Living with anxiety is that voice inside your head that knows all your insecurities and uses them against you. It can get to the point where the voice is so loud that in a room full of people it's the only thing you can hear. It's scary, having absolutely no control over your own mind and thoughts. It's a horrible feeling when everything is going perfectly, but then anxiety creeps in and make you believe everything is wrong. 

Anxiety makes you question "is there something wrong with me?" It has the power to turn you into an irrational, emotional mess. No matter how many times you tell yourself to calm down, it's still there in the back of your mind nagging you with the "what ifs". 

There are many things that anxiety effects in our lives and it's extremely hard to get over them. One of the worst things about anxiety is letting so many opportunities pass by, because the fear consumes you from the inside out. Doubt has one of the worst criminal offences, because it has destroyed thousands of dreams and having anxiety makes it ten times worse. That doubt plants itself in many different ways and can be the sole reason that you don’t pursue dreams. It's not that we don’t want to experience new things or take aboard a challenge, it's just the fear of failing overwhelms us to the point of not even trying to succeed. 

Anxiety isn't just worrying about an exam or stressing about finding the perfect outfit to wear, it's the constant worry about each and everything. It's rehearsing a phone call before making it, it's struggling to make new friends, it's worrying about the time it takes for someone to text back, it's over checking things, and most of all it makes life a living hell. Living with anxiety is hard, because we can't silence the voice in our heads.

Anxiety makes it really hard to be sociable. It's extremely hard to make new friends and then you act clingy with the ones you already have, because you really just don't want to lose them. The fear and doubt that it causes can impact our self-esteem and make it really hard to love ourselves. Anxiety can make us not want to go out or abruptly cancel plans, and sadly it isn't because we don’t want to , it's just because we can't face it. Probably the worst thing is always being quick to jump to the wrong conclusion. Something as simple as a friend saying they can't hang out could have us freaking out that it's because they don’t like us. It's a horrible feeling of dread that sets itself in your stomach each and every time.

It can also have a massive impact on school. We panic about everything from projects and presentations to trying to fit in. The stress can either overwork us or cause us to completely stop. One of the most terrifying things for a person suffering from anxiety is hearing the words "oral presentation". Public speaking is a huge issue for us and honestly the final result isn't worth the endless hours of worrying and all the tears we've cried. We are what I like to call human chameleons because we are masters of disguising our emotions.

One in fourteen young Australians aged between 4-17 suffer an anxiety disorder every year. So next time you're in class or on the bus look around and just think about what the person sitting next to you could potentially be going through Don't try to understand what's going on, even we don't know. The best thing is to just be there for us. More needs to be done to help young Australians with anxiety, because it has huge impacts and influences on our lives, that can drastically affect us.