Competitive Anxiety: What Happens To Young People?

Beyond social norms, beyond the computerized society, the first consequences are beginning to be experienced that are turning an entire generation into “stressed” children and young people. Overstimulation is the culprit and among the main causes seems to be that a competitive anxiety pushes our young people today to “succeed” early instead of taking the time to mature what they want to be.

Why competitive anxiety in young people?

This term coined in the field of sports psychology, is mainly related to the state of permanent stress in which elite players – and fans, alike – feel reason not to fail before the expectations placed on their abilities. Likewise, it is detailed in an article published by various professionals at the University of Murcia in 2009 that is based on the studies by professionals Andersen and Willis about anxiety and motivation as personality variables (competitive anxiety and achievement motivation). .

According to the conclusions drawn, in this case, within the sports world, and, therefore, applicable to any relationship between a person and competitive anxiety. In fact, one of the conclusions that was drawn from this curious study was that those elite athletes who had experienced higher rates of this anxiety had more injuries than their peers.

In this regard, one can come to think that the stress and depression experienced by thousands of young people today has never been so alarming, although it is also true that there is a bias, since mental health has not always been given so much importance among citizens – are governed by the same pattern and those who experience more competitive anxiety in the world of “talent” in which we live suffer more “injuries” also on a psychological level.

The boy who had depression

It seems very far away are those years when you began to work at the age of 14 – if you were lucky – and those stories that grandparents often tell their grandchildren about sacrifice, sixteen-hour workdays and of the non-existence of childhood and, much less, of adolescence. And yet, from living to work from a very young age, one has gone to living to succeed, to the point that the new currents among the youth are directed towards the wild competition between one another, marked by much by an over-informed society, overstimulated in which the maximum level of information dissemination has been reached. “But – some will say – that’s good. The information is good ”.

Knowing is good. The problem is that knowing without the corresponding internalization of the inexhaustible source of knowledge, is for a 13-year-old child like a bombardment of contradictory messages that coexist with one another without the young person having been given enough weapons to decide. This is the key to maturity; be able to choose. And this is precisely what is being denied to these new “old-fashioned” but pathologically indecisive generations that are the product of what their parents, grandparents, siblings, teachers, colleagues, television and the internet, have told them they have to be .

Image courtesy of Ken Wilkox and kit