Emma.

She is 23, and we've been pretty close all of her lives.

We've been kind of talking to each other about mental health, anxiety.

I know that she has experienced a great wave of it in her collegiate years and in high

school and even now.

And so you can introduce yourself.

Hi guys, I'm Emma. I'm Sarah's older sister. I went to the same high school as her, Lake Zurich High School.I was on the competitive dance team all four years. And then I went to University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I got my degree in molecular and cellular biology with a Spanish minor. And now I'm currently getting my MBA through University of Iowa.

And I'm just going to kind of, we're just going to kind of dive right into it.

I didn't experience it myself. And so I would like to hear more about that for this study.

Reflecting on your past, can you share kind of any moments when you've realized the

anxieties impacted your life, especially during your academic journey in high school?

Yeah, absolutely. So I really noticed it during my years on the dance team when we would get into competition season in the winters.

Before competitions, I would get so anxious that I would actually get sick. And then as soon as we competed and the dance was over, I felt 100% better. But like the whole morning and like leading up to it, it was like crippling.

And I noticed that everybody else around me, all of my teammates, everybody was nervous, of course, but nobody was to the point where I was, where I wasn't physically getting sick.

Yeah, yeah. I felt a little bit of the same way, even though I was on the team for a year and I didn't really perform, but jumping into kind of a different dance scene afterwards, I felt more of that kind of wave of anxiety of the whole morning before the entire afternoon before, even when we were performing at like 10pm at night for these crazy competitions,

I would feel the exact same way. Just that like throw upy feeling, just something that really caused a lot of stress. And even after I danced, it was just like, did I do this right?

I was thinking everything.

Yeah. So I got a medication when I, after the incident in March of my senior year, I got a medical treatment.

I tried a few different medications and found the one that was right for me, which is Lexa Pro.

And since then, everything has been a lot better and the academic stress isn't nearly like what it was in high school, which is weird because college and any kind of graduate degree is so much harder than high school, but I feel less anxiety now than I did then.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

And I think that that's, I mean, of course I had everybody has their college breakdowns and you know, you do bad on a test or whatever, stuff like that.

But I never, since getting right on the medication that works for me, it has not felt like what it did in high school.

And I'm kind of experiencing the same thing too. Like socially in high school, I was just like, it was crippling going to school. But now a little bit more of that academic pressure is hitting me a little bit.

So kind of a flip there. But that's really interesting knowing that kind of high school was a little bit more stressful for you rather than higher, maintaining a higher degree.

Yeah, well at first I just thought that I you know was just really nervous, right?

Like I just thought that maybe I just get more nervous than most people for these things and that's just kind of how I'm wired. But it really wasn't until senior year

Um my anxiety with the competitions and things like that still remained but I started to also develop a lot of social anxiety like hanging out with my friends or my boyfriend or things that I did all the time made me all of a sudden I would be anxious like to go to my best friend's house like that's weird, right?

And it didn't and it didn't make sense and that's when I kind of realized like okay

This is something more than just like being nervous like it was affecting you know even going to school was starting to make me anxious, which you know I love school

So that's kind of when I really figured out that it was more than just like you know run of the mill hormones teenager stuff.

Yeah, and is there something kind of outside of dance or something in your high school kind of experience that like a specific point in time where you realize like I need I need help or I need to seek guidance and others or I need to kind of relieve this

Yeah, absolutely. So the moment so I

Before I got on my medication the one incident that really kind of hit the nail on the head for me was In March of my senior year. My friend grew up in my boyfriend and everybody was going to go down to Chicago on the train for the St. Patrick's Day parade, right? Chicago always does the huge thing and

Yeah, a lot of our friends were going and you know, I really did want to go but I physically felt like I couldn't like the idea made me so anxious but it was weird because like mentally like I wanted to go because I knew it would be fun and whatever

But like I literally couldn't I felt so the thought of actually doing it made me sick to my stomach and that's kind of when I was like, okay like this is something that's actually

Um holding me back

Yeah, so that's when I decided that I needed help and I probably needed some medication

Yeah, yeah, and when it dives into your kind of social life

It's just crazy to even think about you would have never known that going to someone's house would be you know crippling or going to a fun little city day would be like a full day of anxiety. It's right you would have never known it's a fun day with your friends, but you just have no idea your mind would switch on you and just anxiety would fill so have you

I know that you talk with us, your immediate family a lot, but who do you seek, who do you confide in or how do you deal with your mental health now?

Mainly my boyfriend and my mom. Be the main two. And then, yeah, I don't have a therapist right now, because I feel like, again, I have everything under control at this point in comparison to where I was, but I always need to talk things through with people that I'm close to.

Yeah, talking through things makes a world of a difference.

It does.

For the last question, if you could give advice to someone who might be dealing with similar challenges, what would you share with them based on your own experiences?

I would say that the main thing is to identify what is causing your feelings, right?

Like, for some people, it's, you know, for me, it was mainly social anxiety, right?

But for other people, there's a ton of different triggers, right? It could be your boyfriend or girlfriend, like your relationship that you're in that's causing this.

It could be school, it could be work, it could be your boss, it could, you know, there's a bunch of outside things. It could be, you know, issues that you're having in your life

and relating to money or your family or whatever, right? So I think that what's the most important is to pinpoint the cause of the anxiety, because normally there is one.

So I think that the key is to, I did to really try to identify what that is and then go from there. Like, for me, I knew that the right path for me was medication because me being anxious about hanging out with my friends, like, that wasn't good for, like, my life, right?

Like, that didn't make sense. So I knew that something had to change. But other times, you know, you can relieve anxiety without medication. Like, for example, if you have constant anxiety about your boyfriend or something like that, right?

Maybe it's not medication you need. Maybe you need to reevaluate your relationships.

So, you know what I mean?

So I think it all, I think the key is to really pinpoint what is causing it and then that's,

you can kind of go from there.