Anxiety is something I see a lot in my practice. I am curious to know why it seems like there are more and more people I meet who are ‘anxious’. Things have definitely changed a lot in our world in the past ten years (remember before Facebook? remember 1st cellphones?) and now it seems like there are an insane amount of ways to connect and make contact with different people. On any given day I switch between writing emails, sending texts, making phone calls, LinkedIn, Facebook, and of course most importantly, face to face. And all of them have different ‘etiquette’ codes that seem to be unwritten yet obvious. Meaning can easily be lost in an email with the use of too many !!! or 🙂 🙂
Instead of being able to read facial cues when we communicate face to face, there are more and more ways to send out feelings, thoughts, emotions without knowing what’s going to come back. What’s interesting is scientists have discovered we are starting to read emoticons like human faces, illuminating the same parts of the brain.
Maybe it’s the pure number of people you are exposed to that causes some anxiety? Not that you don’t want to connect but because but doing it by electronic media means you have to relinquish some control of how you are being interpreted. All you can do is your best to communicate what you want to say and then let go of the response.