KidSpirit

Overcoming Fear and Anxiety

Fear and AnxietyGlobal Beat

I would like to share my vision about anxiety (I won’t share my vision about fear, because I think it is simpler than anxiety) and also how I think it can be triggered for the first time in someone’s life.

To me, anxiety is always having the same questions in your head: Why? How? What if? Did I? These questions appear at random, but they are more likely to appear when you’re not busy with something or when you’re not focusing specifically on one thing (for example, when you’re trying to sleep, or if you’re having a conversation with someone).

Anxiety is worrying a lot about tiny details that most people would just ignore. Anxiety is expecting almost everything to go wrong at some point and having an A, B, even a Z plan as backup.

Anxiety is being so tense all the time that some parts of your body, like your neck, back, and shoulders, start to hurt, you bite your nails, and you are in a bad mood.

Now, let’s talk about how anxiety can be triggered for the first time. Life has a lot of stages, and during those stages you experience a lot of feelings (good and bad), but some of them have a greater impact on your life. You know, the feelings that “change’’ you or make you grow up. You gather these feelings one after another, but all of the sudden, you experience something bigger (an accident, an illness, problems with your family, etc.), something that makes all of those little feelings come out at the same time, like a burst of emotions.

After that, you start wondering what if you’d done something differently. Basically, you are constantly thinking about things in the past that you could have done better or things that you didn’t value when you had them.

In my life, fear and anxiety started as obstacles. They were always blocking me from reaching my goals (sometimes they still do that), but now, I’ve learned to use them as motivation in some cases. It’s tough because if, for some reason, you fail at using your fears or anxieties as motivation, they become stronger, and you have to overcome them again.

I know a lot of people who live with anxiety in my community. Some of them are still struggling with it, some of them already overcame it but at some point they relapse a little, and many other different cases.

What I’m trying to say is that almost everyone suffers from anxiety at some point in life, and we need to learn how to recognize when a person is having a tough time with it, so we can be able to help them, or at least try to be careful about how we interact with that person. Also, I would like to highlight the fact that we need to talk about mental health more often, especially in my country, Paraguay.

Gustavo Ramos is a 17-year-old from Coronel Oviedo, Paraguay. He is interested in the environment, video games, politics, cooking, science fiction, chemistry, physics, and psychology and its importance in daily life.

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Art by Jaden Flach, Brooklyn