 More people have anxiety than ever before. So what's the deal? Are we just being more honest? Has life gotten harder? Or are we not as mentally strong as past generations? I was recently diagnosed with anxiety and my dad laughed at me and said, who in your generation doesn't have anxiety? It does seem like it's becoming almost a trend. Are we just not as strong or have things really gotten worse? Kids right now, people in their 20s, even us, like it's in our face all the time, right? Like my little sister, like growing up Syrian refugees in her face all the time, us, school shootings in our face all the time. We have these devices that, while amazing, we have everything at our fingertips, it's also kind of dangerous. Our nervous systems, like us as human beings, we were not designed to hold all of the world's suffering all of the time without ever getting a break. And so I think it's really unfair actually for this person's parent to say that we're like soft or we're not built as strong or that we're snowflakes, which I hate that word because it's all relative, right? Like I don't think that somebody from that generation that wasn't raised the way that we are raised can actually make that kind of statement. There's so many things about our society that are unbelievably anxiety-provoking. That's the larger thing that I think we're often not acknowledging when it's like, yeah, these are anxiety-provoking times we're living in. God, you and I were just talking about how school shootings, these are not things that we grew up with, you know? Having these drills that our children are living through every single day. And yeah, there's a lot of anxiety that comes with living in the world that we're living in, you know? So what's the difference between having anxiety and having an anxiety disorder? Simplest way to put it is an anxiety disorder is when anxiety actually hinders your ability to live, right, your ability to function. To a certain extent, every human being has anxiety. It essentially means you're alive. So then what does this person do, you know? Ignore them. I can't. Whatever. I mean, seriously, a little bit of that is this is my experience and I don't need you to tell me that my experience is real, right? The more we talk about it and normalize it, and you know, I think that's another thing generationally that it used to be like, well, so and so's in marriage therapy. Like, don't tell anybody, but I think now just like talking about going to my therapist, like I talk about going to my chiropractor is a lot more commonplace, at least where we're living, right? Yeah, we live in LA, so it's, you know, but also I think that the more we do that, then the more it becomes tell me about your therapist. If I had to put my therapy empathy hat on, I might also say that some part of this person's father is activated, right? They're probably activated because they never got taken seriously when they were younger and they probably voiced struggle or maybe they never were able to voice struggle, right? They never felt like they were safe enough to or that it would be heard. And I get so often, I wish they would just go to therapy. If only they read this book, if only they went to therapy, right? And I love that there's that meme that always gets circulated out there that's like, most people are in therapy to deal with the people who won't go to therapy, right? Which is kind of true. I love that you dropped into the empathy for the father. Well, because I think that that's real. And I think what comes up a lot, like what is the number one thing we hear people speak to from a parent when they start therapy? It's like, well, don't go in there talking about me or like, you know, like, I'm sure you're gonna be talking about everybody else but not me, right? Or that therapy somehow means that I've failed as a parent and that my kid is quote, messed up or something's wrong with them. I love to say therapy is not something anybody needs. Therapy is something that in my perfect world, everybody deserves.