a few school-related anxiety queries

I am a high school senior, recently accepted to the college and major of my choice, which funnily enough should be a relief to me, but I have now merely gained a new anxiety: that I will fuck up and bomb hard enough to get my admission revoked. For many years I have been a "high-achieving" student who also intensely procrastinates, and in the last year and a half procrastination and anxiety and what I suspect may be but hope is not depression have contributed to some less-than-good grades (nearly failed calculus last year, failed English this last six-weeks-grading-period (with a 68! aargh!)).

So I am now left to try and push through the next three or so months, with the additional pressure of getting good enough English grades to make up for the last six weeks, and also not fucking myself by performing poorly in other classes. Unfortunately, that sort of pressure only increases my anxiety problems - and right now I have a short essay to write for English, which I am kind of dreading, not to mention an economics test tomorrow.

Today I have been haunted by the urge to curl up and cry somewhere, and at this point I don't even know if it would be helpful to get it out of my system or if it would just end up with me in a crying/exhausted downward spiral.

I guess my questions are: do y'all think me crying into a pillow would help at least a little, or would it be easier if I just pushed through first to try and complete this English essay? Do you have any methods to help cope with anxiety and/or lack of motivation when there's stuff you NEED to get done? Also, any methods to help you think logically when you're feeling panicked and just want to escape the anxiety/panic (my #1 escapism method: procrastinating and reading fanfiction instead of doing things?)

 

@Chiomi
Thank you for the advice! I actually feel a bit better/calmer just by having written out/rambled about my issues, so there's that. I will definitely be trying some of your methods out. Unfortunately, my English essay is in fact due tomorrow; funnily enough, I may be able to hope for school being cancelled due to bad, icy weather tomorrow, which would ease the pressure of the econ test tomorrow, but I would still need to get my English essay in (through email), most likely. Of course, I can't rely on school being cancelled, but I can at least hope a little.

(I have been hesitant to seek treatment because a) I am not sure if I actually am depressed, b) it would become a Thing and my parents would Talk about it, if you get what I mean? I know that it's illogical to value that sort of thing above my mental health, but the idea of them knowing makes me feel anxious, and it won't be too long until I am out from under their roof.)

 

For me, procrastination is usually not laziness, it's 'I'm out of spoons so I'm going to do something that doesn't take more'. I think that's probably pretty common - all of the high-achieving kids I knew in high school had trouble with burnout, because they'd pushed themselves so hard, for so long.

I think Chiomi's advice is good. You need to have time when you're not "on call", when you can completely put your stress down, and shut off that to-do list ticking in your brain. That will give you more spoons, so you'll feel less like procrastinating.

If you're not sleeping enough, you may want to put that on your to-do list too. It really is the best thing you can do to feel better and to get more done. If you routinely don't get enough sleep, you will feel functional, but you'll actually be much slower and stupider.

If there is a small, easy, concrete thing that you can do tonight, I would do that, and then destress. Read five pages, finish one paragraph of your essay. Then put it down and don't worry anymore. It helps to feel like you have done something, and you are capable of doing things. That will help you feel less like schoolwork is a scary, overwhelming thing that never ends. To-do lists and organization can help with that too.

Instead of running to-do lists, I like to have lists of 'what I want to do today', and 'what I actually did today'. The former helps me not stress out about an unimportant thing that I never get around to crossing off the list - that stress makes me avoid the list altogether. 'What I did today' is a list for gloating and cheering myself on, for focusing on my achievements.

If there's someone who can help you, a cheerleader can help a lot - someone who will sit with you and be an emotional support while you work, bring you food, help you get back to work after breaks. If there isn't someone in real life, I suspect this forum would be happy to help.

If your teachers seem like cool people, I would explicitly tell them about the trouble you're having; many teachers will extend due dates or help you if they know you really do care, you're just having mental health issues / feeling overwhelmed. (This definitely sounds to me like mental health issues! Crying into a pillow regularly is not good.) Same thing for college professors. When you get to college, I believe that most colleges have counseling available, and those counselors will not talk to your parents - and talk to the disability office if you get a depression / anxiety diagnosis, they can help with courses.

Do NOT be afraid to take a lighter, easier courseload. No one will think less of you if you take 12-14 credits, especially in your freshman year of college. Take at least one course just for fun, if you can - they do not all have to be difficult courses. College is hard enough that you CAN'T just take 18 credits of impossibly difficult courses.

