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

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

Olivia Remes

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.