Anxiety

Anxiety can be a beacon leading toward the areas in one'’s life that are requiring deeper reflection and understanding, but especially as one grows older, emotional adjustments in response to the anxiety are not made and it becomes pathological.

Unrealized hopes and dreams leave one with feelings of failure. Increasing limitations such as retirement, loss of loved ones, change of residence, loss of material possessions, money worries, and failing health leave an individual with feelings of dread.

The admonitions: "This too shall pass" or "there is still tomorrow" don't hold the same possibilities to move on because of the realization of the final passing of life into death. If one is afraid of dying, as many in this culture are, death is no consolation. Therefore, it is simple to see how the limitations and losses of freedom that occur as one ages produce deep and unsettling anxiety.

Change in life is as inevitable as it is unpredictable. Anxiety comes from the fear that one will be overwhelmed by experience and become trapped. Decreased sensory stimulation, coupled with physical illness and limitation can easily enhance the sensation of being trapped and increase the experience of fear and thus anxiety. Somatic symptoms of anxiety, such as shortness of breath and rapid heart rate have been found to increase in old age. Symptoms of anxiety frequently coexist with other psychiatric and medical problems such as Alzheimer"s and Parkinson"s disease, hearing and vision loss, and reaction to illness and hospitalization.

New strategies of choice and coping are necessary in dealing with anxiety, and yet, if an older person finds him/herself alone and isolated it is difficult to make sense of the anxious experience, learn to manage the symptoms and arrive at a deeper understanding of it. Familiarizing oneself with the nature of one"s anxieties and learning how to enter into a more comfortable and less threatening experience of them is possible and can be a source of empowerment and guidance.

In psychotherapy, anxieties are most often used to arrive at more specific fears, and it is in addressing those fears that individuals may ultimately gain their freedom. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps an individual identify the triggers for anxiety and teaches them to control the flooding sensations that take over their mind and body during anxious states. Given the challenge of coping with anxiety in later life, it behooves us in earlier stages of life to expand our coping repertoire so that we have more choices and greater insight as increasing limitations lead to the cycle of fear and anxiety.