 

If you need cheerleading or proofreading, again, ping the forum, I bet there will be people around. I'm a little fried today, but I'd be happy to do so as long as I'm up.

If it's too much to get done tonight, and your teacher is cool, you may want to consider asking for an extension. Bring in what you have written, and be prepared to talk about what you were planning to write about. Many teachers will give you an extra day or two, if you ask them for it, so long as it doesn't happen too often.

 

I've been procrastinating for one reason or another since about 3rd grade (around the same time I entered my school's Talented and Gifted program... hmm), and while I honestly can't recall my reasons/rationale for procrastinating back then, the 'out of spoons' rationale definitely rings true for my recent procrastination.

For a significant portion of last week (and quite a bit of my junior year), I definitely wasn't sleeping enough; then I actually got 8+ hours and realized, "this is different." The way that sleep deprivation can make you think even more sleep deprivation is a Good Idea is, well, insidious.

I've always been the type to bite off more than I can chew (see: AP Calculus BC last year, AP English IV this year (granted, I had imagined it would be a lot like AP English III, which I found pretty easy)), so I'm definitely going to try to avoid that when I sign up for classes this summer.

Non-specific replies:
Thanks again to both of you. I sometimes (okay, often) find asking for help to be difficult (part of my pride as an intellectual/high-achieving student, I suspect), so I will have to consider the idea of asking my English teacher for an extension... but with any luck, it may not be necessary (the length requirement is relatively short.) I will definitely also consider seeking out the school counseling when I do go to college.

(Unfortunately, the weather report looks like there probably won't be enough ice on the roads for a school cancellation. Oh well.)

 

No worries; I'm speaking almost completely from experience, so you're not at all alone. I think most 'talented and gifted' kids have these issues at some point; it's actually great that you're dealing with them in high school, rather than in college.

Good luck!

 

Oh boy, all this is sounding horribly, horribly familiar. For reference: currently in college, getting treated for depression (mostly as a result of lurking around seebs & co.) wishing I'd done so years ago.

I don't have much to add to what's already been said. The one thing I'd add that I've been working on which I haven't seen mentioned yet is learning when to cut your losses, and not spend spoons and hours of sleep you can't afford to lose spinning your wheels on an assignment that's not moving forward. I've definitely burned myself out with nothing to show for it that way before. :X

#ifyouwerefuckedupbygiftedprogramsclapyourhands #clapclap

 

@Wiwaxia is definitely right about that!

(Ahaha, I was fucked up by not having gifted programs. Instead my teachers all acted like I was an irritating burden at best and a freak at worst, because I knew words they didn't and wanted harder worksheets and didn't like the other kids. I'm not sure if there's really a good solution there. :\)

(But yeah, being The Smart Kid is a poisonous self-image to maintain.)

 

It also really didn't help me that in my small rural high school I was effortlessly the student getting the best grades. College was a brutal brick wall.

 

I actually had a really good accelerated program in elementary school, it just turned toxic and "we need to prepare you for high school/college, so have double the work, but it's not faster or more interesting, just a year ahead if you're lucky" and grade obsessed in middle school. Like, I went to a counselor with mental health problems and got "your grades are good, I dunno what you're worried about" :T

And I still got out of that relatively easy. I know kids who broke down in tears over a single A- (to be fair, abusive, grade-obsessed parents were likely involved in a lot of those cases)

 

I'm in my first year of university, and I also have problems with procrastination. This caused enough stress, between feeling guilty over not doing things, trying desperately to do things at the last minute, and beating myself up over not doing well enough, that I ended up making an appointment with psychological services at my university - one of my better decisions.

My counselor thinks - and I agree - that in my case the procrastination came from perfectionism. Thought process: I need to make it the absolute best I can make it! If I do not put All Of The Effort into this and it is imperfect, then I did not do my best, it is a Failure and I have Failed. Therefore, once I have started a thing, I cannot stop before I have to hand it in, because otherwise I am not putting enough effort into it. Obviously I can't work on an assignment from the moment it's handed out to the moment it's do, so to cope with this, I started procrastinating. If I give myself just enough time to get something done, then it feels like I did everything I could do, so my head doesn't bother me, and, if I judged right, the assignment gets done passably, so it works well enough to keep things going. Problems come up when I judge wrong, or when something unexpected comes up.

My counselor pointed out that I had actually managed to come up with a coping mechanism that does exactly what I need it to do, and therefore procrastination wasn't so much the personal failing I'd though it to be as it was a clever adaption that needed to be adjusted.

