What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a complex umbrella term used for a number of conditions. There is no one type of anxiety, and as such, there is no one set of symptoms to accommodate. Everyone is an individual, and most have varying degrees of comfort talking about this.
Generally speaking, anxiety relates to excessive worry or fear. However, excessiveness is relative. Additionally, the way anxiety can manifest varies greatly from person to person, so it may look like:
- Restlessness
- Fatigue
- Concentration Difficulty
- Tension
- Irritability
- Disturbed sleep
- Body sensations
Some people use medications for relief of their anxiety symptoms, while others choose alternative routes. There are specific supports available for people with anxiety as well, such as therapy or lifestyle adjustment.
Referring to Someone with Anxiety
Person-first language is generally the standard when referring to someone with anxiety. Typically, identity-first (i.e. anxious person) has negative connotations. However, everyone has the right to their own preferences, so asking is acceptable.
Please note that using older terms or diagnosing someone when not acting as their chosen medical professional is not acceptable.
Creating an Accessible Environment for Someone with Anxiety
Enunciate Expectations
With many of our chapters, they’ve been functioning long enough to have established a baseline for how meetings and activities occur. However, this baseline is often something people don’t think about, and therefore it’s not conveyed to new members.
Creating a brief new member guide, sending out meeting agendas before events, and incorporating loose schedules into expectations can all be valuable tools for people with anxiety. Plus, they’ll help everyone in a chapter too.
Add Flexibility
Flexibility, whether it’s how to attend a meeting, options to participate in events, or even methods of communication, helps everyone participate in their local chapter. This flexibility helps someone with anxiety manage their day to day stress.
Flexible solutions do not always feel natural, especially if it’s something like making chapter meetings hybrid events. However, making this transition can be invaluable as more people join the organization.
Provide Written Summaries
Written summaries can be as simple as meeting notes or as complex as transcripts. For everyone, this option means they can look back on the meeting or grab a pertinent detail if it has escaped them.
For someone with anxiety, written summaries function as a record of what’s happened around them. This is often reassuring and helpful. Additionally, it serves a record of things they have agreed to.
Deliver Reassurance
In the event someone with anxiety needs something specific, we should do our best to provide reassurance. This can take several forms, ranging from assuring them about a specific situation to helping them manage a task. It’s important that any reassurance not be patronizing.
Feel like this guide is missing something? Let us know at sfcoa@sfi.org.
Want to know more about accessible communication? Check out Accessible Communication 101.