Anxiety is the body’s way of telling when it is in danger, nervous, or facing a stressful situation, so when a teen is stressed out, his or her body reacts to it by getting tense, always on the lookout for danger. Most teenagers in America go through this everyday.

“It used to be college level kids because of the change in their lives and the expectations of getting to college to get a job. Today, it seems to be more for high school kids with all the things going on around them and their worlds,” said Psychology teacher, David Kuppe.

Many teens feel pressured to try to pass their classes and get on with life. The changes in the school’s education system with the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Standard Based learning cause a lot of stress on young high schoolers. Anxiety makes people extremely nervous; they shake and worry about everything. It’s similar to having a nervous feeling in your stomach.

“When I have anxiety, I kind of just stop and breathe, and I try to concentrate with what’s going on around me and in my head,” said Fraser High School junior, Samantha Neeley.

Young teenagers around America deal with a lot of stress when it comes to school, work, and/or drivers training everyday. When finals come in for students, a job interview, or taking the SAT, the student will feel pressured and get nervous. When most people hear about anxiety, they think of someone who is being over dramatic and is crying out for attention. What most people do not realize is that when a person has anxiety, they cannot control themselves.

“The main reason people feel anxiety is too much going on in their life. They don’t take the time to sit down and relax. The normal things like spending less time with friends and more with family has changed a great deal, as soon as kids start high school for example they spend more time with friends that’s away from the home and because so many people get involved with so many different activities and the world has changed so dramatically a lot of teens today have tremendous amount of stress,” Kuppe said.

When teens have anxiety, their bodies goes through insomnia when they cannot sleep at night, they get stress headaches, and they could get dizzy. People of any age can go through this, so when this happens so many times, they learn how to calm themselves down on their own because no one else can help them with this.

“For me it’s when I over think things I kind of panic, and I just can’t really talk, sometimes it’s hard to breath. I just stop what I’m doing; sometimes I stare off into the distance. So, I just stop and breath, and I’ll take a drink of water if I have some. Then, I just breathe and try to focus on what’s going on around me, ” Neeley said. “Sometimes it’s difficult out in public because anxiety attacks are worse than others, and they are really noticeable to other people, and sometimes I can’t stop them. It depends on the attack and how bad it is.”

When it comes to anxiety, the best thing to do is relax and try to gather all thoughts. To many people, anxiety does not exist because they do not have anxiety attacks like the people who get them frequently.

“Well the first thing is depending on what caused the anxiety, figure out what causes it by eliminating the cause. It helps alert the anxiety. In fact, I just talked to somebody about the same thing. There’s one thing in her life that’s causing the attacks, and it only happens when she is doing one thing. It’s a pretty easy fix if you stop doing that one thing; the anxiety attacks will go away. Typically, if you’re involved in many, many things, school can sometimes do that, jobs can do that, it is kind of hard to get rid of those things, so maybe learning to deal with those things more appropriately, get more rest, take care of yourself health wise helps deal with anxiety, good nutrition’s, and good rest helps take care of it.” Kuppe said.

When the human body loses sleep, the mind has not gotten enough sleep, and usually an average person is supposed to get eight to ten hours of sleep every night. Eating healthy and working out relieves stress and keeps the brain functioning properly. Taking vitamin D helps with depression, which also helps cause anxiety, sleep, and many other things like the immune system. Anxiety is a big conflict to many teenagers and young adults when it comes to school and work, so keeping the mind busy and healthy helps relieve anxiety.