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Not surprisingly, our children aren't spared. Shockingly, researchers have observed that starting in the 1980s, typical school-age children began reporting higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients of the 1950s. And this continues its upward climb. More concerning, rates of suicidality and self-harm have doubled over the last decade in young people, according to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Pediatrician Dr. Gregory Plemmons recently told Susan Scutti of CNN, "An increasing number of our hospital beds are not being used for kids with pneumonia or diabetes; they were being used for kids awaiting placement because they were suicidal." More high school students, including college-bound teenagers, are taking their own lives. Sadly, it's no longer a rare event.

Statistics show that more than half of college students who visited their campus counseling centers between 2015 and 2016 did so because they were feeling too much anxiety. This is a generation that is experiencing intolerable stress. Anxiety has taken over depression as the top complaint by college students seeking counseling.

In everyday conversation, we hear greater numbers of people talk about feeling overwhelmed—this is the word they most often use. When asked to elaborate, they describe periods of confusion and mental exhaustion where they lose the ability to focus and feel they can't keep up with what is being demanded of them. They report a range of symptoms that may last a few minutes to a few days and can include flashes of panic, a desire to flee, trouble staying calm and focused, and becoming overly aggressive or, the opposite, shutting down and becoming passive. They may experience rapid breathing, sweating, waves of nausea, or muscle tightness. As a result of this, they essentially lose access to their full human faculties. Psychologically, we understand them as having exceeded their personal capacity to cope with and adapt to stress. Experiencing the state of overwhelm can feel like experiencing a clinical anxiety disorder, but while its symptoms are significant and debilitating, they don't last long enough to qualify as a clinical disorder.

We often tell clients that experiencing overwhelm is like seeing an automobile dashboard warning light going on; something is happening that they need to pay attention to. But most people, when feeling overwhelmed, don't stop to focus on figuring out the problem and mitigating the causes.

Instead, most motor on. And that is when the problems start.

WHAT'S DIFFERENT TODAY?

What's changed to bring on this age of anxiety and overwhelm? Here are some of the cultural drivers and changes we see in personal habits:

* Always-on technology. Cell phones, tablets, and larger screens dominate our homes and work lives. Too much screen time, almost independent of the actual content consumed, is associated with anxiety-like symptoms, including agitation, impatience, and restlessness. Importantly for our purposes, it robs us of quiet, reflective time when we might find time to focus on our lives.

* Competitiveness stoked by metrics. We have become a culture obsessed with measuring everything—from test scores to goals scored in youth soccer games to monthly sales targets and number of steps taken each day. All of this measurement leaves us reflexively struggling to compete with others on whatever metric the outside world deems important. The minute you start thinking in these terms is the minute you lose your ability to think about and seek that which 'you' really care about.

* Loss of human connectedness. The availability of cheap and high- quality entertaining diversions and the rise of social media as a substitute for person-to-person contact have paralleled an increase in isolation. Increasing isolation leads to elevated stress hormones and is correlated with anxiety and depression, both of which diminish agency.

* Less physical movement. More time sitting at home means less time spent in active pursuits. Lower exposure to outdoor and natural settings fuels stress and increases hyperactivity. We all know that we feel sluggish and isolated when we sit around the house by ourselves and energized and connected when we're out doing things with friends and family, and the latter feelings are essential to agency.

* Always working. Our interview subjects tell us that work, for many of them, has increasingly encroached on their private time. They report more time at the computer on nights and weekends and less time outdoors. They take remote meetings at nights, on weekends, and during vacations. Kids have more homework and "vacation packets" to occupy them at times when they used to be out running around with their friends. Most significantly, people report there are fewer moments in their lives to experience themselves as separate from the complex systems and fast-moving tasks required of them to simply get through the day.

In short, individuals' and families' lives have become increasingly isolated, overscheduled, and fraught with economic anxiety and worry about how they're not measuring up or what they're missing out on. And as with the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pot of water, people often don't realize how much worry they are carrying around until it gets to the boiling point. Exposure to chronic high tension, often in a silent, steady way, leads to more frequent episodes of feeling overwhelmed and a resultant loss of agency.