Why is Anxiety in Youth Increasing Faster than Ever?

By Sankaari Sankar

Anxiety rates in young adults are increasing rapidly all over the world. Researchers and clinicians are attempting to decipher the cause. 

It comes on fast, long before she can even name it. First, the breath quickens, sharp snatches of air that never quite make it to her lungs

“It’s like I’m gasping for breath constantly,” she says, “and I can’t get enough in. I start crying and I can’t stop. I’m trying to breathe but nothing works.”

Then her body begins to slip out of reach. A warm prickling starts in her fingertips and spreads up her arms, down her legs, until everything feels distant and unreal.

“It goes tingly, like pins and needles everywhere,” she says. “Sometimes I can’t move. I try to open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. It’s like my whole body shuts down and I’m trapped inside it.”

While her body spirals, her mind narrows to a single looping thought, a frantic, urgent refrain she can’t silence.

This isn’t an isolated story, it’s a pattern. Around the world, young people are reporting strikingly similar experiences of anxiety. The circumstances may vary, but the intensity is the same: racing hearts, sleepless nights, paralysing doubt. Rates of anxiety among adolescents and young adults are rising faster than ever, making it clear that this is not just an individual struggle but a growing public‑health concern. For many, anxiety becomes one of the defining experiences of growing up, so much so that Generation Z is now renamed as the “Anxiety Generation.” 

The increase is not driven by a single cause but by a “crisis stack” of pressures: relentless social media exposure, economic instability, post-pandemic uncertainty, and increasing isolation. Digital connections may offer temporary relief, but they cannot replace the grounding support of real-world communities, leaving many to navigate intense feelings largely on their own. Experts and researchers emphasise that this surge is less a reflection of fragility and more a response to an environment that constantly tests emotional limits. 

The Rise of Anxiety

Anxiety seems to be tightening its grip on a generation already stretched thin. 

“There’s a kind of third life crisis happening right now,” says James Gordon, an existential psychotherapist and counselling psychologist who works with anxiety disorders (Jamesgordonpsych.co.uk, 2019). “Young people are struggling to find a path toward the life they expected at this stage. And the way they respond is often to turn inward, asking themselves: Am I good enough? Am I competitive enough? Do I have what it takes?”

For many, that self-questioning can spiral. “They cast around for any imperfection in work, school, or relationships and think, ‘I just lack something. I’m not enough,” Gordon says. For those caught in it, the experience is visceral.

 “I’m panicking, and I start overthinking one thing,” Rakshana, a young woman with clinical anxiety narrates. “The same thought just goes round and round. I can’t deal with it, and all I can think is: I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” That feeling - of falling short, of the future being too big to manage - can trigger panic, sleepless nights, and racing thoughts, all symptoms of anxiety.

The statistics reflect this rising trend. A large cohort study in Southern California, involving nearly 1.7 million individuals aged 5 to 22 years, found that rates of new anxiety diagnoses increased by about 31%. The overall prevalence, the share of young people experiencing anxiety in a given year, went up roughly 35% from 2017 to 2021 (Xiang et al., 2024). Global data show similar trends, with incidence rising 50% or more among 10–24-year-olds worldwide between 1990 and 2021 (Funes et al., 2018)

This trend is echoed in the United Kingdom. A University College London survey of 16‑ to 25‑year-olds found that nearly two‑thirds reported experiencing mental health difficulties, and about one in three expect to need professional support in the coming year (YouGov / UCL Survey Results Sample Size, 2025). 

The result is a generation that experiences anxiety in increasingly intense and frequent ways. For many, it’s not just a phase; it’s a persistent, sometimes debilitating part of everyday life. But, why now?

The crisis stack

Anxiety rates have spiked not because of a single trigger, but because multiple pressures now collide in young people’s daily lives.

An international study across 113 countries finds that social media users reported higher levels of anxiety than non-users even after accounting for age, gender, and economic differences - suggesting the link reflects a broader structural shift rather than individual vulnerability alone (Ranabhat, Marion and Jakovljevic, 2025).

 Online life exposes young people to constant social comparison, cyberbullying, fear of missing out (FOMO), or investing too heavily in digital interactions (Weigle and Shafi, 2023). This exposure is nearly unavoidable. Recent data show that social media use is almost ubiquitous among adolescents: 95 % have access to a smartphone, 94 % go online several times a day, and almost half report being online “almost constantly.” (Emily et al., 2022)

Rakshana, an online content creator by profession, says, “I started going out less. And even if I did go out, I would get pretty anxious and I would just not talk”. Researchers explain that, for adolescents who are already socially anxious, social platforms becomes a substitute for face-to-face interactions, offering short-term relief while gradually weakening real-world relationships. (Weigle and Shafi, 2023)

This shift highlights a deeper issue: isolation. Even as young people maintain digital connections, many are left to manage complex feelings without the grounding support of community - whether that’s family, school networks or informal social groups. 

