Anxiety: a debilitating disorder that affects you physically and emotionally. You can say, "I suffer from anxiety" and someone will say, "It's all in your head" and those people are very very wrong. If someone has asthma, you don't say, "It's all in your lungs." I think this disorder is something that people who aren't too familiar with, have to educate themselves in.

People don't realize that their words can trigger anxiety attacks. It's not their fault, but it does happen. This disorder affects you so much and the physical symptoms are sometimes the hardest to get through. One of the main things it can affect is your stomach. Think of a time where you became really nervous before a performance or a presentation and you start to feel nauseous and possibly like you want to throw up. This is how some people feel for either 5 minutes or maybe even weeks. These sudden feelings of panic is your fight or flight system working on overload. You can get pain in your legs and your arms and even your chest and suddenly you think you're having a heart attack and you end up in the emergency room. You get very cold, you get extremely hot, you get dizzy, sometimes you can faint! There are so many other things that can happen as well: irritability, obsessive behavior, sensory overload, stuttering, zoning out, etc. Feeling physically ill is terrible, but that's not the half of it.

Phobias can really take over your life. This irrational fear of places, things, events, etc is something that people with anxiety try to work on to get over but it does take a lot of time and it doesn't just change over night. Phobias are huge triggers and avoiding those triggers can sometimes alleviate panic attacks, but it can feel like it takes over your life. Dying your hair and even driving a car can trigger an attack. These things may sound silly, but it's perfectly normal to feel this way and it's okay to want to avoid them. The least you can do is try and work on those fears, but you have to feel 100% comfortable in doing so.

Yes, these things happen to me. Yes, I feel ALL of these things every day of my life as I'm sure many others can relate. One of the worst things a person can do to someone with anxiety is to make fun of them. If you put someone down and you're making someone feel like their feelings are invalid, frankly you're a terrible human being. Just because you can't understand or relate doesn't mean that you have the right to bring them down and make them feel worse. Try to understand where they're coming from. I think that the more people try to understand how anxiety works, the less of a stigma there will be.