Anxiety

Anxiety is an extreme feeling of excessive fear which mainly occurs in people with an upcoming event.  Many people, including myself, have felt anxious before or even after completing an important task.  Anxiety is a basic part of general anxiety and panic disorders.  This appears to make people attempt to avoid a specific situation which causes the feeling of anxiety.  Severe anxiety may lead to a person having a mood disorder or cause a shift in personality when experiencing these extreme and abnormal emotions.  Personally, I have always felt anxious while taking a test.  The second I find out there is an upcoming assignment or exam, I start to feel anxious in several ways.  My hands begin to sweat leaving a feeling of clamminess, my body starts to shake, and I feel as if I can not focus.  My track of thought completely disappears leaving me with an empty mind before and while I’m taking my exam.  Although, it wasn’t until the beginning of my academic career at Penn State that I experienced a different level of anxiety.  I have always gone to sleepaway camp so being away from home was never an issue for me.  Once I arrived to University Park to unpack my belongings, I lost my appetite and started feeling extremely queasy.  Throughout the next week I began to throw up multiple times per day and continued to only drink water because the thought of eating would make me more nauseous.  I figured it was a 24 hour virus although when the feeling did not go away, I decided to go to urgent care for a second opinion.  Thinking the attending physician would simply just give me anti-nausea medication and send me on my way, was an incorrect conclusion.  The doctor prescribed me with a low dose of anti anxiety medication which helped me contain my fear.  The medication also enabled me to regulate myself in ways that I couldn’t due to the distraction of my anxiety.  The doctor also ran through several breathing exercises with me that would also help reduce my anxiety.  Till this day, when I get anxious I think back to the meditation exercises which calm me down.  Although I can not eliminate anxiety, I can do many exercises to help me feel at ease with my fear.