Having occasional anxiety is normal, but once anxiety goes over the top it can be a negative distraction. I have been coping with anxiety my entire life and I am still working on it and getting stronger everyday. Here are some day to day scenarios where I get into my head with anxious thoughts and how I get these thoughts out of my head.
The unacknowledged hello
Do you ever have a day when you run into someone you know in public and they completely ignore you. You either say hi, wave or smile and they just walk away. The worst is when you feel like you are on good terms with someone and they don't acknowledge you at all. When this happens, I start to question what they think about me. Are they mad at me? Did I upset them the other day? Are we not as close as I thought? When I get to this negative thought pattern I have to start rationalizing the situation. What if they are late for class or a meeting? They could be having a bad day? Did they literally just not see me?
Being left on read
There's always that time when you send someone a text message over regular text or an app and they open it and ignore it? Yes, I have been there too. When this happens, I start to worry if I said something that offended them or annoyed them. I am the most anxious when I am reaching out to someone about making plans and they leave me on read. It worries me the most when someone leaves me on read about a plan because I will jump to the conclusion that they don't want to hang out with me. In reality they could not know their schedule yet so they have to think things through before they respond. They could be in class or at work and they can't respond quick enough without their boss or professor seeing. Their phone could of died, or they ran into someone the minute they opened the message. I always try to think of all of the rational reasons of why they left me on read to keep me from staying out of my head.
Blanking out on an exam
Exams are stressful for most people because it requires hyper focused thinking and a long attention span. Not only are you trying to work through every question in your head, but you are trying to remember the information you retained while studying. Taking tests has always caused my anxiety levels to rise, but my biggest fear is blanking out in the middle of an exam. The thought of knowing the material, receiving the test and realizing that I completely forgot how to solve the problem or interpret the question terrifies me. When this happens to me I start to question if I studied long enough or if I even know what I am doing on the other questions. Then I start worrying about what grade I am going to recieve on the exam and how that will impact my final grade. My biggest advice to someone who is dealing with test anxiety is to only focus on each question at a time. Answer the questions you feel confident in first and save the harder problems for the end. This eases my anxiety because I can feel confident about the problems I know how to do and I can give myself more time to work on the more challenging questions. Another thing I noticed is that self-trust is key to doing well on an exam. If you don't have confidence in your answers you are going to re-think every single problem and this will cause you to change answers you probably don't need to. When I am stuck trying to decide between two answers I always go with my first answer because most of the time your first answer is your intuition speaking.
People laughing at you
Nobody wants to be laughed at, so thinking people are laughing at you is a real drag. Do you ever have that moment when you are speaking in front of the class or walking down the street and you just hear a group of people giggling? Sometimes when I am giving a presentation in front of the class and I hear people in the background laughing I start to get anxious. I am most anxious when I know I didn't say something funny and I feel like people are laughing. Another situation I feel anxious in is when I am walking by myself and I hear a group of people laughing behind me. I start to think is stuff falling out of my backpack or do I walk weird? The fact that I have anxiety of people laughing at me is a little absurd, but it is something that personally affects me. Then I came to the conclusion I did nothing funny there is no reason for people to be laughing at. When I am with my friends I am always laughing and messing around so I have to realize that is why other people are laughing. If whatever they were laughing about had to do with me would honestly be 100% irrational. They don't know me, they didn't talk to me, they know nothing about me, so why would they laugh at me?
If you ever run into a similar situation just know most of your anxious thoughts and insecurities are all in your head. Most people are so busy with their own personal lives that they are not thinking about the small details you are sweating. Finding the root of where your anxiety is coming from can help you come up with logical solutions.
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