Anxiety and What to do About It

Spring Break has come and gone. For university students this means that end of semester is looming and finals are just around the corner. In other words, the anxiety meter is hitting an all time high. It’s exactly around this time that anxiety creeps into our lives for many reasons. If you’re like John you haven’t done anything all semester and the workload ahead of you instills panic, fear and uneasiness. If you’re more like Alice, the lack of confidence you face when writing finals is enough to send you over the edge: “a… no b… maybe it’s c…” sound familiar? For these reasons and many more anxiety is one of the most debilitating factors affecting test performance and overall life satisfaction.

I have seen what anxiety can do to people who have to deal with it on a daily basis. It’s easy for someone like me, who doesn’t get anxious very often, to just tell my anxious friends to get over it or to look at things a different way but it’s much harder when the shoe is on the other foot. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment, aka GAD-7, is a self-administered questionnaire usually given to people to measure the severity of their anxiety. The GAD-7 score is calculated on a scale from 0–3 where the total score of 5,10 and 15 represent the cut-off point for mild, moderate and severe anxiety. Being a self-administered questionnaire, this often raises doubts in our minds about the truthfulness of the respondent’s answers but this test has been shown to have a sensitivity of 89% and specificity of 82%, making it a valid and efficient tool for screening generalized anxiety disorders. Furthermore, it has good reliability and validity.

So for all the John’s and Alice’s out there, whenever the time comes that you feel your anxiety is getting the best of you here are a few things you can do to help yourselves out

1. Learn to postpone worrying (create a worry period)

2. Distinguish between solvable and unsolvable worries

3. Stop worrying by questioning the anxious thought

Epictetus said it best “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”