At one point or another, I'm sure you have experienced this feeling: anxiety. The overwhelming feeling that can take over your entire body. For many, anxiety is something you feel every once and awhile and can cause a bit of stress in your everyday life. For a select group, anxiety is so much more. Anxiety can be anywhere from tapping your foot on the ground, to gasping for air during a panic attack. Anxiety is a silent killer. Most people that have actually been diagnosed with anxiety are extremely good at hiding it. They don't want people to know how they really feel so they keep it bottled up until they're alone where it all explodes. Often people who struggle everyday with anxiety are the people you would least expect. These people can be extremely cheerful, appear happy all the time, and offer help whenever needed. The issue with anxiety is that it can build on itself. When you are stressed about one thing, anxiety tells you that you should be worried about even more things. Anxiety often hits at random times and there are multiple forms that can appear all throughout the day. For many, test anxiety is a problem. Especially in high school, the thought of taking hard tests is something that we fear. However, people with anxiety fear it even more. It can take over your whole body causing you to forget everything that you've studied and learned. It can cause panic attacks that take over your mind and body and cause you to forget everything else and just focus on your breathing. When an anxiety attack takes place, the best thing for someone to do is to step away from whatever caused the attack and take deep breaths. For people who struggle with anxiety, taking deep breaths doesn't always help. People always say "take a deep breath" when someone starts to get anxious but it's generally the last thing that these people want to hear. They want to be consolidated and they need somebody to tell them that everything is going to be okay. Anxiety is one of the most common mental health issues that people today deal with so you should always be considerate when talking to people about the issue and make sure that they know that they have your constant support.