My gifted program was almost completely segregated - I'm in a big enough city that there were enough gifted kids to have full gifted-only classes from grade one to grade eight, and a semi-integrated gifted program in high school. It was actually pretty good for me, in some respects - everyone knew that just because you picked some things up quickly didn't mean you'd automatically be good at everything, and though I knew I was smart, being in the bottom half of your class when you're averaging an A- is pretty good for deflating your ego. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it was everyone telling me that it was how much effort I put in that counted which contributed to the development of the above, so... Win some, lose some? But yeah, the learning to study: First year University, and I'm right now trying to figure that one out.

 

My Talented And Gifted (we called it TAG) program experience was much like that of @Wiwaxia; it was quite good in elementary school, then became very grade-focused in middle school, with the only TAG classes where we had actually advanced course material were math and (to an extent) English; the TAG science and history classes were the same material, just with more work. Funnily enough, in high school some of my AP classes are still labelled as AP TAG, even though there is absolutely no difference between an AP student and a TAG AP student. My guess is the district wants to say good things about their TAG student retention/performance/what-have-you, so they pretend we're still in an actual, non-imaginary TAG program.

I actually read a book that had a lot to say about the detriments of using grades to "motivate" students - Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn. The gist was that using external motivators to try to motivate people often saps peoples' internal/intrinsic motivation. Grades are one big example of external motivators - "As" as carrots and "Fs" as sticks, in the carrot-donkey-stick metaphor, and this applies just as much to high-achieving kids as it does to students closer to the norm. Definitely an interesting read (it also covered the detriments of rewards/external motivators in the workplace and in child-raising.)

Oh, this. A year or two ago, I realized that I am a huge perfectionist, which finally solved my mental confusion over why I procrastinate so much (at the time, I had labelled it laziness) while also at times being quite high-achieving. I'm not sure my brain is as insistent on continuing to work on it for as long as possible as yours is, but perfectionism is definitely a big contributor to my procrastination - and also, I believe, to my anxiety, which also contributes to procrastination. Funny how that works.

 

This is p much me exactly. :P

 

I'm having a lot of the same problems. ADHD makes concentrating to get stuff done take a lot of spoons and I don't wanna so I procrastinate and then as the deadline gets close, I'm too anxious/ADHD to get it done. Combined with the fact that missing an assignment/class isn't as (immediately) end of the world as it had been stressed to me all my life...yeah...Basically I ended up with multiple anxiety attacks a day, semi-suicidalness and had to switch schools because I was failing out of the one I was in. Not fun.

So I'm still floundering around trying to fix this myself, but I can at least offer some tips on how to not make it worse. If you can, get help now or over the summer. Try the counselors at your current school or even your next school. They've seen this plenty of times before and they can help. If your folks are supportive, tell them what's going on too. Be honest with yourself and those around you.

 

...Actually, as I was examining the advice to take breaks and do stuff in small steps and whatnot, it occured to me that my brain might actually be more like what you were describing than I had first thought. I realized that it actually usually just doesn't occur to me to do something not all at once; for instance, if a math worksheet is assigned for homework to be turned in two days later, it doesn't occur to me to do half of it the first day, half of it the next day. The options available to my brain appear to be: 1) do it all now 2) do it all later 3) don't do it at all, and I usually end up picking option 2), as a middle road between 1) and 3). I had wondered if this was due to my procrastinatory habits (ie. when you've procrastinated enough, you end up having to do it all at once at the last minute), but I hadn't thought until I reread your post that my procrastination could at least be partially caused by my tendency to do an assignment all at once. Hmm.

@Malaloba, thanks for the advice!

 

I'm probably not going to be much more help, advice-wise, then everyone else has been, other than to say that if you think you might have a mental health thing that needs looked at, going to a therapist would be a huge help in college. I have depression/PTSD stuff, and I thought I could just keep punching through when I got to college (even though I was flagging by senior year of high school). Instead, I just mentally collapsed and was forced to stop my schooling. I'm still working on fixing my brain, two years later, so just keep in mind that prevention and self-care will do you better than ignoring it and breaking.

Other than that, I currently do a lot of work editing papers for high school/college students as well as helping them figure out where to go next in their writing and the like, so if you're having trouble or just need a second set of eyes, I'm around.

 

Yeah, from what I've been hearing, it would definitely be a good idea for me to seek counseling in college.

A second set of eyes would be great, as right now I am mostly just stuck on I finished it, now I am going to bed. I'll message you, hope that's alright.