Loneliness and social isolation have been shown to be independently associated with poorer mental health in adolescents and young adults, including elevated anxiety symptoms, underscoring that being “connected” online doesn’t necessarily mean being supported in the ways that protect emotional well‑being (Christiansen et al., 2021).

Digital life acts as an amplifier - intensifying existing insecurities and folding them into everyday routines. Yet social media is only one layer of a broader crisis stack. 

Economic uncertainty has emerged as another defining pressure shaping young adulthood today. Youth unemployment has risen pushing more 15–24-year-olds into the category of not in education, employment, or training (NEET). (Gordon, 2020)

Discussions with Gordon indicate that many in this group are deeply anxious, often “highly sensitive” young people who feel “incapable of assuming adult roles.” Some describe a profound fear of the workplace itself, believing they would “not be able to work with people” and would inevitably fail.

This helps explain why mental health appears to be peaking now: not because young people are uniquely fragile, but because they are coming of age within a convergence of pressures, leaving little room for recovery. “I think the stress they’re facing is kind of permanent,” Maud Cappaleeti, a PhD researcher says. “And this is a reaction to the amount of stress they’re under all the time.”

Post-Pandemic Norm

This generation didn’t suddenly “become” anxious. They were raised in anxious conditions. Unlike previous generations, who had a sense of linear progression, school, then work, then marriage, Generation Z entered adolescence into disruption due to the pandemic.

As Maud, a researcher studying post-pandemic anxiety, explains, “They have a lot of needs during this period where they develop, in terms of interactions or autonomy. And I think every one of these was just stopped… it really leaves some deep marks for them because it was a crucial developmental period.”

The disruption is clear in the numbers. During lockdown, a survey of over 8,000 university students in eastern France found nearly half reporting depressive symptoms, 39% struggling with anxiety, and 43% experiencing high psychological distress. (Essadek and Rabeyron, 2020)

Follow-up studies after the pandemic showed sharp spikes in anxiety and depression, hitting hardest those with social or financial disadvantages, many reaching levels that required professional support. The pandemic didn’t just add stress - it magnified vulnerabilities, piling pressure on top of pressure. (Essadek et al., 2025)

But the effects went deeper than statistics. As Gordon observes, young people confronted something they weren’t prepared for: the fragility of life, the uncertainty of the future, the unsettling sense that they weren’t fully in control of their own lives. And then came the historical weight, the realisation that they might become one of history’s victims, a statistic among millions. 

The pandemic didn’t just interrupt adolescence; it left an entire generation acutely aware of how precarious life can be, and how fragile the sense of normalcy really was. 

Anxiety used out of context

Anxiety seems to be everywhere - on screens, in conversations, in the way we talk about ourselves. But what do we really mean when we say it? Gordon points out the hard truth: there’s no test for anxiety, no blood work or scan. “All the biomarkers are of the consequences… we have to rely on discourse.” In other words, we measure it by talking about it, not by proving it.

Research suggests that simply putting feelings into words can make people feel calmer. A landmark brain-imaging study found that when people labelled their emotions, activity in the brain’s threat detector decreased. (Lieberman et al., 2007) In that sense, naming distress can be soothing. But feeling better does not necessarily mean the experience is clinical anxiety. 

Maud Cappelletti notes, “I think the way words are being used is changing, for example, in France it's common to hear the word melancholy and people use it all the time but for us in psychology, it holds a really different meaning.”

As language shifts, reported rates rise - yet part of that increase may reflect not a surge in diagnosable anxiety, but the way anxiety has become a broad label for experiences people are attempting to make sense of.

That concern is echoed on the front lines of healthcare. In a survey reported by the BBC, a substantial number of General Practitioners said they worry that everyday stress and normal emotional distress are increasingly being medicalised, labelled as anxiety, even when they may not meet strict clinical criteria. (Burns, Loader and Agerholm, 2025)

“Anxiety is a universal human experience,” Gordon says, and that universality makes it slippery. Without strict definitions or quantitative markers, one can’t perfectly differentiate between clinical anxiety and worry, dressed in an alternate word. 

