Haunted in Stressful Situations A story about how to manage anxiety
By Maya Sullivan
Introduction
Imagine this: you’re sitting in your classroom with a dark cloud of fear hanging overhead. The people next to you are tapping their feet on the floor, clenching their fists, and exchanging nervous glances. It’s presentation day. Your friend leans over to you asking if you’re nervous. The grade you’re going to have is a mild concern, but for some reason you’re perfectly calm while everyone else is freaking out. Yet some time later, you’re diagnosed with anxiety. How could this be possible if public speaking doesn’t make you nervous? This is basically how Christa Pauly, a student at Mountain View High School, found out she had anxiety. She could make new friends easily, didn’t find performances stressful, and could present her work without much issue. So for many years, she believed she didn’t have it. Christa would think, “Other people do, but I don’t ‘cause, like, I don’t get nervous. ‘Cause I used to do dancing, not very well, actually very poorly, and I wouldn’t get nervous before performances. So I was like, ‘I don’t have anxiety’” (Pauly). Christa’s story is a prime example of how anxiety is a very subjective experience. Just because you don’t share the same symptoms that many others do doesn’t mean that it’s not a possibility for you to have anxiety. In order to visualize it, picture a ghost that follows you around constantly. For some people, it’s a malevolent beast that seems to attack you at any chance it gets, but for others like Christa, it’s not scary at all – just extremely irritating. She describes it as having a very annoying little person screaming at her occasionally. Dealing with these ghosts, especially in a high pressure situation, is a challenge that many struggle with. However, there are various strategies to face the problems that anxiety presents. Even if you don’t have any type of diagnosed anxiety disorder like Christa, there is still a lot to learn from advice on managing fear and stress in the high pressure situations that all of us will
Christa and her “ghost” face in life. According to Anxiety by the Gale Encyclopedia of Science, “Unlike fear, in which the individual is usually aware of its cause, anxiety’s cause is often not clear.” In other words, people will feel the same adrenaline spikes and general feeling of panic even if there is no threat. Although it’s a different experience for each individual, there are many symptoms that people share. According to Lissette Saavedrea and Wendy Silverman in the International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family, “Common features shared across anxiety disorders include (1) avoidance of feared objects, situations, or events, or enduring such objects, situations, events with severe distress; (2) maladaptive thoughts or cognitions, typically regarding harm or injury to oneself or loved one; and (3) physiological arousal or reactions (e.g., palpitations, sweating, irritability).” In Christa’s case, uncertain situations will cause her severe distress, sometimes even to the point of crying. “Anything that could be a surprise and could go wrong I freak about,” she said. “When I was at work my boss would be giving me a little bit of information about, like, ‘you come to work tomorrow’. And then I’ll be panicking like okay, I don’t know what booth I’m supposed to be at, I don’t know who’s going to be with me, I have so little information and then I panic and shut down again” (Pauly).
