I’ve suffered from anxiety for as long as I can remember, but in my third year or college I’m only just realizing that the source of pretty much all of my anxiety is school. I’m perfectly happy and calm working on things that aren’t school related... that is when my anxiety from college doesn’t seep into the rest of my life. I come from an extremely rigorous, competitive high school and a father who pushed me far harder than I could handle (along with other poor parenting decisions). This combined with the environment I faced in high school from my peers and teachers and trying to maintain my ranking in the top 5% of the class (because once you got passed 10% it was a bitter cat fight between students for their number on the leaderboard of GPA), I associated far too much of my self worth and happiness with how high my GPA and ranking was as well as how good my resume looked. This carried over into college where school work terrifies me and my anxiety is basically always present twisting my stomach. I love biking and running and just generally working out, but I can’t go past half an hour of cardio without having a panic attack anymore. I’ve realized this feeling is worse and worse the further into the semester I go, because at the beginning of the semester I’m fine. I have a hard time working on personal projects as well or enjoying much of anything else except video games or anime (my safe havens) without feeling like I’m going to have a panic attack. And it all comes back to what academic stressors I have on me at that time. At this point I’m taking a gap year instead of going into grad school right away and I’m holding off on going back on medication or anything else until I graduate since I simply want to get college over with.

TL; DR: is anyone else’s anxiety deeply rooted in academics because of a terrible environment like mine is? And what do you do to manage it?