My journey with anxiousness and stress recently approached in my late teens and early twenties, as I’m sure it has many others. I remember so vividly when it first started. First-year university finishing up one of my five papers due that week, realistically working on the second out of five. I began to feel this feeling in my chest, seriously like I was having a heart attack. Now, was it from the excessive drinking, overindulging in energy drinks and lack of sleep, potentially? But rather than talking myself down like I usually did when I didn’t feel well, I panicked. As a first-year university student living eight hours away from home, I occasionally had weekends when my friends from the GTA and Southern Ontario would go home for the weekend. To my luck, of course, my brain turned into a toaster the weekend everyone had gone home. I had called my best friend from school, who was at home for the weekend and sobbed to her on the phone, sharing the physical pain I felt that was realistically caused by my brain. We were both so confused and made jokes while panicking about the state I was in. After talking about it with a few friends I still had in town who had talked me down from what seemed like a major health breakdown, I ended up fine. As someone who likes to be in control of most things, not having control over my body or having a solution to the way I was feeling while not being able to get out of my own head felt like my worst nightmare.
I hadn’t had another moment until I had gone home and spent every day sitting at an office job, using my life’s issues and biggest insecurities as songs to fill my head as I worked my 9-5. Let’s just say it wasn’t necessarily an ideal spot for my mental block to unclog. As I found coping skills for my anxiety-inducing thoughts, my “heart-attack” esc episodes turned into waking up every morning at 6am to go for a walk before work to try and catch whatever my brain was going through before I started my day. It turned into completely cutting out caffeine and journaling here and there. But of course, as I got better and more stable at the end of the Summer, by the time I was back to normal, it was time to go back to school, and if there’s one thing university students think they are when going out and being social in their uni town is invincible… or at least that’s what I thought. I went through my entire school year going out realistically 3-4 times a week, indulging in copious amounts of caffeine, yet still trying to maintain a healthy balance that wouldn’t send me back to where I had just gotten myself out of.
Luckily, surrounded by so much fun and love while at school, I never really had the time to be anxious. I was always thinking about what I had to do next weekend that was fun, who’s birthday was coming up and what assignments or tests I had to get done to move forward in my program. There was barely enough energy left in me to have the kind of anxiousness that left me feeling unlike myself. So I was good… Until a year later, this Summer, when I realized that I was moving across the country in a little over two weeks. While the anxious tendencies and heart-racing thoughts sparked from what my life was soon to turn into, I challenged myself to question if I was anxious or if I was just experiencing life in its whole form.
The most brainwashing thing I’ve experienced to date is anxiety and stress, especially when it translates into basically feeling like your body is shutting down. The most frustrating part for me is that I’ve felt like most of my anxieties and “stresses” this Summer at least have been due to things that overly excite me to frankly the point of no control. Since I had no accurate pinpoint for any sadness, bitterness or confusion in most aspects of my life, I feel as if now, while still having anxious tendencies affecting my body beyond my control, I choose to find ways to cope and look beyond what is making me feel a certain way. Obviously, it’s much easier to say to “walk off” anxiety or “make a choice not to feel that way,” but for me, that seems to be the only way I can find a way to escape certain emotions and reclaim anxieties. Forcing myself to get out of bed and walk, blaring my favourite albums, and choosing to turn my nervousness into excitement for new opportunities while also getting into healthy routines and forgetting bad habits that promote unwanted feelings.
While it’s fair to say teens and young adults have an overload of pressure on them to succeed in simply all areas of their life; relationships, education, friendships, social life, etc., what maybe we should be doing instead is prioritizing mental health days and preventing anxiety that causes inevitable burn out. Life is hard, especially when you’re just figuring things out and learning who you are. So, maybe instead of using anxiety as excuses that get in the way of the life you want to live, you grow with whatever comes at you, take breaks when it’s due, while finding solutions that work for you to cope and allow yourself to feel every good and bad emotion that comes. It will all work itself out eventually, even if you don’t immediately see results. Hang in there!
Talk soon,
Gracee
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