Understanding of fear and anxiety

Understanding of fear and anxiety

The Forever Overhead story by David Foster Wallace is primarily simple. There is nothing much happens in the story; it is just a boy in his young age of 13. A birthday party for the boy is prepared and ready to occur in a swimming pool. The David Foster short story has critical meaning on every moment of everyone’s childhood, maybe mine or yours. He conveys an important message on the universal experience of rising self-awareness of adolescents, especially during the puberty stage, and turning from childhood to adulthood. With his compelling message on adolescence, embarking on a quest that will embrace his information from the child stage to the world of adulthood. Notions of anxiety, especially fear of ridicule and how they affect the modern generation, are discussed in the essay. Thus, to help a young age, discussion on anxiety and fear experienced by teenagers is more significant.

David Foster’s style of postmodern challenges the fiction structure. It is a story narrated to a person about a thirteen-year boy on the stage of puberty experiencing his first dive into adulthood. Anxiety is inherent to any person about turning to adulthood, and Foster carefully analysis the ideas of the anxiety and eventually concluding the universal anxiety of time at the beginning of it all. This is simple to the reader with the personal pronoun ‘you’ which means that it targets a specific audience of the young generation or rather the modern generation that is filled with anxiety and fear during the adolescent stage. Ideally, the message stipulated in the story signifies the passage from childhood to adulthood. The passage opens with a relevant quote; your thirteen age is substantial “Happy birthday.” Thus, it is a critical beginning part of the story, which symbolizes the young boy is of age, starting to see changes in his body. For instance, the development of pubic hair and voice changes from smooth to scratchy. Foster Wallace’s entire story is a mechanical process of the new life the boy is experiencing. Every verb in the passage is used to command the boy and make the reader understand the new life of turning into an adult after going through the adolescence stage. Wallace analyzed the act of thinking as a form of anxiety experienced by the boy. The boy sees new things in life as a discovery.

Anxiety is seen as typical to affect the young generation, especially youths. It can manifest itself in a broad occasion, starting from life-threatening to school activities such as sports. Anxiety is set to help an individual to cope in a situation where the individual is facing a positive but challenging situation and even in a dangerous situation. These situations, anxiety during the adolescent stage should not be taken as a problem but as a resource, although anxiety may be a hallmark and a predictor of anxiety disorder. The boy described in the story is faced with anxiety and fear, but he is going to mature when he learns and when faced with new feelings such as risk. Preventing youth’s anxiety is significant to avoid or slightly to reduce the adverse impacts of anxiety on social performance, mindset development, and performance in school. Prevention of elevated anxiety is critical to adolescents because it makes young people gain courage in life and live a happy life with no fear of anxiety. Foster Wallace has much concern about the boy’s fear and anxiety. He tells the boy to climb the ladder and do the thing up until the thirteen-year-old boy reasons about it and decides to act, all that the boy has to do is to think, but his idea was changed by the family that likes him, and he can’t be alone in the birthday (Wallace 6).

More study has been done in the field of anxiety and peer relations groups, which indicates peer challenges bring further maladjustments. In a better of understanding of anxiety in adolescent and peer relations, much research has identified the self-perception, behavioral, and self-cognitive as a peer rejection mechanism Social anxiety can be defined as a persistent fear showed by an individual in one or more performance situations whereby a person or an individual finds him or herself among unfamiliar people or exposed to possible scrutiny by other people. Some people argue that anxiety is characterized by social distress, fear, negative evaluation, and social avoidance (Inderbitzen-Nolan, and Walters 345).  Performance social situations vary among individuals, for example, eating in public, making presentations to a crowd, attending private meetings, joining school clubs, and making conversation with peers and among others. The research shows that most people experiencing anxiety, their situations occur in the school setting with the distressing peer encounter situations. Despite most individuals experiencing social anxiety in the school setting, there are also other settings where research should be conducted and report the issues of anxiety during adolescence. For instance, they are carrying a study in our homes and gatherings such as weddings and birthday celebrations.

