The Story of My Anxiety & How I Addressed It by Michael Kharadze (16, Georgia)

[Note: everyone's experience with mental health & anxiety is different; the concept of reverse psychology is not a strategy that will work for everyone nor are we necessarily advocating for it. This is simply one story of a person's journey with anxiety.] 

​   Every person may feel anxious or worried at some point in their life. But in my case, I was exceptionally susceptible to it, and it had been making my life relatively difficult and agonizing. Anything slightly worrisome or exciting would cause my anxiety to peak, in turn causing my physical and cognitive abilities to sharply decline—which would make me unable to properly deal with any issues present in that situation.

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     My anxiety first started at 4 years old. When the Russo-Georgian war first began, my family and I were staying in a village called Mejvriskhevi, which is near the south Ossetian border. On the 7th of August, at midnight, sporadic explosions and gun firings were initiated from a distance. My parents were terrified and started packing, as they were aware something terrible had to be going on since relations between Russia and Georgia had been tense for a while. By the morning they had finished packing, woke me up, and were ready to leave. Seeing my parents so unnerved, I started investigating what was going on. My parents didn't want a 4-year-old kid to be struck with fear, so they tried their best to distract me from reality; but hearing the chaotic screaming and panic from all around, I quickly realized that there was some sort of mayhem, and that was the moment my first anxiety attack kicked in.
     We soon got in my dad's car and left off. While on the way to Tbilisi, traveling through the city of Gori, a Russian helicopter came out of nowhere and kept flying right over our car for a while. My mom instantly got paranoid and assumed it was there to shoot us. I got so terrified I froze and couldn't hear or discern the surroundings for a few minutes, I had felt my mind leave my body and become void. That was the moment when I was the most terrified I'd ever been in my whole life. Luckily, the helicopter soon flew away, and shortly afterward, my sense of danger subsided and I became fully conscious. We arrived in Tbilisi safe. Nonetheless, my psychological health had taken a huge toll.
     Initially, I didn't have any problem dealing with school, because all of the subjects seemed fairly easy and untroublesome; but later on, in 7th grade, I moved to another school that specializes in maths and physics. The biggest hardship of studying in this school is that we have to take 8 exams each year. Getting anxious during the exams, my cognition would deteriorate, which caused me to fail multiple exams and severely affected my grades; and eventually, in 8th grade, I had almost been expelled. That's when I finally realized I had to do something about this issue.
     I started looking for solutions, trying everything from exercise and a good diet to eastern spiritual practices like meditation. These methods, while lessening the symptoms by a bit, didn't necessarily address the main issue. The anxiety still had dominated my body. That is, until one day, while casually surfing the web, I came across an eerie article talking about a technique called "reverse psychology". It is a method of persuasion by which a person is persuaded by asking them to do the opposite. After researching it further, I decided to try out this "miraculous" technique that all the articles were so eagerly advocating on myself.
     Previously, every time I would get worried I would keep repeating to myself: "Calm down, everything's going to be okay", basically forcing myself to stop worrying, which wouldn't do much good. Instead, I tried doing the opposite: Every time I felt a rush of anxiety, I welcomed it and instead of trying to lessen it, I physically tried to make myself feel more anxious. Surprisingly, instead of the anxiety escalating, it immensely diminished. Using this method, over time, anxiety stopped being such a big deal for me and its vast influence on my daily life came to an end. Consequently, my grades and exam scores have skyrocketed and I've started to live a happier, healthier life.
     What I've learned from this experience is that the psychological trauma I had received from the Russo-Georgian war made me cognitively associate nervousness with a major issue. This cognitive association, in turn, made me develop a fear of being nervous in general. Thus, to conquer my anxiety I had to conquer the fear. Using reverse psychology, my brain has torn that cognitive association, and now, instead of being afflicted by nervousness, I use it to my advantage.

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