Hello EC, I've been going through a rough time for the past few weeks. Whenever I wake up, I feel a combo of anxiety, stress, emptiness, hopelessness, and "weird-ness". But then, those feelings tend to fade away after about 30 minutes to an hour. Whenever I feel happy, there is this nagging feeling that I haven't figured something out. This situation started bothering me not too long ago. I graduated from community college back in May (congrats to me) but something is still bothering me about it. I have an OCD problem. When I walked across the stage, it was an "unlucky" time. Now, I feel like my graduation is "cursed". Plus, I'm feeling guilty that I allowed something really small to ruin my graduation day. I want to speak to a counselor right away but I can't. I have to wait until the school year starts. I need help controlling my emotions until I can get help (or just completely solve this problem as soon as I can). I need help getting out of this emotional rollercoaster. Please help. Any advice? Scientific advice? Other input?
Hey there, and congrats for graduating community college! I can hiiiiighly relate to this. I am a severe overthinker and tend to have really bad anxiety when I'm overwhelmed from stress. I've had a bad few years and it's been at an all time high, so I've been able to witness how out of hand my anxiety can get. At times I border on paranoia from overthinking. I'll have a bad feeling, try to understand the bad feeling, try to be a psychic, and then I blast away into a world of anxious overthinking filled with some horror/thriller movie worthy material. I'm even sort of going through an episode lately. I've gone through some crazy life stuff and things are calming down, but I think my senses can't calm down from it. Much of the time, I'm expecting the absolute worst to happen at every moment. Something I like to do is imagine writing my actual thoughts, like here to you right now, except I'd sound insane. That brings me back to reality a bit. If it sounds too abnormal, it probably is! Kind of like your 'cursed' graduation theory. My advice, scientific or not, is to find some articles on anxiety/anxiety spikes and how they can roll out of control. Sometimes those are helpful, they can maybe make you calm down a bit by acknowledging that it's something that happens. Also, if you can, maybe go to a doctor and get a check up just to make sure nothing's going on, like vitamin levels being off or anything like that. Also, did this stem from graduating? There's a thing that I would call Transitional Anxiety, if I could name anxieties! Where people get super stressed from a big change or things ending and feel uneasy, so go into anxious thoughts instead of accepting that they're just going through a big change. In the morning, try to distract yourself by switching your thoughts and focusing on something more positive, or wake up to music so your mind is instantly distracted by something other than your own thoughts. Think of when this started and what was going on around it. If it's from an event, and that thing is over, try to acknowledge that this is what these feelings are from, but it's over now (hopefully) and you can start adjusting into a new structure, or even get back to your old self. Hope you feel better!
Thanks for replying. I’m glad you can relate to what I posted. My anxiety tends to go up and down. It is like a scale for me. I tend to try to be a psychic only for it to lead down a path of my anxiety getting worse than before. I will try to read more articles that pertain to anxiety and anxiety spikes. Being able to acknowledge that this may be natural for me to have anxiety episodes is definitely helpful. I’m going to ask my parents if I can see a doctor soon. Thank you for your tips. I will take these into consideration.