The link between behavioral inhibition, anxiety, social withdrawal, and peer rejection is likely to be reciprocal. Negative experiences on anxiety are seen to cause an individual’s insecurity, and doubts which, therefore, may eventually cause social phobia and social withdrawal. According to Ishiyama 1984, shy adults showed more scenarios of teased views and ridiculed during their young age as having facilitated to their current stage of shyness. Likewise, grades four and five learners were submissively rejected using some standard procedures analyzing scores. The growing group who reported a higher number of anxieties also were found to show results of a lower level of social acceptance in the school setting level. Likewise, individuals with a high level of anxiety tend to have a low level of friendship with others.

Anxiety is also experienced in the setting of music performance (Osborne and Kenny, 450). Adolescent individuals face challenges when it comes to performing music to the audience. Still, performance anxiety is understood by the interaction of three separate systems, which are behavioral responses, physiological arousal, and fear cognition. The three performance aspects are highly interactive, such that one is influenced by another. For instance, high cognitive anxiety can happen with low physiological arousal, while high physiological arousal can happen with small anxiety. However, anxiety in music performance can occur without or with behavior indicators and can be with or without a breakdown of performance.  The argument here is that anxiety can occur and can be controlled at the time by learning and maintaining a high level of confidence.  If an individual cannot control his/her cognitive anxiety, he/she may be affected psychologically. In the case of performing music at school setting music, students are faced with social anxiety that is associated with an increase in heartbeat and fear of lousy evaluation from judges and peers.

Anxiety brings impacts in the workplace office or when working at home, and this may bring a more significant impact on how an individual is doing his/her task. Some people may decide to turn down their opportunities such as public speaking, traveling, meetings with managers, staff launces by making an excuse to get out of such events. People with anxiety problems face difficulties in handling complex challenges, unable to meet deadlines, issues in participating in meetings, and also unable to maintain social relationships with others. What happens to individuals who face anxiety problems, talk to the employer about your issue, and even to a close friend who can help. In the early stages of childhood, it is the best stage of reducing and managing the impact of anxiety, especially in adolescence period. More extensive knowledge of social anxiety is the need for lowering anxiety impacts.

Approached taken in public health to address and reduce anxiety among individuals in the early stages are considered as a solution. If the policy informants had good knowledge about the possibilities in preventing anxiety, the society might also offer extensive prevention services to anxious adolescents. Primarily, learning about how to handle anxiety dimensions can give knowledge and essential ideas to improve anxiety interventions. Education courses in both high school and college levels should be implemented to teach students how to handle anxiety conditions, especially in the adolescence stage. Education on how to treat anxiety is more valuable and could help a more significant population. Also, the parent should take the mandate of telling their children specific ways to manage anxiety fear.

In the discourse of discussing anxiety, especially in the adolescent stage, there arise anxiety impacts the body, such as depression, insomnia, headaches, tension, and social isolation. Other effects that can occur are an effect on the immune system, nervous system, life phobias, and panic disorder if it is not treated or handled at an early age.

In conclusion, even though anxiety in adolescence stage is taught in different settings, there is still a challenge since not everybody is capable of managing it. Fear brings impacts in the school, working place, and in other social settings. Primarily the anxiety issue will be handled well if we all make efforts to help each other and follow the recommendations. Notably, individuals desire to live a world where there is no anxiety; definitely, nobody wants to live in fear. Teaching how to handle anxiety is of much importance to everyone in this world because anxiety is not only experienced but also in adults. In addition, David Foster Wallace his focus is to share the universal experience of self-awareness on the anxiety level.

Work cited

Inderbitzen-Nolan, Heidi M., and Kenneth S. Walters. “Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents: Normative Data And Further Evidence Of Construct Validity”. Journal Of Clinical Child Psychology, vol 29, no. 3, 2000, pp. 360-371. Informa UK Limited, doi:10.1207/s15374424jccp2903_7.

Osborne, Margaret S., and Dianna T. Kenny. “The Role of Sensitizing Experiences In Music Performance Anxiety In Adolescent Musicians”. Psychology of Music, vol 36, no. 4, 2008, pp. 447-462. SAGE Publications, doi:10.1177/0305735607086051.

Wallace, David. Wallace, David Foster. “Forever Overhead.”. 2000, Accessed 6 Apr 2020.