I have always found studying behavioral sciences, psychology, mental illness and how *things* affect society so interesting. My seventh grade science project was discovering what physical and mental effects lying has on someone. The next year, I studied how attractiveness affects people’s reactions to certain questions. (This was all before I had even taken a psychology course and knew of things like the Halo Effect and cognitive bias). In my spare time, I read Scientific American, took behavioral science classes and watched Ted Talks about eating disorders, confidence and mental health research. I love to learn about the mysteries behind certain behaviors, especially those caused by mental issues.
But I don’t read anything about anxiety. Not anymore. I can’t do it. It gives me knots in my stomach, and I sometimes feel so sick or annoyed that I can’t finish them.
I’m not talking about the actual scientific articles written by experts. I’m talking about the articles floating around on social media.
You see those articles or blurbs on Facebook and Twitter labeled “How People with Anxiety Love Differently” and “What Not to Say to Someone with Anxiety.” Those are too easy. Those are too relatable. They are feelings stated as facts. They paint anxiety as a fragile thing — something for the weak, something that can be cured by drinking a cup of tea or finding true love. And that’s just not how it works. Anxiety and depression are serious.
I have to question articles written by people with little experience with these conditions, with little statistical or factual information. Typically they are very broad and include little credibility. Even articles written by people with anxiety often do not acknowledge that anxiety is different for every.single.person. Mental health and mental illness fall on a spectrum.
What gives me the right to write things like this? Well, here I go. In an article about not reading articles about anxiety, I’m going to write about my experience with anxiety.
Throughout high school, I dealt with the same things a lot of young adults deal with: self-confidence, body image issues, the uncertainty of what is yet to come. I was driven by the desire to be perfect, and I ultimately isolated myself. I didn’t think I was putting myself in any real danger. But at the end of my freshman year of college I started dealing with some heavier emotions, which led to even further isolation, nervous breakdowns, excessive working out and a fear of food because I became terrified of gaining weight. Going into my sophomore year, these things began to affect my everyday life. I couldn’t focus, eat, sleep or relax. Because I had studied anxiety in my psych classes, I sort of knew what could be happening to me, but I couldn’t control myself when I was shaking violently on the bathroom floor. My mom and a few friends reached out to me and recommended I should see a therapist.
The therapist told me I had anxiety. That the ‘nervous breakdowns’ I was having were panic attacks. I wasn’t prescribed medication, but I was given a lot tactics to handle these feelings.
Now, I’m able to handle my anxiety better. For some, anxiety is something that needs to be dealt with every day; for others, it’s an occasional thing that happens when there is a lot of stress. To have anxiety, you don’t need to be on medication or have a prescription that proves it, but feeling anxiety and having anxiety are two very different things. Periods of high stress (e.g. finals week, public speaking) cause people to feel anxious, but that feeling eventually goes away. Constantly feeling nervous or uneasy, worrying about “irrational fears,” feeling overly self-conscious and having digestion and sleep problems that interfere with everyday life is having anxiety.
I’m not trying to bash other articles that focus on anxiety. I do feel that they could acknowledge a lot more, including the serous effects of anxiety and other mental illnesses, how to reach out to someone with anxiety, how to deal if you have anxiety, stuff like that. Having anxiety isn’t beautiful, it doesn’t make people special, and it definitely isn’t fun. I believe that everyone has or can experience feelings of anxiety. Everyone can relate to those Tumblr-like articles, but they are cliché and not real. Sure, those articles with gifs and snippets of information are funny and totally relatable, but we do need to tackle the more serious side of anxiety and other mental illnesses too.