Severe Anxiety and Homework

faransaa
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:49:18 +0000

You sound exactly like me. I absolutely love to read, write, and learn in general but when it comes time to do it for school it all just feels so forced and trite. I have tried almost every medication known to man and nothing seems to work. After working with both a psychiatrist and counselor, I have been diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety, and bipolar.

The anxiety aspect of my mental illness forced me to avoid…everything. This, of course, included schoolwork. I couldn’t read assigned texts, couldn’t write (and I’m a writer!), couldn’t do a single math problem. Everything just seemed so pointless and the anxiety this created was insurmountable. I wanted so badly to be able to do what I used to so enjoy, what I still loved but simply could not do.

Now, instead of avoiding, and besides the help of my 4 medications, I alternate between doing tasks for fun and for school. This has really worked for me, and I hope it works for you too. Seriously, to get over the anxiety, it really helps to just do it. (People kept telling me this, and I didn’t believe them - I would try, really, I would, to do my homework, but it just didn’t feel right; something in my brain was off. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, couldn’t recollect facts, I just felt like I had gotten stupider. Actually, I feel like some medications can have averse cognitive effects that negatively impact academics.) But then, with the help of my medicine, the anxiety wore off a bit and, little by little, I could accomplish something. I would sit down for 20 minutes, no more, and crank out whatever I possibly could. Then I would move on to something not-so-anxiety-inducing and do that for another 20 minutes. And so on and so forth.

I really hope this strategy can be of some help to you.