Could you tell me a time when you were worried and anxious?

After getting drunk in York’s vibrant city centre, I would come home and go back to bed surrounded by my university hockey kit, vodka bottles, and largely unread books on political theory scattered around my room. In bed in a kind of bleary-eyed and peaceful state – before the inevitable hangover – I would sit scrolling through Instagram and Facebook.

While I was flicking through Zuckerberg’s Frankenstein’s monster, I questioned myself the entire time as I saw squares of people enjoying themselves by a myriad of means: doing apres-ski in a French ski resort, enjoying their latest exploits on Wednesday night and their most recent trip to a bigger city at the weekend. I would look at all the likes, shares, and comments throughout it, comparing myself to others.

It led me to question myself: and not in the Hollywood movie way where it leads to some incredible epiphany at the end of the film. Instead, I queried everything about myself and raised doubts about anything in my head.

“Am I going out enough?”

“Am I smart enough to do this course?”

“What grade will I get in the end?”

“I need to be bigger. What gym work should I be doing?”

“That one word I said last night, will they think about it?”

“Am I at the right weight?”

Nonetheless, back then, each of these worries would take up so much time to run through my head that by the start of the next day, I would still be tired from the tormenting thoughts the night before. These worries would wax and wane with time, but there were certain points when they got to their most heightened.

There are three instances when the worry and anxiety reached their highest points: A-Levels, university, and Covid-19 lockdowns.

During my A-Levels, I was very anxious and worried about the whole entire concept of life following school. First of all, I was worried that I wasn’t doing sufficient revision, so completely overcompensated by locking myself in my room at school and at home for hours each day. Another great worry was what grades I would achieve, and, therefore, where I would go to uni. After seeing my sister and brother go down to England for uni, I believed that I too, needed to follow suit, which probably didn’t help with the worrying at that point either.

To put this all into context, I was told by a primary school teacher that I worried a lot and that I must calm down as I overthought the consequences of too many things.

The angst metamorphized at university into something more consuming. As I had much more free time, consequently, I had an infinite time to be fretful about situations that I would play out in my own imagination out of fear rather than anything else. Since I had left school, where I was constantly busy doing something like lessons, prep, rugby, and choir practice – yes, I was very cool – the endless time felt more like a straitjacket rather than something to be enjoyed. Therefore, to counteract the open days, I would get ruinously drunk during nights out just to forget for at least a few hours the rolling thoughts and the unexplainable possibilities that I created. In hindsight, it was stupid and hindered dealing with the anxiety and worry.

Then came Covid-19, a virus that made people both ill and concerned in equal measures. It amplified the stress, like turning up the volume on one of those vintage 1950s-style radios. The pandemic meant that I had to go return to Edinburgh, a place I had escaped from largely for five years, which was a weird moment in itself to live with my parents and cat. As I got older, given I had finished my master's, I was contemplating bigger “life events” such as first jobs and proper flats. The virus now had thrown all of my life into debate.

The pandemic swept aside my idea of a first job as the market crashed, and I couldn’t get driving lessons to pass my test, so that came to an abrupt stop. Added to that, I was terrified of the virus for the first two months, and there was no defined end to it all, which I hated the most.

Overall, a great combination for someone known to worry. With the abundance of time, there was no real reason for me not to investigate methods of dealing with my problems.

In order to cope with long days doing absolutely nothing, I would run across Edinburgh using different routes depending on my mood on that day. The running reduced the stress as all I thought about was the pain in my legs and the music booming in my ears. I have written before that the achievement at the end of a run is something that I enjoy.

I have managed to find ways of coping over time with the copious amounts of anxiety and worry that I generate. I have made a conscious effort to go to the gym and get running around south London. I have decreased my time on social media. I do certain activities that I know mitigate it, like cooking, reading and gaming on the PS5. Alongside these goings-on, I do most of the boring things that work, such as eating healthier, getting to bed before 2 am, and not drinking booze as much as I used to.

I will have to live with the knowledge that I worry a lot, but I have now established habits to lessen its impact.