Competitive anxiety: What happens to young people?

Competitive anxiety: What happens to young people?

Beyond social norms, beyond the computerized society, the first consequences that are turning a whole generation into “stressed” children and young people begin to live. Overstimulation is the culprit and among the main causes, it seems that 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 environment of sports psychology is mainly related to the state of permanent stress in which elite players - and fans, alike - feel at the reason of not failing before the expectations placed on their abilities. Likewise, it is detailed in an article published by various professionals of the University of Murcia in 2009 that is based on the studies of Andersen and Willis professionals 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 person and competitive anxiety. In fact, one of the conclusions drawn from this curious study was that those elite athletes who had experienced higher rates of this anxiety had had more injuries than their peers.

In this regard, it can be thought 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 because neither has always been given so much importance to mental health among citizens - are governed by the same pattern and those who experience more competitive anxiety in the world of "talent" in which we live to suffer more "injuries" also at the psychological level.

The boy who had depression

Far away it seems that there are those years in which they began to work at the age of 14 - if they were lucky - and those stories that grandparents often tell their grandchildren about the sacrifice, the sixteen-hour workdays and of the absence of childhood and, much less, of adolescence. And yet, from living to work from a young age, one has come to live to succeed, to the point that the new currents among youth are directed towards wild competitiveness between them, 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 knowledge without the corresponding internalization of the inexhaustible source of knowledge is for a 13-year-old child as a bombardment of contradictory messages that coexist with each other without having given the young man enough weapons to decide. This is the key to maturity; Be able to choose. And this is precisely what these new generations are "denying" but pathologically indecisive that are the product of what their parents, grandparents, brothers, teachers, classmates, television and internet, have told them that they have to be.