We all know that feeling. We have experienced it at some point in our lives, in some variation. Suddenly, the room gets smaller, the air gets thicker and your heart decides to run a marathon. It’s probably one of the hardest things to go through, especially when you don’t know why or how it is happening. It can become very frustrating. Why am I feeling like this? How can I make this stop? When will it stop? Will it ever stop…?
For those who have dealt with anxiety in the past, or are dealing with it now, we all can agree that it is an unexplainable and scary feeling. Having an anxiety attack is hard to deal with because sometimes it comes out of nowhere. You could be doing something totally normal and relaxing, and then all of a sudden, boom. It hits you—that shrinking room, thickening air and heart racing feeling. Those random attacks are the absolute worst, especially in public. Who knows how to properly react when having an anxiety attack? No one. How does someone react to this unexplainable feeling that grips every aspect of your body, making you feel as if you lost total control?
It’s a hard and overwhelming feeling to get over fast. It takes over your enter body and you have no control, or at least you think that you don’t. That is something that makes anxiety so hard to deal with: you forget that you have some control. Remembering this while having an anxiety attack is virtually impossible because your body is telling you the exact opposite. But you do have some control. You are going to be OK. It is going to pass. Now that is more easily said than done. Anxiety is a very strong and captivating emotion. In most cases, it does its job efficiently. It is hard to fight off, but it can be overcome. Don’t let it rule your life. Having anxiety is normal, and most people, if not all, have dealt with it or will deal with it at some point in life.
Anxiety is the worst when you have to deal with the concrete aspects of life; every day small things that need to get done. How can I get these things done when I am feeling this way? I can barely think, let alone go about life. And there is also school work. School work alone is an anxiety attack. It is so easy to get overwhelmed with school and the stress that is attached to it. But add on anxiety and that makes life seem basically impossible to get through. I cannot put into words the feeling of anxiety and stress attached to having school work. It is so degrading. Having that loss of control, not knowing what to do, not knowing when it will stop. And when this feeling finally does stop, then you still have to deal with the school work that is sitting at your desk mocking you. It’s hard, but everyone goes through it. It makes you stronger, as cheesy as that sounds.
So those of you with anxiety that are reading this, I know it’s hard—trust me, I know—but it will be OK. We all go through it, and we are all dealing with it in our own way. Nothing I say will make anxiety magically go away, but I’m telling you that there is nothing wrong with feeling the way you do. It makes you human, and it is an obstacle in life that you most certainly will get over.
