When anxiety is not just anxiety

High school student thinking (Alana Moscoso-Mendoza / The Puma Prensa)

By Alana Moscoso-Mendoza, Opinion Editor

Anxiety is oftentimes seen as a normal part of life for adolescents, mostly due to school-related stress. Between grades, social pressure, college applications, and at-home responsibilities, feeling stress or overwhelm seems almost guaranteed. While teens are bound to feel stress at some point in their lives, for many individuals, anxiety goes far beyond occasional worry. 

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 31.9% of US adolescents had any anxiety disorder. Based on that staggering statistic alone, about 3 in 10 individuals aged 13-18 have an anxiety disorder, which are most commonly reported in this age range. However, not all anxiety looks the same; in some cases, what is dismissed as general anxiety or typical teenage stress can actually be obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. 

Not every experience of school stress is OCD or general anxiety disorder (GAD). However, these conditions are often grouped together despite being very distinct from each other. 

GAD affects roughly 2% of US adolescents, reports Mission Harbor Behavioral Health. Symptoms of this disorder include persistent worry about areas “out of proportion to the impact of the events, a difficulty handling uncertainty, inability to let go of a worry or relax, and difficulty concentrating,” to name a few outlined by Mayo Clinic. Furthermore, GAD does not only affect the mind, but the body, as well. Fatigue and trouble sleeping are common, as well as nausea and irritability. 

GAD is much different than typical school-related stress; it is oftentimes all-consuming, persistent, and unable to be overcome. That is not to say that GAD renders an individual helpless, because it does not, and it is a very treatable condition. However, the significant differences in the amount, severity, and persistence of anxiety is generally what sets GAD and common stress apart.

OCD, while also an anxiety disorder, is not simply extreme GAD, and it is not obsessive cleanliness. While it can be a common symptom for many individuals with OCD, that is not all that OCD is– what characterizes the disorder are unwanted and frequent intrusive thoughts. Mayo Clinic outlines the major symptoms of OCD, some of them being aggressive thoughts about becoming out of control and harming yourself or others, “unwanted thoughts, including aggression, or sexual or religious subjects,” fear of contamination, and requiring everything to be “orderly and balanced.” Some examples of obsessive symptoms would be recurring, overwhelming “doubts that you’ve locked the door or turned off the stove,” or “intense stress when objects aren’t orderly.” 

With obsession comes compulsions, which are repetitive behaviors that one feels “compulsed” to do in order to reduce anxiety related to one’s obsessions, or to prevent something bad from happening. These actions, which can be anything from washing/cleaning, counting, following a very strict routine, or anything else, oftentimes don’t actually relate to the issue they’re supposed to fix. Furthermore, they usually only offer brief relief, while anxiety related to the issue lingers and eventually comes back up later. Some examples of compulsion symptoms would be “hand-washing until your skin becomes raw, counting in certain patterns,” or obsessively “trying to replace a bad thought with a good thought.”

Both GAD and OCD are statistically uncommon in adolescents, but are still prevalent today. Many anxiety disorders often go unnoticed in teens for a number of reasons, but predominantly because an adolescent’s life is naturally stressful, and what may appear outwardly to be occasional anxious thoughts can actually be much more than that.

Sometimes occasional stress is just that, and sometimes it's a much bigger issue than many of the individuals around you–even those that are supposed to advocate for your mental health–are able to recognize. That is why it is so essential that teenagers check in with themselves and confide in people they feel safe in doing so with.