Some experts believe that anxiety is so common in the U.S. today because of how much information we receive on a daily basis. “We are having trouble understanding what we need to react to and what information we can let go of,” says Carino. “Some people struggle with anxiety disorders like [obsessive-compulsive disorder] (OCD), generalized anxiety disorder or phobia, and this is when anxiety has become persistent, consistent and interferes with our everyday functioning.”

• According to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, about a third of adults overall (32.3%) reported anxiety and depression symptoms in 2023. Nearly half of these adults (49.9%) were between the ages of 18 and 24, 38% were between the ages of 25 and 49, 29.3% were between 50 and 64 and 20.1% were 65+.
• An estimated 31.1% of U.S. adults experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives.
• 6.8 million adults or 3.1% of the U.S. population is affected by GAD and only 43.2% are receiving treatment.
• According to the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH), an estimated 2.7% of the U.S. population experienced panic disorder (PD), 7.1% had social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 9.1% were impacted by specific phobias in the past year.
• One poll found that while anxiety rates in Americans have decreased overall since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, rates are still higher than they were pre-pandemic. In early April 2023, about 28% of Americans reported anxiety symptoms. This is 11% lower than the peak seen in the fall of 2022 and, but 3.5 times the amount who reported symptoms before the pandemic.
• Results from the Healthy Minds Monthly Poll done by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) found that at the end of 2022, 37% of Americans rated their mental health as fair or poor, which is up from 31% the year before. More than one in four (26%) said they expected to have more stress at the start of 2023, up from just 20% the year before.
• Researchers from the Health Resources and Services Administration found that anxiety among children ages 3 to 17 has increased over the last five years, increasing 27% from 2016 to 2019. By 2020, 5.6 million kids (9.2%) had been diagnosed with anxiety problems.

Some experts believe that the growing rate of anxiety across all age groups is mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “COVID really impacted people’s mental health,” says Katie Schubert, Ph.D., a licensed mental health counselor, certified sex therapist and owner of Cypress Wellness Center in Saint Petersburg, Florida. “Humans are social creatures—we are not intended to live in isolation. COVID also impacted a lot of people financially; either they weren’t able to find jobs or the industry they were in suffered as a result of the pandemic. And as people came out of isolation, many were experiencing social anxiety.”

Carino also believes that the way the pandemic shifted work/life balances affected anxiety for many. Because COVID allowed people to work from home, it blurred many lines between work life and home life for a lot of people, she notes.

Some of the reasons young people are experiencing anxiety more than older people may be due to where younger people are in their lives, says Carino. “Spikes in anxiety can correlate with our life cycle stages and young adulthood is a time with a ton of change around the exact time that we start to make big life decisions independently.” There are also many potential reasons why anxiety levels are higher in children: the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, social media, the climate crises, stressful and high-stakes educational testing and loss of unstructured free time are just a few examples cited by a 2020 article in Gifted Education International.

Statistics also show that anxiety may be higher in women than men, which could be due to a variety of reasons. “Women are subconsciously programmed through generational modeling and societal expectations to take on more at home and in the workplace,” says Carino. “This [can] lead to feelings of burnout and overwhelm, making them more prone to developing an anxiety disorder.”