Not all anxiety is bad, and it might even boost your performance, Dr. Jon Goldin, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, tells Al Arabiya News.
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00:00So you're saying millennials and younger generations are talking more openly about mental health.
00:04Do you also think therapy and mental health tools have become more normalized among younger
00:10generations? This is compared to older generations, or are they facing, are they still facing some
00:16stigmas? I think there's still some stigma associated with it, and we need to continue
00:21to sort of challenge the stigma of having mental health difficulties. I mean, everyone is prone to
00:27having mental health difficulties at different points in their lives. We need to distinguish
00:32normal unhappiness and sadness and normal kind of anxiety from pathological depression or anxiety
00:40disorder. And the ways that we distinguish that are things like how much is it impacting on your life?
00:46And I think it's really important that we do say to young people and to each other that being
00:50anxious sometimes is a perfectly normal thing to do. In fact, it's actually a helpful thing to be
00:55anxious when you're facing an exam because, for example, or a sports event or something that you
01:00need to perform at because anxiety helps increase your performance to a certain extent. But if you
01:06have too much anxiety, it can impact on your day to day functioning and it can become a kind of
01:12disorder which needs the right help and support. I think young people are more open to receiving
01:17therapy, to receiving help than perhaps the previous generation 20 or 30 years ago were. And that's a
01:23really positive thing.