I’m anxious… literally all the time. OK, maybe not all the time, but I go through the majority of my life feeling anxious and not being able to calm myself down. I’m always thinking about everything I have to do with school, what I’m going to do with my life, and then I stress out about being stressed out, which doesn’t help my anxiety at all.

My counselor introduced me to an exercise to help me when I start to feel anxious. First, I press my palms together and dig my heels into the ground and breathe for a little while. Then, I am able to make my anxiety a true, concrete thing. I explore where I am feeling anxiety in my body (usually it is in my chest and lungs — I can’t breathe). After that, I rate my anxiety on a level of 1-7, give my anxiety sensation a name (usually it is “can’t” or “stress” or something of that nature), a color, a shape, a size, and finally a weight. After all of this, I imagine being able to get rid of the anxiety with each breath. I breathe deeply for quite a while until I am a little calmer, and then I do all of those rating things again.

This seems to help me a lot – in a short-term sense. It helps me feel calmer for a little while, but then it always seems to come back not too long after that. I just feel like it is so hard to not be tense; it's how I feel at almost every moment of every day. I hate feeling anxious, and it is not something I bring on myself, not even in the slightest!

It’s hard to understand what it is like to live with anxiety unless you have experienced it yourself. It is easy to simply say, “Oh just calm down. Stop overthinking everything.” Well let me tell you – it is not even close to being that easy.

I’m learning how to manage my anxiety each day, and I have made huge strides since I started this process a few years ago. I think that the biggest thing that has helped me is the support system I have. My boyfriend is always there for me whenever I am feeling anxious, and it always willing to do anything he can to be a wonderful support for me when I need him the most.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say that I don’t feel anxiety every day, but I am hopeful that I will be able to keep improving with both my medication and counseling, which has helped me more than I could ever say.

I know I can do it. And so can you.