Symptoms For different people, different situations could cause similar levels of mental and physical distress. For Christa, the worst part about anxiety is crying frequently. “Crying all the time when you don’t want to, it sucks. I like always cry- because with me if I feel anxious I shut down very quickly so that’s what happens.” But for others it could be feeling lightheaded, heart palpitations, gritting teeth, etc. Another important factor to look at when discussing anxiety is that anxiety disorders are often hereditary. In the article Anxiety in Kids published by USNews “Anxiety disorders tend to run in families.” Taking all of this into consideration, high pressured situations could cause similar symptoms to anxiety or heighten it for those who already have generalized anxiety disorder or something similar to it, which is why it’s important to understand what such situations do and how to manage them. School is an example of how stress and anxiety can be exacerbated by the pressure to succeed placed on students, even from a very early age. Christa said that she “used to get super nervous about stuff like going up to strangers and asking for directions, ordering at restaurants, raising my hand in class, like that kind of stuff when I was younger like in elementary school.” When Christa was very young, around preschool or kindergarten age, her mom “signed me up for some soccer and I showed up and I walked out to the field and I started crying. I’m like I can’t do this - no. So my mom had to sit with me in the car and she got mad at me cause she wasted her money signing up for a year worth of soccer.” This is an example of how sports, or trying out new extracurricular activities, can cause stress in students with anxiety. Another example of this
“We have a long line of ADD in our family and ADHD, personally I have ADD and it’s one of those things where if you have ADD you’re probably gonna have anxiety or depression. IT’S A 2-in-1 DEAL!” -Christa Pauly was when she “cried on the first day of girl scouts. I showed up and there were too many people, and I went and hid. And then my mom was like, no, we’re going to girl scouts. I’m doing the same thing as the soccer I was in second grade and she brought up the soccer and she was like Christa, Christa, go, go, you have to go to girl scouts. I’m not making this turn out like it did with the soccer” (Pauly). She described elementary school as: “One big anxiety something something. Let’s see, I cried like, a lot. I didn’t know how to multiply cause I think they might have taught multiplication in first grade, and in second grade they were like here’s how you do it real real. So the first day of that, they show up and they had one day where they taught us all the multiplication and I cried in class cause I didn’t get it. And I was super sad that day and I went home cause like, as soon as I don’t understand something unknown I shut down like I did at work and that’s where my anxiety kicks in. So I asked my mom, she taught me, I came to school the next day all confident and then we learned division and I cried again. See, I cry like a lot. See the fun thing is the people that were anxious, or all the kids that were crybaby like me, there were spots at our school designated to crying. They were unspoken places but they were definitely there. Like underneath the playground and by the bike racks at the back of the school, those were the cry spots for kids.” (Pauly) In school, situations where it feels like you’re the only one who doesn’t understand what to do can cause immense amounts of stress. This can make people very anxious and they could end up avoiding certain activities. The article Anxiety In
Kids by USNews states that “Anxious children have difficulty with new situations of any kind; they tend to find novelty uncomfortable or scary. They also tend to see their world in more threatening ways than other children do.” Christa’s experiences with new situations in school illustrate this point. However, it’s important to note that it’s something many students face at one point or another whether or not they have anxiety, so you’re not alone. Even as adults, many people also have no idea what they’re doing but just don’t say anything. Stress is a very common thing that people face, which is pointed out by Christa talking about the places people went to go cry in school. As mentioned before, in middle school she did dance and believed she did not have anxiety. Even today, her anxiety confuses her doctors because performance is something that would make most people with anxiety nervous to some extent. In Joshua Fletcher’s book Anxiety: Panicking About Panic he writes that “It is normal to fear an exam result, the dentist, an operation, public speaking, and what the boss will say etc. However, when worrying thoughts and anxious behaviors become a daily constant - for reasons beyond our comprehension - we start to acknowledge and admit to ourselves something isn’t quite right.” Christa’s anxiety wasn’t very similar to this view of it, so she was never able to acknowledge that she had it until much later in her life. Currently when dealing with anxiety in high school, she prefers to “sit in my own space. I draw.” She says it helps if people “give me some space, let me sit down and think cause normally when my anxiety kicks in I’m just overwhelmed so I just need time to breathe.” To help her deal with her anxiety in general, she goes to therapy and she also said “I’ve got pills.” Using medication like Christa is one way people can help ease their anxiety. Another treatment people often find useful is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT for short. It helps target the negative thought patterns an individual has and change them, helping ease stress. According to How to Relieve Anxiety by USNews, “approaching your negative thoughts and feelings with compassion is a powerful way
to remind yourself that those thoughts are not facts.” So the next time you find yourself in a stressful situation, it could be useful to remind yourself that you’ll be okay. Try your best not to listen to the ghost screaming negative thoughts at you and focus on positive things as much as possible. Anxiety is also very prominent in the workplace, even for people without any anxiety disorders. Gilda Page, a supervising attorney at the Santa Clara County public defender’s office, worries “whether I’m appealing to a judge, or jury of 12 people, or prosecutor that they will refuse to act in a merciful way towards my client and so my client will face a very long time in prison.
