You're standing up the front of the class with your group and you're about to do a presentation. Throughout your whole educational life you have done so many of these, probably more than you could count on all your fingers and toes, so as you stand there you don't feel to nervous. All you have to do for the 100th time is read from this piece of paper while people either stare aimlessly at the slides behind you or don't even listen (neither of which bothers you). It's not fun standing up there but you feel use to it and don't think you're going to feel to nervous during the speech; you shouldn't have any trouble ...
.... but then you start to talk.
You introduce to the class what you're going to be talking about for the next few minutes and suddenly your body takes a drastic turn ... and you can't do anything to stop it.
The first instantly noticeable thing is how quickly your heart starts beating - which sets off a chain reaction of a bunch of other terrible and off-putting symptoms. You start to heat up and you know that your neck and chest are beginning to develop noticeable red patches which always give away how your body is reacting. You are finding it hard to take enough breath in, and the longer you talk the more you'll start to stumble over words and mess up; which only makes things worse.
By the time you finish and step away from the desk, you realise how bad your hands are shaking, to the point that if the person actually standing a few metres from you really looked they would be able to tell. It probably only takes a couple of minutes once you're done talking for your body to calm back down and for everything to feel right again, and then you're left thinking why?
You felt completely calm as you waited to start, you knew in your brain that this wasn't bothering you and this was just another presentation you had to slog through - you thought the whole standing up in front of people wasn't such a bother anymore - apparently your body thought differently.
Suddenly the way your body chooses to react, in a way that gives you absolutely no control and there is nothing you can do to stop how your feeling expect finishing that talk, is a lot more scary than having to stand up and give that presentation.
For those who don't suffer from this it may be hard to understand, but imagine if your body just started to do something without warning, for no real reason, and there was nothing you could do to stop it...
.... welcome to anxiety.
