Let’s face it: “adulting” can be excruciating at times.
There’s work and family obligations, household chores, a seemingly endless array of bills, and nowhere near enough time to sleep.
One day, we’re carefree kids playing with friends during summer holidays, and the next we’re trying to figure out why our knees are making those weird sounds.
Sure, adulthood brings certain freedoms that we didn’t have when we were living with our families, but many people get seriously anxious about adulting in general.
Why is that? And how can one get over the fear of growing up? That’s what this article will aim to answer.
Speak to an accredited and experienced therapist to help you get over your fear of growing up. You may want to try speaking to one via BetterHelp.com for quality care at its most convenient.
What is adulting anxiety?
In basic terms, adulting anxiety is the feeling of fear and worry stemming from one’s coming of age and the transition from childhood to a life of responsibility and obligation. In other words, it is the fear of growing up.
The belief that one can’t handle adulthood often accompanies adulting anxiety. A person may feel overwhelmed by the reality of becoming an adult and all the additional pressure that heaps on your shoulders.
What causes it?
Fear of failure.
The number one cause of adulting anxiety is the fear of getting something wrong, or of being a failure in a broader sense.
When you’re an adult, you’re expected to be able to fend for yourself. This means maintaining gainful employment so you can support yourself and take care of your family if you have one.
But what if you can’t get a job—the job market isn’t kind to everyone and it can take a long time to find any work, let alone work that you’d like to do.
And even when you do find a job, if you do poorly at it, you risk getting fired. The spiraling thoughts that start with that possibility don’t end well…
If you lose your job, you won’t have money. Not having money means that you won’t be able to pay your rent or mortgage, or buy food. The next steps after that include destitution, homelessness, and likely illness—both for you and your loved ones. All that’s left after that is death, which is inevitable for everyone, but we’ll touch upon that more later.
The desire to remain care- and worry-free.
Children don’t have massive weights of worry on their little shoulders: that’s what their parents deal with in order to keep the littles healthy and carefree.
When kids are aware of the crushing responsibilities that come with adulthood, they “grow up too fast” and may suffer from panic and depressive issues.
When they reach adulthood, the training wheels and kid brakes come off. Now, they have accountability and responsibilities of their own, and many people don’t like that at all.
As a result, many don’t want to grow up and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so. Some might self-sabotage in school or work so as to remain in a state of arrested development. After all, adulting is hard.
If their parents are still alive, they might try to stay at home as long as possible. That way, they can continue to spend their time playing games and hanging out with friends, and—most importantly—they can continue to be cared for by their parents.
Abdication of personal responsibility.
That last factor mentioned above is often the biggest draw, because it alleviates the weight of adult responsibility. If other people are responsible for them and their wellbeing, then if everything goes to hell in their lives, it’s someone else’s fault: not theirs.
As a result, they won’t have to deal with the stress that comes with the consequences of their actions (or lack thereof). Some people even expect their families to help raise their children if they don’t want to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the results of their own procreation. If and when the kids don’t turn out the way they liked, then that becomes someone else’s fault too.
Fear of dying.
To grow up means that one is aging, which is associated with old age and death. Many people seem to feel that if they cling to their youth by any means possible, then they’ll somehow stay young forever and cheat the Reaper.
Obviously, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Death can happen at any time, and behaving like you’re still a teenager isn’t a magical elixir against imminent mortality.
Some people are scared to grow up because they are terrified of dying. They try to avoid the mere thought of dying through orthorexic eating, surgery, and so on, but that’s all superficial.
How to overcome a fear of growing up.
Like all other fear-related issues, the best way to diffuse (and thus eliminate) the fear is to recognize where it’s springing from—the root source, if you will. Much like a disease, you wouldn’t treat the symptoms without trying to discern what’s causing the problem to begin with.
With that said, here are some things that will broadly help most people who suffer from adulting anxiety.