Gilda Page And prison we know is the least effective means for rehabilitation.” When I asked how she deals with the stress, she stated that “I just work up the cases as best as I can and tell myself I cannot control the results. And then if I lose and I don’t prevail, then I seek out good healthy supportive people” (Page). In addition, Page says that “I get a good night’s sleep, go on a walk and you just keep going.” She also advises against overthinking the issue or remaining fixated on it: “Don’t vent too long. Complaining is actually a triggering event when you stay in that mental state” (Page). Obsessing over negative worries and thoughts can make them worse, which is why it’s useful to practice mindfulness techniques and breathing. “It helps calm the fight-flight limbic response and reconnect to higher executive functioning. And don’t shorten your sleep. There is a cascade of physical and mental consequences when you don’t get at least 8 hours of sleep” (Page).
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Facing the Challenge For anyone suffering from anxiety and stress, it’s important to remember that it can be changed. Panicking About Panic, Joshua Fletcher asserts that “Anxiety is a condition that develops over time as a result of poor mental routine and solidified behavioral habits. Note that the key word in that statement is the word ‘condition.’ A condition is something that can be changed and altered and is in way represented as something permanent.” In order to change, Christa first had to realize she had anxiety so she could get the help that she needed. Both Gilda Page and Christa say that breathing helps reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed a lot. People’s responses to stress are very subjective, so trying out different combinations of techniques could help. How to Relieve Your Anxiety advises “considering your anxious or sad thoughts as clouds -- momentary. When we view emotions in this way -- accepting each as it comes, without judgment; viewing them as adaptive responses to situations we encounter; and understanding they’ll run their course and organically pass on their own -- we encourage them to move along faster.” This type of visualization can also help familiarize you with your thoughts. It’s a bit easier to combat the negative thoughts if you imagine they’re being said by an annoying little ghost saying it to bother you rather than an abstract bundle of ideas of what could go wrong. Exercise, sleeping well, eating well, practicing mindfulness, visualizing the problem, practicing self-care, and going to therapy can all help improve mental health. We are all bound to encounter a stressful event at some point in our lives. Keeping these techniques in mind is important for maintaining mental stability during difficult situations. Ultimately, when it comes to anxiety and stress it can feel like you’re being haunted by a ghost. This is especially true if you’ve felt the
effects of it for a long time because of your job or school. It can make you feel like you can’t do something, or just induce paralyzing fear. When this happens repeatedly, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that that is how it always is and that is how it will always be but that is not true. It’s way easier said than done, but through mental training and regulating the constant negative thoughts, the challenges that anxiety presents you with can be overcome. It’ll be like climbing a huge mountain, you might not get there overnight or even in a few years or months. It’ll be difficult and you’ll wonder if it’s even possible to reach the top. Sometimes you might even end up climbing down a bit before ascending the cliff again. But with perseverance, you’ll get there eventually. It won’t be immediate but you’ll get there. And reaching the pinnacle will definitely be worth it. Overall, it’s important to realize that there are many people out there that have similar issues and you are not alone. In the article Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders, published by the Gale In Context Online Collection, “Anxiety disorders are some of the most common mental disorders, with almost 30 percent of adults experiencing an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives.” It’s also definitely a common thing for people to experience stress in general. Knowing how to manage it and reduce it is an important part of everyone’s daily lives.
Christa Pauly “Way more people have it than you think, so like whatever you’re dealing with there’s gonna be a lot of other people out there in the same situation that are gonna know what you’re going through kinda. Maybe not like the very specifics because like, I mean bailing out of soccer isn’t something that everyone has done but it’s like they’ll get it you know?” -Christa Pauly
About the Author Maya Sullivan is a Junior animation student at Mountain View High School and Freestyle Academy. She spends her time drawing either through software such as Abobe Photoshop or traditionally on paper. She enjoys bringing more otherworldly concepts and ideas to life through art. She’s very interested in storytelling and hopes to use her art to be able to create content for others to enjoy.