The Anxiety Problem

Anxiety is an extremely general term, and the physical manifestations of it come out on a very large spectrum. Some people experience GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), some people have a more serious case of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and some people just feel anxious in certain situations. If I had to guess, I would think that all people have felt anxious at some point in their life, and we all deal with that in different ways.

College is a time when a lot of people feel anxious, specifically more anxious than they’ve ever felt before. According to the American College Health Association Fall 2018 National College Health Assessment, 63% of college students said they felt overwhelming anxiety in the last year, and 23% reported getting professional help for anxiety within the last year. These are staggeringly high statistics, which is why Courtney Knowles of the JED Foundation states that “students deal with a unique amount of stressors” causing this high percentage. As college students, we have to deal with things like living on our own for the first time (including separation anxiety), being responsible for ourselves (and making responsible decisions sans parental guidance), being expected to keep up with an academic rigor higher than any we’ve ever known, all while growing into the identity we shaped throughout our younger years in a whole new setting. Licensed clinical social worker Hilary Silver coined a term called “identity disorientation” for when the familiar people we had in our lives are no longer there to reinforce the identity us students have created for ourselves. Before college, most of us lived in a totally different environment than what the college environment is, so some struggle to keep up this identity in an entirely new setting.

Adding on to all of this, college students tend to have a few habits that either cause or make their anxiety worse. The first of these is sleep disruption caused by lack of sleep and/or extreme amounts of caffeine. Another one is unhealthy and irregular eating and drinking habits (including but not limited to: eating dessert for every meal and binge drinking for 3-5 consecutive days per week). New college students often also experience loneliness as they’re thrown into an entirely new social food chain, and may not have developed the social skills necessary to thrive in the chain quite yet. And, on top of all of that, students are required to independently attend classes for the first time, when said classes are especially harder and require more effort than classes they’d probably taken previously. Because of all this, it’s really quite obvious why anxiety is so prevalent on our college campuses, but the part we haven’t quite figured out is how to efficiently deal with all these problems and stressors.

I, unfortunately, do not have a magical solution to make all anxiety go away, but I will give all my wonderful readers some tips that I have personally taken advantage of:

Self care: do a face mask, sit down and watch your favorite football team, rewatch your favorite movie for the 10th time

Stay healthy: cut down on the binge drinking, make 2-3 healthier food and drink choices everyday, try and work out a minimum of once per week

Take advantage of opportunities: free mental health/counseling center on campus, knock on your RA’s door, talk to your roommate

GET ENOUGH SLEEP for the love of God

To conclude, I encourage everyone to be conscious and aware of when anxiety might be becoming too much, and explore different methods for how to successfully curb that anxiety in order to go on and live your normal life.