Counseling in Orlando at the office of Orlando Thrive Therapy, Coaching & Counseling, can offer you a chance to let go of the anxiety and fears that you have been struggling with for so long. Fear is a very overpowering and overwhelming feeling. Fear can ultimately drive us if we let it. Fear to get up, fear to face the world, fear to go to class or go to work, fear to smile, fear to even breathe sometimes. We all have fears and most of them are questionable. Are these fears rational? If not, then perhaps what you’re actually feeling is anxiety.

Find your feet and walk, you say to yourself. Find your hands and take the handout from your professor, you force yourself. Laugh out loud at the joke, you convince yourself. With anxiety, sometimes the simplest of things can become the hardest things to do. Sometimes it takes a minute to find your voice, catch your breath, or move your feet.

Anxiety affects over 40 million adults in the U.S.

Anxiety affecting ages 18 and older is the most commonly reported mental illness in the U.S. today. These numbers are equivalent to 18% of the population. (Source: National Institute of Mental Health)

YouTube sensation, Meghan Rienks, recently created a video entitled, “What Having Anxiety Feels Like,” where she opens up to her 2,052,566 subscribers and counting, and depicts a true and meaningful situation and sensation of what it genuinely feels like to experience anxiety.

“From the outside it’s easy to think that somebody’s got it all figured out. Because my hair is curled and my cheeks are intentionally flushed, I must not have a care in the world. As if it were expected for my demons to be worn like a scarlet letter pinned to my chest. And they assume if you cannot see it, then it’s not really there. As if pain does not exist unless you’re bleeding, or slung in a cast, or staggering with a limp. But sometimes the most painful demons are the ones they can’t even see. So we learn how to smile, how to grin and bare it because nobody likes to talk about the tough stuff; hell, I don’t like to talk about the tough stuff.

I have anxiety.

It feels like every cell in my body is moving so fast that my veins are blurry; that despite the constant metronome of my heartbeat, inside my ears it’s like listening to a spastic drum line; it feels like bees in my ears, like a broken white noise machine playing all of the sounds at once. And I don’t even realize I’m grinding my teeth, or cracking my knuckles, or rubbing my fore finger against my pinky, or twisting the gold band on my middle finger. Holding onto myself like I’m the only lifeline bridging the gap between reality on my own two feet, and the autonomically loud abyss of noises and sounds and feelings of fleeting rushing through my veins.

And I’m avoiding eye contact.

Not because I’m not listening to what you’re saying, [but] because I’m listening to the sound of my own voice, hoping that through your ears you can’t hear that it’s two octaves too high, and on the verge of breaking because my palms are sweating and I somehow forgot to speak with anything behind my words other than insecurity.

My anxiety feels like fire.

An unexplainably hot, and rash, and frustrating, as I gnaw the inside of my cheek, as if the solution to this feeling is buried between my teeth and gums.

It feels like drowning. But it feels like burning, and it feels like fucking forever.

I imagine my feet moving with trails of dust behind them, like those cartoons because somehow it feels like I’m moving faster than the 60 seconds they’ve allowed in a minute. All the while I’m just playing catch up on the stopwatch. It doesn’t add up like it did in high school mathematics. I can’t carry the one and find the square root of the problem because most of the time…there is no problem.

There’s no life or death situation. There’s no rhyme or reason.

There is just feelings, and I am feeling all of them at once.

Some days are better than others.

Some days are worse.

But they’re just days, and I’ve got more where they came from.”