'It's Just Me, Right?': My Experience with Anxiety in Graduate School
As I sit at my desk (conveniently positioned next to the door of the grad student office), I hear footsteps approaching from down the hallway. They must be coming from the faculty offices at the other end of the suite. My palms start sweating, my heart rate increases, and I start mentally running through the list of all I've done recently, wondering what I've done wrong, and if this is the moment I'll get yelled at embarassingly in front of my peers. As the footsteps get louder, I minimize any windows on my laptop and monitor that might appear at all un-academic (We all have Twitter up in the background, let's be honest here), and I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans in hopes of calming myself down. As I brace for the oncoming storm of whatever foe approaches, my stomach tightens and I can feel the blood drain from my face and --
It’s not my advisor. It’s another faculty member, here to ask my office-mate a question. I breathe a sigh of relief, and take a moment to calm back down before returning to work, mildly embarrased at my own reaction.
This cycle of fear became a regular occurrence for me in the 2nd year of my PhD program. Had I ever been yelled at by my advisor? No. She is an incredibly supportive, caring, and understanding person who plucked me out of my undergraduate program and believed I was driven and bright enough to do this PhD in the first place. But the fear of being reprimanded or told to leave was so present and constant for me that I became paranoid and increasingly self-critical. I wasn’t really aware of why I was feeling this way, and for a long time I just assumed that everyone else also felt like throwing up or literally running away as they stepped into a meeting or their advisor popped in for a visit. I chalked my feelings up to stress and, seeing everyone else around me equally stressed all the time, figured it was just how I handled things.
But, it ended up getting worse as time progressed. I lost 15 pounds in one semester because I couldn’t bring myself to eat. I would have days where I just felt numb, not wanting to speak to anyone or do anything other than work or feel guilty about not working. My thoughts would meticulously dissect the code I had worked on that day and focus on any hypothetical errors I could have made, and how horrible it would be if those errors existed and went unnoticed until after a publication. I couldn’t relax long enough to watch a movie with my roommates; I vividly remember watching Mad Max in our living room and feeling the cold spindles of dread wind through my body as I sat on the couch. I sighed a lot back then, too, like I would forget to breathe as often as I should and had to sigh to keep enough oxygen flowing. Full-blown anxiety attacks didn’t happen very often for me, but when they did, they materialized as me convinced my heart wasn’t working correctly and that I was actually dying (thanks for that one, anxiety-induced heart palpatations!). On two occaisons, I sat in a corner of my room, called my Mom, and cried over the phone until she could calm me down. This sounds crazy now, but when you feel like you’re drowning it’s hard to realize you’re only in two feet of water and can just stand up.
In the Spring of 2016, after facing multiple occaisons where I felt my only option was to quit my PhD program (one time even telling my advisor how I was feeling), I finally convinced myself that maybe what I was experiencing was more than just the stress of being a graduate student. With my family’s encouragement, I sought help from MSU’s Counseling and Psychiatric Services, and after a semester of counseling and a visit with my doctor, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and perscribed anti-anxiety medication. At first, I was hesitant to take the meds, as my Comprehensive Exams were only a month away, and I had no idea if I would experience any side effects. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to think like myself, and would fail the most important exam of my life as a consequence (ironically, having anxiety definitely didn’t help with that decision-making process).
Eventually, after again leaning on my friends and family, I started my medication and life got a little easier. I learned tools that I could use to interrupt the cyclical thoughts that spun my anxiety out of control, like practicing mindful breathing when stressed and before bed, and maintaining an exercise program (this is my favorite song to breathe to: Long Time Traveller - The Wailin’ Jennys). I now respect and prioritize taking breaks from work, and focus on being present in every moment. Even little things like turning off email notifications on my cell phone reduced my fear of getting bad news electronically.
I also want to mention, my situation would have been a million times worse if I hadn’t had the support of my loved ones during the darkest days. I’m eternally grateful to my friends and family for being there while I worked through this, from my Mom and (now) husband listening to me cry over the phone, to my good friends letting me come hang out at their house on nights I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts. I felt like a burden and hated it, but I hope they know how much their love and attention helped me feel like I could live with my anxiety.
Anxiety, like other mental illnesses, isn’t something you are ever ‘cured’ of; instead, you learn to live with it and how to overcome the cycles of negative thoughts. I still have days where the world feels like it’s ending, but I have far more good days than bad. I still keep hand sanitizer on my desk for days where my palms won’t stop sweating. When my anxiety is at its worst, I cut the fingers off a pair of cheap dollar store gloves so at least I won’t feel the sweat, or see the rings of salt left where my hands sit as I type. I have a new-found skill of being able to identify my office- and suite-mates by the sounds their footsteps make in the hallway or their keys make in the door (not sure when that will come in handy, but a nifty trick, nonetheless). My anxiety is a part of me, but through the methods I’ve adopted with my support system, my anxiety doesn’t dictate my life.
So why am I telling the internet all of this? Because I want everyone to know that they are not alone. According to this survey of over 3,600 graduate students in Belgium summarized by “Science” magazine, over 50% of students experienced at least two symptoms of poor mental health in recent weeks, with 32% of participants reporting at least four symptoms, which is indicative of mental health disorders. Doesn’t that seem a bit ridiculous? The pressures of pursuing higher education are immense and isolating, but the social stigma surrounding mental illness is just as great. I know I felt alone when my mental health was deteriorating, and I was afraid to admit that I needed help. The only way to improve the situation is to share our experiences and recognize that while some stress is unavoidable, not all stress is healthy and needing help doesn’t make you a less capable person. Obtaining a Masters or PhD degree comes with many sacrifices, but deteriorating mental health should not be one of them. It’s up to all of us to change our system through better symptom recognition and accessibility of support for the treatment of these mental illnesses. I think we can do it; we just have to be willing to try.