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Anxiety in college

Asked By: Anonymous     Views: 948 times

I’m a freshman college student, and lately I have found out that my symptoms may be linked with anxiety.  It all started in the beginning of my senior year in high school. The problems started in the beginning of my senior year.  As I began to take calculus, I noticed that many homework problems I do would be troublesome.  Even though I clearly understood the topic, my mind would always be telling me that I was missing something or doing something horribly wrong.  Even after I understood the topics, and had all the right answers, all these questions would make me unconfident on tests.  Sometimes I would spend an entire day going through a set of fifteen simple problems, going through each one what seemed like a thousand times.  Furthermore, my mind had the sudden urge to “forget” things.  Sometimes, even the night before a huge test, my mind would be telling me to forget something.  I would have to resist the urge.  I was frightened, scared… I was truly terrified.  As the year went on, things became worse. In my freshman year of college, things have reached their worst (at least so far).  My mind will tell me to “forget” or “mess up” something – be it a topic, an idea.  Subsequently, I have no confidence in my methods for using the ideas (such as working on homework problems).  Furthermore, this has happened to basic ideas I have understood and known for years – such as the ones in basic calculus – that are suddenly disappearing from my mind.  I fell unconfident in doing even the most basic techniques.  Sometimes, I will spend hours worrying over one homework problem that I have no trouble on – I always get into thinking something is wrong and sometimes spend hours mindlessly thinking in circles to no avail. This is one of the darkest periods in my life – does this sound like anxiety and what resoures should I use?

What you are describing is an obsessive compulsive response. On a technique level you want to apply what's called response prevention. This means to accept the obssesive thoughts (as not real); the goal of which, is to prevent the behavior of repetition to nowhere.Your mind has learned this "tic" as a maladaptive formula for control. On a deeper level you need to do emotional work regarding your stress response. Your internal "critical script" has become extreme as a component of over-compensation and not trusting yourself.