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Clarity
Sophomore learns to cope with anxiety Libby S eline COpy Editor It was as if he would wake up each morning with a pair of fogged up goggles covering his eyes. He couldn’t think clearly. He had trouble performing everyday tasks. Sophomore Sam Vazzano felt as if these goggles were jumbling up his thoughts and causing him to not act like himself. These goggles are like his anxiety, which causes him to overthink situations. “[Anxiety disorder] just makes the situations that you’re in and the things that you’re doing just that much more difficult [than] if you didn’t have the ‘goggles’ on,” Vazzano said. Vazzano was diagnosed with anxiety when he was in fifth grade, and is part of the 8 percent of teenagers that have been diagnosed with anxiety disorder in the United States according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Anxiety is classified as a mental illness, and according to school psychologist Melissa Williams, it occurs when the brain’s neurotransmitter called serotonin is not responding the way it should. When this happens, people may constantly have a nervous feeling. It is also possible that people develop a feeling of anxiety in certain situations. “We all have [anxiety] to keep us moving, to keep us motivated, to accomplish things that we have that happen everyday in our life,” Williams said. “[Anxiety disorder is] when the anxiety happens over a long period of time and is interfering with something in the person’s life.” Vazzano believes he has had symptoms of anxiety since kindergarten when he started to have panic attacks that caused shortness of breath. Doctors diagnosed him with asthma at the time. Several years later, he began to notice that his inhaler did not help him. “I just became aware that these are anxiety attacks,” Vazzano said. “I [was] afraid when these [were] happening, and there [was] usually an underlying reason why this [was] happening.” He was officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder in fifth grade and started to see a therapist. A psychologist gave him medication to help him cope with his anxiety. However, the original medication did not help him control his nervousness. “I felt an urgent need to change the medicine because none of it was working,” Vazzano said. “I started getting anxiety over my anxiety medicine because each and every single one that I was getting wasn’t working for me.” During eighth and ninth grade, Vazzano’s anxiety was at its worst. The summer before freshman year, he went through a three-month period where he thought about philosophical concepts such as afterlife. It was at this time that his anxiety felt like a feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach.
“I was just in a constant state of anxiety,” Vazzano said. “You feel like you’re going crazy almost. It’s scary because you have all of these thoughts going through your mind constantly, you feel like it’s never going to end.” As he entered freshman year, he began to feel the symptoms of social anxiety as well. He would keep to himself and didn’t want to talk to a lot of people. He did not talk to his friends from middle school and struggled to talk to his teachers. He still has social anxiety and causes him to be nervous during the day. “I will feel scared almost as if you’re a little kid and you’re afraid there’s a monster under your bed,” Vazzano said. “I try my best to hide the fear [of social situations], but generally I start to shake, I get nervous [and my] breathing can be slightly off.” It was also during freshman year that doctors gave Vazzano a medicine to help cope with anxiety. “The medicine doesn’t help 100 percent, and it’s not supposed to because some of it has to come from yourself or else you’d just kind of be like a robot,” Vazzano said. Vazzano copes with his anxiety by taking risks. He has taken a risk by reaching out to his friends from middle school again, which proved to be beneficial. “I would say in February of last year, I couldn’t count my friends on two hands,” Vazzano said. “So, I had maybe five good friends. Now I can’t count them on both hands. I would need a lot of hands. I would need to be an octopus.” Vazzano also uses coping methods introduced to him by therapists. He has learned strategies such as tensing up his muscles and then relaxing and also has learned to take a deep breath when he feels anxious. In addition to these coping strategies, Vazzano has looked to music to help him cope with his condition. Music allows Vazzano to take his mind off his thoughts. He admires the different emotions a song can elicit “Definitely one of the best things someone with anxiety can do is have something that they love that can get their mind off of their anxiety, something that they can do pretty much on a daily basis,” Vazzano said. “That’s what I did, and music has definitely changed my life.” Currently, Vazzano has a variety of other activities that make him happy and takes his mind off of his anxiety. He only experiences a little anxiety each day and has learned to convince himself that there is no reason to be afraid. “I know that what I’m anxious about isn’t anything to be scared about, but my anxiety doesn’t know that,” Vazzano said. “In my head, I know that it is nothing to be afraid of, but I’m still afraid because of my anxiety. As long as I can rationalize [that] there is nothing to be afraid of, I can talk myself down.” Vazzano has been more open talking to people about his anxiety and feels like his funny, laidback self more often. He claims his anxiety has never been better. “If you’re in your car [and the front windshield] was covered in ice and hard to see, it’s kind of like throughout the years I’ve taken the scraper for the window and started scraping away at it,” Vazzano said. “It’s not always perfect, but you can at least see.”