It is a good idea to seek professional help from one of the therapists at BetterHelp.com as professional therapy can be highly effective in helping you to work through your adulting anxiety
1. Look at the shinier side of the coin.
Many people who try to avoid adulting at all costs focus on the downsides and detriments to adulthood, rather than the benefits. If you’re dealing with adulting anxiety, then turn your attention to all the plus points that come with being of the age of majority.
First off, you are now a completely sovereign human being. Were you ever held back from doing things you wanted to do at your parents’ place because of the “my house, my rules” idea? Well, when you live on your own, you make your own rules. You don’t need to ask permission to order pizza at 5am on a Wednesday or have several people over for some late-night frolics.
As long as you’re not doing anything illegal, you’re quite free to live life on your own terms. Dress how you like, get tattoos and piercings, and date whoever makes you happiest. You don’t have to justify your choices to your family, nor do you require their permission or blessing to do anything anymore.
Your life: your rules.
This is especially important to remember when and if someone tries to guilt or manipulate you by informing you that you need to “take responsibility” for one thing or another. It’s important to look behind their words to their motivations if and when they pull this on you. Are they trying to get you to do something for them? Or shift you into a direction that you don’t want to take?
Whenever it comes to a responsibility or obligation, determine how you’ll benefit from it in turn. Think of it like an investment or a reward. If you take responsibility for cooking a meal, you’ll have tasty food to enjoy and share with others. But if you’re being asked to do manual labor for someone, what’s in it for you? Has there been an agreement regarding monetary compensation? Or are they just trying to get free labor out of you?
You have a set number of minutes to live, so choose how you spend your time wisely. Don’t let people try to force you into doing things you don’t want to do. You are the ruler of your own life and destiny, so take the reins and move in the direction of your own choosing.
2. Recognize that there is leeway as far as obligations go.
There will be some areas in which you have to take responsibility for things, but in many other cases, you can choose which responsibilities you take on. This will depend a lot on factors like income and living situation, but there are usually options other than taking everything on yourself.
If you live alone, you may have to do a great deal by yourself simply because there’s no one else to do it for you. That said, if you’re making decent money, you can delegate and outsource a bit. You can pay a cleaning company to come in a couple of times a month, or sign up with a meal service to drop pre-prepared dishes at your place a few times a week.
If you have a shared living situation—with housemates or a partner—you can divide up domestic work to suit everyone’s individual strengths. As an example, if one person loves to cook and another is a clean freak, then the former can take point on meal prep while the other does a lot of the tidying.
3. Practice doing easy adult-y things (and make them fun!).
This tip works well whether you’re still young and living at home or older and trying to regroup from a bout of paralyzing existential angst.
Yes, being an adult is hard at times, and there are a number of things we *have* to do in order to stay alive and reasonably functional. These include bathing, keeping our clothes relatively clean, and feeding ourselves. Since these are necessities that will have to be done by us, the best thing we can do is try to see them less as “chores,” and more like opportunities.
Basically, change the dialog from “I HAVE to do X” to “I have the OPPORTUNITY to do X.”
Make bathing and self-care more pleasurable by using products that you love. Spend a bit of extra money on body wash or shampoo that makes you feel amazing.
Do you hate doing laundry? Analyze why. Is it because you feel like it’s a waste of time? You could be doing something else you love instead? That’s not an excuse if you have your own washer/dryer, but is understandable if you need to go to a laundromat weekly to wash all your stuff. If you’re stuck doing the latter, try to make it as pleasurable as possible.
Take a book or tablet with you and do something you love while everything is washing and drying. Then take everything home, turn on the TV, and fold while being entertained. Before you know it, all will be folded and put away, and you’ll have caught up on your show.
How about food? Can you cook, or do you just get takeout? Expand your repertoire by learning how to make the dishes you love best. This might involve asking your parents or grandparents to teach you how to make that recipe you adore. Or you can find some great chefs and home cooks on YouTube and get busy in the kitchen. Make food preparation a pleasure rather than an obligation and you’ll be amazed at how much happier you feel.