Naming it doesn’t mean measuring it. And in that tension, between awareness and precision, between lived experience and statistical reality, the messy truth about what it really means to live in anxious times seems to unfold.

Conversations with Intent

As anxiety surges and the reasons behind it become increasingly complex, interventions must evolve in response. Gordon reflects, “We love to have continents of experience all on a page… and it all fits together on a flow chart, but this wasn’t the world that she was in. This was not the world that she could participate in.” Effective care, he argues, comes from “getting to know her” and meeting patients where they are, rather than forcing complex lives into diagnostic frameworks.

This approach is particularly urgent for young people. Early intervention can prevent distress from escalating into patterns that are harder to reverse. As Maud observes, “Changing the way we are taking care of those young people is really the main goal… What we are trying to change for them is to truly integrate their needs into the care we can provide.” Research supports this perspective: school- and youth-based programmes that provide targeted support at the first signs of anxiety have been shown to reduce symptoms and improve long-term outcomes. 

It’s not only formal therapy that matters. Gordon emphasises the value of “conversation with intent”- a space where someone feels genuinely heard. Rakshana describes the role of a relative who listened without judgement: “I have an auntie who understands… she is a reason that I’m still here today.” Her experience echoes that of countless others whose anxiety has grown unaddressed, until it feels overwhelming. 

And reflecting on what that weight felt like for so long, she says, “Like, I need help. Like, I clearly need help and you're just leaving me now.”

References

Burns, C., Loader, V. and Agerholm, H. (2025). ‘Life being stressful is not an illness’ - GPs on mental health over-diagnosis. BBC News. [online] 6 Dec. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2pvxdn9v4o.

Christiansen, J., Qualter, P., Friis, K., Pedersen, S., Lund, R., Andersen, C., Bekker-Jeppesen, M. and Lasgaard, M. (2021). Associations of loneliness and social isolation with physical and mental health among adolescents and young adults. Perspectives in Public Health, 141(4), pp.226–236. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/17579139211016077.

Essadek, A., Guenoun, T., Gressier, F., Najdini, M., Cappelletti, M., Frigaux, A., Melchior, M., Musso, M. and Robin, M. (2025). Post-pandemic changes in anxiety and depression symptom networks among socioeconomically disadvantaged young Adults: A repeated cross-sectional study. SSM - Population Health, [online] 31, p.101854. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101854.

Essadek, A. and Rabeyron, T. (2020). Mental health of French students during the Covid-19 pandemic. Journal of Affective Disorders, 277. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.08.042.

Funes, Jorge & Martín, Pablo & Maass, Fernando & Valero, Elvis. (2018). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211379718320771?via%3Dihub. 

Gordon, J. (2020). Understanding affluent male NEETs (not in employment, education or training) by choice. [online] Available at: https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/download/9308291871ee2e651c818c3f36a2368521693c3ee9d0e9becb127e63f3b71967/1076981/JPGordon%20thesis.pdf.

Jamesgordonpsych.co.uk. (2019). Biography — James Gordon Private Practice. [online] Available at: https://jamesgordonpsych.co.uk/Biography [Accessed 3 May 2026].

Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H. and Way, B.M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, [online] 18(5), pp.421–428. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x.

Ranabhat, C.L., Marion, J.W. and Jakovljevic, M. (2025). Association Between Social Media Use and Self-Reported Anxiety and/or Depression: Results from 113 Countries. The International journal of social psychiatry, [online] p.207640251393415. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/00207640251393415.

Recommended Citation Pew Research, E.A.V., Center, R.G.-W. and Massart, N. (2022). Teens, Social Media and Technology, 2022. [online] Teens, Social Media and Technology. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2022/08/PI_2022.08.10_Teens-and-Tech_FINAL.pdf.

Weigle, P.E. and Shafi, R.M.A. (2023). Social Media and Youth Mental Health. Current Psychiatry Reports, [online] 26(26). doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-023-01478-w.

Xiang, A.H., Martinez, M.P., Chow, T., Carter, S.A., Negriff, S., Velasquez, B., Spitzer, J., Juan Carlos Zuberbuhler, Zucker, A. and Kumar, S. (2024). Depression and Anxiety Among US Children and Young Adults. JAMA Network Open, [online] 7(10), pp.e2436906–e2436906. doi:https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.36906.

YouGov / UCL Survey Results Sample Size: 1545 adults aged 16-25 (2025). Available at: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/UCL_1625s_MentalHealth_w.pdf.