You have two exams this week, plus a practical. You feel confident you can accomplish it. Then you realize you have chemistry homework due the next week that is 50 problems long, which you haven’t started. You also realize you forgot about the Bible talk you are in, which of course is the night before your exam. You have so many things coming at you at once that you realize you aren’t even seeing your friends since you moved into the library for the last two weeks. They start to worry about you, and that gets you worried. You start freaking out, and boom. Anxiety kicks in.
Your heart starts racing to the point where you will be sitting still and it will still beat more than 100 times. You’re overthinking everything and trying to figure out how you are going to get it all done. You panic, breathing faster and faster with a wild look in your eyes. Crying is a bad option because it’ll just make it 10 times worse. Being angry won’t help either. You are just stuck. Holding the world on your shoulders is a tough task, and you are only one person. Taking everything on at once was a bright idea at the time until you feel the weight coming down on you, and you can barely breathe — literally. You have tried everything to not be as anxious as you are. Sleeping more, exercising more, study breaks, even just breathing for a few minutes. Nothing has worked well. Reminding yourself to breathe should not be the majority of your life.
All of your friends are worried about you because you stress yourself out to the point of no return sometimes. It has even tested some of your friendships. You start stressing about how worried they are about you, yet you aren’t worried about yourself. You put everyone else before yourself because you would rather have them happy than yourself. You will do everything for everyone else. It’s not a bad thing at times. You just feel the need to help others, which can lead to some major anxiety. You don’t want to disappoint anyone. You don’t want to let anyone down, so you bite off more than you can chew.
You don’t know why you’re exhausted. You’re fighting a war inside your head every single day. If that’s not exhausting, then I don’t know what is. You’re fighting battles that shouldn't exist. They are irrelevant to what is going on in your life. Your mind traps these ideas in your head, and you freak out. You overthink every little detail to the point where you don’t know what is the truth and what is the stuff you've made up. You stress over the little stuff. You stress over the big stuff. You get anxiety as easy as it is to breathe. Even writing this article gave you anxiety.
So welcome to the life of an anxious person, where your problems become theirs without you even asking them to be, where stress is second nature, where overthinking is how you think 24/7. Trust me, if we could turn it off, we would. Life isn’t meant to be like this. But if there weren’t people like us in the world, who would be worried for you? Yes, it is very hard to live with, but we do it every day. It’s hard to explain to people what is going on inside of your head when you don’t know yourself.