The more you practice doing adult things, the less your fear of adulting will affect you, until one day it will be gone.
4. Learn to shift direction on the fly.
Doing the things above on your own will teach you to be more adaptive. Many people freak out when things don’t unfold the way they want them to, but those who can adapt to circumstances and find other solutions end up using that adaptivity in other areas of their lives.
As an example, let’s say you’re baking something but halfway through you realize that you don’t have any sugar. That’s cool… You can use honey, maple syrup, or even jam instead. Run out of laundry detergent? Grate bar soap and mix it with baking soda for a quick and easy solution.
Being able to adapt on the fly can be hugely beneficial across the board. It’ll train your mind to seek alternative solutions whenever you come across an obstacle, and you’ll soon learn that you can overcome any problem simply by finding a different way around it. If you can’t go through, then climb over or around. Or dig underneath. There’s always another solution, so there’s no need to panic. Simply change direction.
You may feel like you can’t handle adulthood, but the more you learn to adapt and roll with things rather than fighting against them or crumpling in a heap, the more emotionally resilient you’ll feel. Soon enough, you’ll be able to put your adulting anxiety behind you.
5. Stay present and focused on what you want to do now.
People often fall into anxiety spirals when they start to overanalyze everything. Their minds will drift into “what if?” land, and they’ll freak out about all the things that could possibly go wrong.
If you’re the type of person who worries about all the potential variables and is scared of growing up because of it, bring yourself back to the present moment. Do what you can with what you have right now, and deal with whatever happens when it happens.
And what if it all works out just fine? After all, how many things that you freaked out about in the past actually unfolded the way you feared they would?
Try to think back to when you were a child and were utterly engrossed in what you were doing. When you were a toddler, did you spend your time trying to figure out what training you’d need to do a triathlon? Or were you focused entirely on learning how to walk?
Furthermore, when you learned how to walk, do you think you were concentrating on placing each foot in front of the other? No. Your goal was to get yourself over to the cookie you were eyeing or the dog you wanted to pet. Your body followed your mind and did what was necessary to get you to your chosen destination.
Aim to get back into that mindset. If there’s something you want to do now, put your thoughts and energy toward attaining that goal—not all the maybes that may unfold down the line. You don’t think about inhaling and exhaling when you’re out for a walk; you just walk. Do the same with every endeavor you undertake, and you’ll feel a lot less anxiety overall.
On a similar note…
6. Enjoy the learning process.
Just about all of us have known at least one person who has held back from doing something they loved because they didn’t know how to do it already and didn’t want to screw up. The motivations and explanations behind these behaviors may vary, but ultimately the fear of failure is what held them back from a lot of joy and accomplishment.
After all, if they didn’t try it at all, then they wouldn’t fail for sure, right? But that’s a terrible way to live a life.
Remember the toddler making their way toward the cookie? How many times do you think you fell on your ass when you were learning how to walk? More times than you could count, most likely, yet you persevered. Furthermore, you probably don’t remember falling down much at all.
You once had to learn everything you know now, and this is pretty much the same for every skill on the planet. The unknowns that terrify us are swiftly forgotten after we’ve practiced them for a while. You may hate being an adult, but that feeling will subside the more you practice, the more you learn, and the more you master the things you must do as an adult.
Have you ever been nervous about all the skills you needed to learn at a new job, but then after a month or two, you did them all like they were second nature? Much of life is that simple. What initially seems daunting and scary ends up being the easiest thing in the world after you’ve done it a few times.
The key here is to…
7. Allow yourself to fail.
This is a vital part of the learning process, and it is pretty much inescapable. Just like little toddler you face planted when learning to walk, adult you is going to mess up in a lot of different ways.
Unless you’re juggling chainsaws to impress someone, there’s little that can’t be fixed after you’ve messed up. Mistakes at work can be rectified. Broken items can be repaired or replaced. Missteps in relationships can be worked through with communication.
Once you recognize and accept that you ARE going to mess up, then you’ll feel a lot less anxiety about it. It’s kind of like knowing that you’re going to get wet because it’s raining outside. Instead of avoiding every raindrop, you just let the rain fall and change into dry clothes when you get home.
As soon as you’re no longer bracing against a situation, it stops being a big deal. It’s a case of “yeah, this is going to suck, but it’s not going to last forever.” You’ve been through some uncomfortable or challenging things before, right? Are you still going through them? Probably not.
In fact, you might not even think about those things anymore at all. They might have terrified you when you were gearing up to face them, but now they don’t come to mind unless someone else actively mentions them or you find weird mementos that remind you of them.
Failing is actually a gift in your circumstances because it will remind you that what you imagine in your head as you battle adulting anxiety is always going to worse than the worst case scenario in reality.
8. The most daunting situations are almost always less insurmountable than you think.
Have you ever avoided doing something because you just knew it would be a massive bugbear? Maybe it was paperwork that you were nervous about attending to or a cleaning project that was so intense that you were overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. Either way, there are only two options when it comes to situations like these:
- Ignore it and let it build until it becomes atrocious to deal with
- Face it, and get it over and done with
I’ll give you an example here. For a few years, we’d had a ton of stuff accumulating in a storage room in the basement, and it was a nightmare in there. We had been avoiding even going into that room because the awareness of just how much work needed to be done to clear it out was too overwhelming. As a result, the mess of boxes, old TV sets, and various bits of detritus just sat there.
We kept avoiding taking care of the issue because there was always something “more important” or fun to do instead.
Finally, we agreed that if we didn’t take action, that room would remain unusable forever. So we set aside a few days to finally take care of the issue. We geared up with old clothes and rubber gloves, put on some great tunes, and resigned ourselves to the fact that we were about to “waste” about three days clearing that mess out.
Do you know how long it took us to clear it out entirely? A few hours.
What we had assumed would be a monumental task that would eat away days of our lives ended up being over and done with in less time than we would have spent watching The Return of the King. Best of all, we discovered some absolute treasures as we cleared that space out. There were childhood photos we had forgotten about, a favorite screwdriver we had given up as lost, and so on.
Best of all, the relief and sense of accomplishment we felt after clearing it out was indescribable. That was a massive task crossed off our to-do list, and unless some natural disaster strikes, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have to do that again. Even better, we now had more space in the house to work with!
Know that this type of experience is common as you move through life, and tackling it head on is almost always the best course of action. Face your fears and anxieties, and you’ll discover that they’re usually as easily transmuted as the previous tasks.
9. Work on discovering your inner strength, and know that you’ve got this.
One reason why so many people have anxiety about adulting is that other people have tried to take their personal power from them.
This often happens when someone has insecure or controlling parents. Instead of being taught vital life skills and being encouraged to take care of problems on their own, these folks are coddled and either overprotected or prevented from becoming more independent.
This is because the parent has made their children their reason for being, and if the kids develop a strong sense of self, then the parent doesn’t know what to do with themselves anymore.
The way to overcome this is to become your own pillar. Learn how to set boundaries, and defend them well. Become your own best advocate, and spend your time and effort working on the skills and strengths you know you have.
Pursue educational and career paths that are important to you, not other people. Develop hobbies and skills that make you happy, rather than pandering to others’ wants or suggestions.
Most importantly, know that you’ll figure it out. If others are trying to make you feel fearful so you stay dependent on them, don’t let their fearmongering hold you back. No matter what happens, you’ll get through it. People have been muddling through existence on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, and they’ve been doing just fine. You will too.
10. Don’t be afraid to ask for guidance.
Are there older or otherwise more experienced people in your life whom you can turn to for instruction or guidance? If so, don’t hesitate to reach out to them for advice when you feel like you need it. After all, these are people who have a lot of life experience under their belts. They’ve been through a lot and have accrued a massive amount of life skills.
