Anxiety is uncomfortable but harmless to experience anxiety. There are things you can do to learn to deal with your anxiety.
Worry, anxiety and panic are terms describing an increased sense of unpleasant reactions. They can take the form of slight nervousness, an upset stomach or, in stronger cases, a panic attack with breathing difficulties and dizziness.
Anxiety can cause various symptoms in the human body. Here are some common examples.
Worrying and dwelling is a mental behaviour that essentially is vital for our survival. Anxiety can be described as a sort of bodily alarm system that triggers when we come across a threat. The reaction is intended to help us handle dangers by fight, flight or by playing dead.
The body and brain cannot separate real threats from non-dangerous threats – the alarm system triggers in both cases. If you think a scary thought, like “I’ll never pass my exam”, the bodily alarm system will react as if it was true. For that reason, it is good if you are aware of your thoughts and how reasonable they are. Also emotions, situations, memories and bodily reactions can cause anxiety.
Normal symptoms of anxiety
If you suspect that these symptoms can be caused by something other than anxiety, it is important that you seek medical advice at a health centre.
Is anxiety an emotion?
Anxiety can feel like and is similar to fear in many ways, but it isn’t an emotion in itself but rather a reaction to one or many other emotions. It can be difficult to separate emotions from each other. To understand and do something about your anxiety, yo
u must become aware of your emotions.
We all need our emotions to get guidance on how we feel about things and how to react and communicate to satisfy both our own and others’ needs. Here is a film that can give you a better understanding of how emotions work.
Not leading the life you want can cause anxiety
One way of looking at anxiety is if you act and live life in a way that differs greatly from your underlying values and desires, it can cause anxiety.
Since humans are a herd animal it is natural that we try to adapt to the contexts we are faced with. As a student, you need to make adaptions to fit your education and performance, for instance to pass an exam, but it is also easy to lose your sense of direction and your priorities when trying to adapt to others’ expectations. Take a minute to reflect on how some areas of your life work: education (and maybe work), relationships, spare time and health.
Mental health
Everyone has a mental health. And everyone goes through periods of not feeling good. Everyone feels bad sometimes. You may have experienced something tough or worry about something. Maybe you don't really know why you feel the way you feel. There are things you can do to feel better, but you might also need professional help.
How you manage to handle the challenges you are faced with in life depends on your current mental health status. If you want to learn more about mental health, take a look at this film (approximately 2 minutes long).
What are mental health problems? By Mind, the mental health charity.
You can find more information about mental health at Studenthälsa.se a national webpage for students.
Mind to read more about most aspects of mental health.
By gaining knowledge and looking out for your basic needs, you can affect how much and how often your anxiety bothers you.
Some simple tips
Start by making sure you:
Practise mindfulness
Mindfulness aims to make yourself actively aware of what happens around you in that moment without valuing or assessing what you experience. By practising mindfulness you get an opportunity to ease off and relax, but also to become aware of your own thoughts, emotions, your body and actions and how these affect how you feel and your life from a short and long-term perspective. It can also contribute to making it easier to make decisions, focus and increase your awareness and compassion for yourself and others.
Here are some good mindfulness and relaxation exercises you can try.
Those initial scary or difficult thoughts that automatically pop up are difficult to change, and may just need to be accepted, but if you often keep wondering and pondering it means you have created a habit. It is easy to think that we can control a situation by thinking about it often, but as you may have noticed, thinking about something often makes you more upset and means it’s difficult to finish one thought at a time. Your mind gets muddled up and it’s difficult to see solutions.
As anxiety can be experienced as very unpleasant, it could lead to avoiding situations that cause anxiety. That means you may become more limited in life than what you want to be. When you have started avoiding things that give you discomfort, it often becomes more difficult to do them again. That’s why it is so important to find ways of dealing with the unpleasantries to allow you to do what you want and need to do.
Three things that fuel anxiety
Gritting your teeth and keep going, ignoring it or paying attention to the anxiety – what works best?
Here is some advice on what to do when you feel worried or experience anxiety. If you want to look more closely into specific situations that can cause anxiety, you can use a behaviour analysis method.
Here is some advice on what to do when you feel worried or experience anxiety. If you want to look more closely into specific situations that can cause anxiety, you can use a behaviour analysis method.
A short film with Alfred & Shadow about how our inner critic can make us feel ashamed about ourselves and make us feel lonely and low. The film is approximately 5.5 minutes long.
Here is some advice on things to try when you need to reduce your levels of anxiety.
Continue doing what you planned to do before you started experiencing anxiety.
One way of gaining an understanding of what causes anxiety and finding new ways of dealing with it is to make a behavioural analysis. It can help you gain an insight into how behaviours that are problematic to you arise and what consequences they have on you in the short and long term.
Do this:
Start by writing down a situation or event that causes discomfort or anxiety and that leads to a behaviour that you wish to change. Use the following structure and describe everything as best you can:
Do you need help thinking of situations that cause you discomfort? Here are some examples of common situations.
You are welcome to book an appointment for individual counselling at the Student Health Service.
A lot of people experience thoughts about not wanting to live when they are going through a rough time and don’t see any simple solutions to their problems. You should never keep suicidal thoughts to yourself. It is important to tell someone you trust about how you feel. It can be a friend, someone in your family, a health care professional or an anonymous helpline.
Most people who struggle with suicidal thoughts do not actually want to die but may need some help to manage life. It is common to feel very alone and think that it’s no use talking to anybody. Many of us might be afraid to be judged, misunderstood or not be taken seriously. But there is effective help to be found and if you feel like you have already tried reaching out without getting the help you need, it is important that you try again.
If you want to read more about the possible causes of suicidal thoughts and feelings, coping strategies as well as how to know if you should seek professional help - please click on the the link to Mind UK.
If your suicidal thoughts are getting so bad that your situation is becoming unbearable or if you are making plans to commit suicide, then you need to immediately visit the psychiatric clinic or call 112 the national phone number for emergency.