Here’s What Anxiety Feels Like When You Have No Idea What Anxiety Is
It’s 8AM and my heart’s racing. It’s that terrible, full-body sort of beat that makes your whole body shake and occasionally flutters from time to time from over-stimulation. For a second it almost feels like excitement, until the belly flips start, my face heats up, and my neck starts to hurt and I feel a little dizzy. My breathing’s heavy and my palms and scalp are starting to sweat for reasons unbeknownst to me. If this were 29-year-old Alicia dealing with these feelings, she’d know, either a.) she drank way too much coffee (cup number four is ALWAYS filled with regret), or b.) she was having an anxiety attack.
…Unfortunately, we’re talking about 8-year-old Alicia in this instance, who didn’t drink coffee (yet) or have even the slightest flippin’ clue about anxiety.
It’s really hard to understand what anxiety is and how it relates to what it feels physically within you when you’re told to “just calm down and everything will get better.” Spoiler alert: it doesn’t always get better, especially if you don’t know what you’re dealing with on an emotional and mental level. Nor does it really assuage anything in the long run.
According to the fancy paper of record The New York Times, anxiety is now more common than depression amongst college students. Which means that anxiety and stress level increases are happening to people at younger and younger ages. But when that’s not considered a regular occurrence by-and-large, people might not believe you, or might dismiss it as an over-abundance of keen kid energy …but sometimes it’s not.
And sometimes it’s even worse when you try to re-categorize your anxiety spirals in your head. For example mine became quite the party trick when I tried to turn them into self-aware comedy outbursts to make people feel more comfortable about them when they happened. Oddly enough, though, it didn’t help the matter.
When you’re young, anxiety is like a smoke monster: it lurks behind you, this intangible thing that makes your heart beat and your head go akimbo. It makes you wonder, nervously, “Why am I like this? What’s making me feel this way? How do I make it stop?” Ignoring these feelings often makes it worse, too. Pretending it’s nothing only makes the looming dread grow stronger, the monster’s unseen presence hoarding all your rational thought. And when you don’t know what it means but you see how these weird feelings inside of you are bouncing around externally, it’s easy to say, “Well shoot, this is totally my fault and I’m doing something wrong. I’m the worst, and also maybe an emotional monster-person.”
Listen to me when I say this: you’re not wrong. And you’re not alone. When you name anxiety for what it is, you’re able to understand it, and feel less controlled by it and more in control of it.
Stress is like the weirdest twinge of electrical energy within us, and sometimes it’s hard to know what’ll stress you out, cause you anxiety, or send you into a spiral of self-hatred and feeling hopeless. When anxiety is left buried and ignored, its talons only latch on stronger. (It’s like Golum and his precious.) It becomes a battle against your mind — “I know I shouldn’t feel this way! And yet I totally do!” — and your heart that can make you feel, frankly, more than a little cranky. It’s not a good look! Especially when you consider yourself a fairly logical Smart Girl who’s self-aware and in control of their emotions. But hey, even the smartest among us need help understanding what we’re feeling or how to deal (pro-tip: breathing helps).
No one in my family has ever been diagnosed with anxiety. They’ve never understood my energy levels or ways of handling things, and it was always an alienating divide for me as a kid (even sometimes as an adult). It wasn’t until a doctor told me last year that I had PTSD that I realized the thing I jokingly called “an endearing personality quirk” was actually a something I could work towards remedying to make my life better. The shame I’d felt for so long wasn’t something I needed to mentally flagellate myself for, it was a part of how my body learned to cope with stress and trauma growing up — and there’s nothing wrong with that. It was just my body doin’ what it does: survive and thrive in spite of any and everything.
So next time you feel those rumblings — that tidal wave of dread and grief and worry — just try and find a way to relax. Reach out to your friends, talk to a counselor or a teacher or a therapist. Find resources that work for you. Because you’re not alone and you can and will overcome this and it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you because of it. A body’s going to do what a body’s going to do, you just have to trust and work with it in order to see yourself through.
Have you ever dealt with anxiety or depression? How did it feel when you were a kid? Let us hear your anecdotes in the comments, Smarties.
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Alicia Lutes is the Associate Editor of Smart Girls. Find her on Twitter @alicialutes.