It can only benefit you to learn from their experience, as long as they aren’t going to treat you badly in the future because of it.
Some elders like to lord things over younger people and make fun of them for needing help. If the older folks you know are thusly inclined, then you’re likely better off to muddle through on your own, figure things out by watching tutorials online, or ask friends who can teach you instead.
That said, if you’re lucky enough to have parents or grandparents who have helpful skills and are eager to pass their knowledge on to the next generation, then let them do so. You never know when the skills they teach you may come in handy. I wouldn’t know how to handle an axe if I hadn’t asked my Grandpa to teach me how to chop wood, and my partner’s cooking skills were honed by her grandmother’s side.
If you don’t have family members like this, then see if you can connect with others in your community. There are usually learning opportunities at community centers or even meetup groups that you can join. At places like these, you have the chance to draw on the knowledge that others have accrued, while offering them your time and friendship in return.
Furthermore, even if certain methods seem a bit antiquated, you can either adapt them for modern needs or use them as-is if required. For instance, you may have the world’s most high-tech oven in your kitchen, but if an elder teaches you how to rig up an outdoor camp stove, you’ll still be able to cook if there’s a major power outage.
Yes, you’re a strong, independent adult, but that doesn’t mean that you’re all alone in the world. There are always resources available to you, if you’re open to them.
11. Make peace with the idea of death.
This isn’t meant to be a downer, and it shouldn’t make you feel afraid of anything. Far from it. In fact, we’re hoping to inspire the opposite effect, here.
Many people are absolutely terrified of the idea of death. As a result, they either live recklessly as if to thumb their noses at mortality or cling to an age in which they felt safe from the grim specter of death that’s looming on the road ahead of them.
When you make peace with the fact that all of us have an expiry date, however, it’s an immensely freeing experience. You don’t have to worry about avoiding it because it’s inevitable, so that’s a massive weight off your shoulders.
Furthermore, it’s freeing to realize that you have carte blanche to live your life to the fullest, in exactly the manner you want to, because it’s all going to end one day.
So many people say, “If I knew I was dying, I would do X thing I’ve always wanted to do.” They hold back from doing what’s authentic and important to them thanks to other people’s judgements or fear of potential failure. The only thing that would allow them the freedom to do what they wanted is if they knew it would all be over soon, and they’d only have a small window of opportunity to do that thing.
Do the thing. None of us know how much time we have left, but accepting that on a soul-deep level allows us to live life fearlessly. There’s nothing to be afraid of, other than an unlived life.
Remembering the phrase “memento mori” (remember death) isn’t meant to be scary, but is instead a reminder to be present and enjoy every moment, since we might never have another.
Rather than thinking of life as “growing up,” simply see it as “growing.” You’re here to experience amazing things and to have joy. Don’t hold yourself back from that due to fear of the unknown or failure. There is nothing to fear.
Still not sure how to stop being scared of growing up? Talking to someone can really help you to handle whatever life throws at you. It’s a great way to get your thoughts and your worries out of your head so you can work through them.
Speak to a therapist rather than a friend or family member. Why? Because they are trained to help people in situations like yours. They can help you to challenge your thoughts and offer tailored advice to make you feel more comfortable about being an adult.
BetterHelp.com is a website where you can connect with a therapist via phone, video, or instant message.
While you may try to work through this yourself, it may be a bigger issue than self-help can address. And if it is affecting your mental well-being, relationships, or life in general, it is a significant thing that needs to be resolved.
Too many people try to muddle through and do their best to overcome issues that they never really get to grips with. If it’s at all possible in your circumstances, therapy is 100% the best way forward.
Click here if you’d like to learn more about the service BetterHelp.com provide and the process of getting started.
You’ve already taken the first step just by searching for and reading this article. The worst thing you can do right now is nothing. The best thing is to speak to a therapist. The next best thing is to implement everything you’ve learned in this article by yourself. The choice is yours.
