Teenage Anxiety

Rachel glanced across the room at her friends and classmates, all of them laughing and easy in each other's company, and it struck her that she used to be exactly like that before the stress and the constant worry took hold. She could still picture herself smiling and joking with the same group. The difference in how she felt now taught her something uncomfortable: that a face full of joy can be a mask people wear over pain they would rather keep hidden.

The anxiety first hit hard in the spring of her junior high years, a stretch that wears on most kids anyway. Her plate was full. Homework, AP classes, soccer practice every evening, pit band rehearsals, and a boyfriend on top of all of it. She was, in her own word, overloaded. Looking at the pile of commitments, she figured she had to let go of one thing, and the piece that seemed to generate the most tension was the relationship.

"One night during the final dress rehearsal for the school play, my mind drifted to my boyfriend. We'd been together since the start of the year, and since he was the first guy I'd dated, I didn't really know how relationships were supposed to work. Sitting there in rehearsal, questions about us kept surfacing. Where was this headed? Was it even a good relationship? What was holding it together? These are ordinary things to wonder about, but the way I responded was out of proportion, both in my head and in my body. I couldn't keep my place in the music. My breathing sped up, I started shaking, and I was certain he was going to break up with me and that everything would come apart. I pictured nothing but disaster, one scenario after another, until I couldn't stay in my seat with the band. I left the auditorium in the middle of the last full run-through and bolted to the bathroom, where I ended up vomiting in a stall."

After that night of spiraling through every worst case, things only got heavier. She stayed home from school for the next three days, flattened by the dread, and spent most of that time in bed turning the worry over and over. Trying to reason her way out, she traced the fear back to the relationship and concluded it was the source of everything. So when the moment came, she sat him down, explained where her head was, and ended it.

The anxiety did not go anywhere. Something underneath it was still gnawing at her, and since her schedule was clearly packed too tight, she wondered whether leaving the soccer team might settle things. It did the opposite. Once she quit, she felt worse, and now guilt and second-guessing moved in. Had breaking up been the right call? Did he still want her? What about her coach and teammates, had she let them down, were they angry? Her schoolwork kept slipping as the worry shifted targets, now fixing on what her family and friends must be thinking of her. She had just started taking psychology, and the fear curdled into a strange certainty: everyone would read the chapter on psychopathology, recognize her in it, decide she was mentally ill and plainly unhinged. And then what would they make of her?

Her parents, though, stayed level. They arranged for her to see the school psychologist. She was terrified, irrationally so, that she would be hauled off to some treatment facility, but the man said he only wanted to talk, and that alone took some of the pressure off. The conversation led to an appointment with a psychologist outside the school, who diagnosed her with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. He taught her controlled breathing and how to catch herself before leaping to the darkest conclusion. Even so, the excessive worrying hung on, and eventually she added medication, which finally seemed to shift things in her direction.

With the medication and ongoing therapy together, Rachel noticed a change within a few weeks. The anxiety became something she could live with. She came to understand that she was far from perfect and also nowhere near crazy. Knowing other teenagers carry the same weight gave her a sense of connection she had been missing. Coming through the anxiety left her steadier and surer of herself than she had been before, and somewhere in the process she learned the worth of taking a risk instead of arranging her whole life around avoiding fear.

Rachel's complete account appears at teenshealth.org on their teen mental health page about anxiety.