College is hard enough as it is, but if you have an anxiety disorder, it can become so much more difficult. College can also increase anxiety, giving people anxiety disorders. (I wasn't diagnosed with anxiety until I started having panic attacks during my sophomore year of college.) If you don't have an anxiety disorder, please consider these simple ways that anxiety makes college so much harder. If you do suffer from anxiety, feel free to just nod and say, "Yup, that is me."

1. Freshman Orientation is hell

When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Hell is other people," he spoke the inner dialogue of every introvert ever. Being crowded into a gymnasium with hundreds of other people and forced to interact with them is a special brand of torture.

2. Residential Life is a nightmare

Little to no privacy? Check. Constantly being pressured to attend events and be social? Check. Unpredictable lifestyle made worse by the fact that many of your dorm mates are assholes and seem to live only to screw up your life goals? Triple check.

3. The days when your anxiety won't let you do ANYTHING

Those days when you're too anxious to go to class, but you're also too anxious to skip class. Because grades. And your anxiety acts up when you try to do homework, but it also acts up when you don't do homework. Because OMG YOU'RE GOING TO FAIL.

4. Any unexpected change is a threat to your internal security

A due date gets moved up? Nope. Somebody asks you if you can help them with an assignment? [sirens blaring, fires break out all over the city, gavin screaming in the distance]

5. Deadlines / due dates are evil monsters threatening your very existence

Whether the project is due in two days or in two weeks, just thinking about the fact that you've been given a deadline is enough to send you into a spiral of anxiety.

6. You're constantly stressing about whether your grades are high enough

It doesn't matter if you've got all As or all Cs. You WILL stress over your grades. It is inevitable.

7. Basically, this is you all the time: