Help with overcoming academic anxiety / terror

I'll keep the description brief. I suffer from generalised anxiety disorder, depression, and early signs of psychosis.

I have always been an extremely high achiever my whole life and took great pride in my work and enjoyed doing my work, especially in mathematics, physics, and computer science.

Around a year ago I started to get hit by extreme hestitation and doubt whenever I would try a problem, or listen to something in a lecture (I'm at university right now). It eventually grew into full-blown terror so now whenever I look at something that even slightly requires any kind of logical thinking I get hit by a surge of anxiety and terror and become unable to process anything. In fact it has gotten so severe that my brain instinctively avoids thinking too hard about anything by shutting off whenever I'm approached with any kind of logical problem, which is very frustrating because it makes me function like an idiot in day-to-day life (I get confused from things like doing my laundry, or putting on clothes, or even tying my shoelaces, when these are things that have NEVER caused me any difficulty my whole life).

I was wondering if anyone has suffered from something similar and if so what were the main things that helped you recover. The way I see it is that I need to re-train my brain to not be afraid of these things, but it's extremely difficult and I don't know what the best way is to do this.

Any help would be extremely appreciated.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *