Olivia Remes: How to Cope With Anxiety at TEDxUHasselt (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of  Olivia Remes’ TEDx talk: How to Cope With Anxiety at TEDxUHasselt conference. 

Listen to the MP3 Audio: How to cope with anxiety by Olivia Remes at TEDxUHasselt

 

Olivia Remes – University of Cambridge

Imagine that you’re getting ready to go to a party. You feel excited, but also nervous, and you’ve got this feeling in your stomach almost like another heartbeat.

There’s something holding you back, holding you back from getting too happy: “No, you mustn’t get too happy. Better to be cautious, otherwise, something bad might happen.”

You start wondering, “Who should I talk to when I get there? What if no one wants to talk to me? What if they’ll think I’m weird?”

When you arrive at the party, someone comes up to you and starts talking with you, and as this is happening, your mind starts racing, your heart begins pounding, you start sweating, and it feels almost like you’re dissociating from yourself, like it’s an out-of-body experience, and you’re just watching yourself talk “Keep it together,” you say to yourself, but you can’t.

And it’s just getting worse: after a few minutes of conversation, the person you’ve been speaking to leaves, and you feel utterly defeated. This has been happening to you in social situations for a long time. Or imagine every time you go out, and you’re in crowded places, you feel this panic starting to arise.

When you’re surrounded by lots of people, like on a bus, you start to feel hot, nauseous, uneasy, and to prevent this from happening, you start avoiding a lot of places which makes you feel lonely and isolated. You or the person in both of these scenarios have anxiety disorders, and what I can tell you is that anxiety is very common, much more than people think.

Right now, one in 14 people around the world have an anxiety disorder, and each year, it costs over $42 billion to treat this mental health problem. To show you the impact that anxiety has on someone’s life, I will just mention that anxiety can lead to depression, school dropout, suicide. It makes it harder to focus, and to hold down a job, and it can lead to relationship breakdown.

But a lot of people don’t know this. That’s why, a lot of times, people sweep anxiety under the rug as just nerves that you need to get over, as a weakness, but anxiety is so much more than that. A reason why so many people don’t think it’s important is that they don’t know what it is.

Is it your personality? Is it an illness? Is it a normal sensation? What is? That’s why it’s important to differentiate what is normal anxiety from what is an anxiety disorder.

Normal anxiety is an emotion that we all get when we’re in stressful situations. For example, let’s say, you’re out in the woods, and you come face-to-face with a bear. This will probably make you feel a little bit anxious, and you’ll probably want to start running like crazy. This anxious feeling that you get is good because it protects you, it saves you, and it makes you on a hightail it out of there, although maybe it’s not such a good idea to start running when you see a bear.

I really don’t think you can outrun a bear. Anxiety helps us meet our deadlines at work and deal with emergencies in life, but when this anxiety emotion is taken to the extreme and arises in situations which don’t pose a real threat, then that’s when you might have an anxiety disorder.