Unnecessarily Anxious

There are many situations in my life that I feel I am not capable of looking at clearly, and it was nice to see a clear example of that in Sophie’s World, with the red-tinted glasses experiment. The experiment was basically conducted to show Sophie what it is like to see the world from a different perspective, and give her a better understanding of Kant’s theory that there are certain conditions that prevent humans from experiencing the world clearly. There are many factors that I can think of in my own life that cause me to be incapable of perceiving my environment clearly, but one stands out above the others. My anxiety disorder often causes me to view situations differently, and then have highly escalated reactions in response.

Most students might procrastinate doing a certain difficult assignment, and just remember with annoyance that they still have to do it. For me, this is not the case. When I attempt to wait on doing an assignment for any period of time, I begin to think that I won’t be able to complete it in time and I cannot think of anything other than getting that assignment done, partly due to the huge knot in my stomach that tightens every time I think of a stressful assignment. In most cases, this can be helpful because I am pushed to do the assignment as soon as I can and then I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Unfortunately, it does not work so well when I find out that a friend is ahead of me on a project or has totally completed it before me. I become so anxious about getting to the point that they are, or farther, that I have difficulty focusing on anything else. If I think about how I feel logically, I know that feeling that way is totally irrational because I have plenty of time to complete the project if I continue on my own schedule. Regardless of this, I will normally continue to think about someone else being ahead of me, which could also be partly due to my competitiveness, until I give in and just finish the project, or do a colossal amount of it at once.

And of course, this anxiety spreads to situations outside of school as well. If I simply go to the movies with friends and I think that they talk to each other more than they do to me, I start believing that they don’t like me, or I have done something wrong to make them not want to talk to me. Once again, I know in my head that this feeling is totally ridiculous most often, but I cannot make it go away for a few day or sometimes until the next time that I can see those same friends again.

There are some small aspects of my anxiety that I am beginning to be capable of ignoring, so I hope 

that eventually I will be able to feel normally about most situations that currently stress me out. Until then, I 

will keep trying to know rationally how I should feel and hopefully stick to that feeling instead of seeing

things differently than almost everyone else.