Are You Facing “Autumn Anxiety”?

Autumn anxiety is very common. As we know, the autumn season often involves major life transitions.

Young people go back to school or post-secondary education, fall activities re-commence, and the days grow shorter, while we feel the approach of winter. All of these things can make autumn anxiety a profound reality. As Westchester Medical Center psychiatist Stephen Ferrando this can be an agitated and anxious depressive state.

There are very specific things that individuals can do for such anxiety. For instance, children or young adults experiencing anxiety around return to classes can learn various breathing and relaxation techniques, which can be tremendously helpful. If the shortening days trigger depression/anxiety, often there can be great benefit from properly using tools like light boxes, which expose the individual to very bright light for specific daily periods.

Yet, beyond these types of experience, adults may experience other kinds of autumn anxiety, which are very specific to the adult journey.

Passing Time, and the Unlived Life

With shortening days, the sun lower in the sky and falling temperatures, autumn reminds us powerfully of the approach of winter. It can be a very powerful symbol of the passage of time in the individual’s life, and it can lead us to ask some very searching questions.

The whole autumn season gives us the message that we should be getting ready, making preparations, doing more. Sometimes that can resonate with a powerful feeling that I’ve somehow missed out on my life or that I’m somehow not on the right track. These can be intensely disturbing, extremely anxiety provoking feelings.

We may need to really focus in our lives and identify where such feelings come from. We may also need to grieve lost opportunities, but also seek for ways in which the deepest yearnings within us can find some way to come to life, and to be made realities in our present lives.

Ignoring Our Inner Voices

We can keep trying what we’ve already been doing, and hope for a different, better outcome. Yet it’s likely that ignoring the pressing questions that life asks us about our success, our failure, our dreams and aspirations and about getting older, will just make the questions get louder.

Sometimes our autumn anxiety can be rooted in a deep anxiety about ourselves, and about intuitions that whisper to us that life has more for us than what we’ve experienced. Yet such intuitions can be deeply unsettling and anxiety-provoking. They may require us to move away from our preconceptions of who we are, so that we can let in the reality of who we are, and how we most deeply feel about our lives.

What About You?

Some people might tell you that it’s selfish or narcissistic to look at questions about meaning, about what I value or about living out the creative purpose of my life. Yet, it’s a psychological truth that, unless I can value who I really am, and listen to my own deepest self, my capacity to give to others is likely to be very limited. Compassion for others starts with self compassion, and as Jung would tell us, self-compassion starts with accepting who we really are.

So who am I, really? Who are you? What are the desires and abilities that have been locked up inside of you, never acknowledged or expressed, or perhaps just forgotten? Finding these things is all part of our journey towards wholeness.

Depth case studies can help us to answer fundamental questions like these. It can be of tremendous value to sit with someone positive and non-judgmental, who can help to find self-acceptance, self-knowledge and the deep places within ourselves that carry the precious awareness of who we really are, and what we really desire for genuine fulfillment.