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.09.004