Why Beginning College Can Cause Anxiety, and What Students Should do About It.
Anxiety is a fact of life. We are vulnerable organisms, and we’ve developed systems to monitor our environment for threats. When we perceive a threat, even a potential threat, alarm bells ring through our body. The alarm is felt as anxiety.
This simple picture is complicated by what human beings consider a threat. It’s obvious that we feel threatened by things that can cause physical harm (snakes, heights, etc.); less obvious is that we also feel threatened by things that can harm our social being. This explains why public speaking is regularly ranked at the top of people’s list of things that cause anxiety. There is rarely any physical danger involved in talking in front of an audience, but public speaking does put us in a position to look foolish in the eyes of others.
Just as we have a physical body that we seek to protect from harm; we also have a social body that we protect from harm. (Greek has two different words for body, sarx and soma, that correspond to these two kinds of bodies). Today we call this second body our self image. In other words, we have a way that we want others to see us. If I consider myself an “intelligent academic,” I will feel my self image threatened if I give a particularly stupid answer to a question. If I consider myself a “dashing athlete,” I will wince at an airball thrown in front of a group of onlookers. If I consider myself “fashionable and beautiful,” I will make sure to let people see me only when I’m looking my best.
The concept of a social threat explains why beginning college can be a time of increased anxiety. By leaving home, we detach ourselves from the reference points of how we were once known. We have to create a new self-image in the eyes of others. As we struggle to get others to see us as valuable and special, even small gaffs or failures can feel catastrophic.
But where do these ideals for our self image come from? How do we choose how we want to be seen by others? Strangely enough we don’t usually choose them at all. They often form subconsciously in us through our exposure to the culture around us. And this is where the real trouble begins. Culture often gives us ideals that are impossible to uphold.
Without even being aware of it, college students have often constructed an impossible image of the “perfect student” that they want to uphold in front of their peers and teachers. I’ve often witnessed the waves of anxiety that pass over a student's face as they struggle with an assignment. The anxiety can only be explained by the fact that the student assumes that the “perfect student” would never struggle with an assignment.
I love teaching Proverbs 3:7-8 because it helps students with the anxiety that comes as a result of their own erroneously constructed ideals of who they should be. “Do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the LORD.” In the Bible, “in your own eyes” means something like “according to your own standards of judgment.” What Proverbs tells us is that we shouldn’t be our own judge. It’s no wonder that the verse tells us that, “This will be a healing for your flesh, and a refreshment for your body.” By letting God be the judge, we no longer have to labor under the burden of our own unrealistic expectations.
This is why terminology matters. It matters what we call ourselves because this signals what image we are trying to live up to. At the Institute, one of the first lessons we teach is that a “disciple” is a “student,” and that we should all strive to be “students of Jesus.” The term acknowledges right at the outset that we are not perfect; It acknowledges that we are in the process of learning and growing. If we make it our goal to present ourselves as “students of Jesus,” then we won’t fear failure because learning through mistakes is part and parcel of our very identity.
At the Institute, we often tell students “the classroom is the safest place to fail.” We want all of our students to walk into the freedom of being a student. You don’t have to have all the right answers. You don’t have to get everything perfect. You just have to be willing to be humble and learn from God.
