10 Things People Don’t Realize You’re Doing Because You Have Generalized Anxiety Disorder

1. You’re obsessed with being on-time.

Your anxiety convinces you that you’re going to be late. Your class starts at 8 and it’s only a 10-minute drive but what if there’s an accident? What if there’s traffic? What if your car breaks down? Logically, you know none of these things are likely but your anxiety doesn’t listen to logic so you end up showing up 30 minutes early to almost everything.

2. You’re always convinced you left the stove/straightener/iron on.

Even though you’ve literally never left any of these things on when you leave the house, you’re convinced you do every morning. Sometimes, you have to text your roommate to check just in case.

3. You plan everything.

Your friends are chill, fly by the seat of their pants kind of people and it annoys the sh*t out of you. You need everything to be planned because your mind won’t stop circling through thousands of scenarios until you know what’s going to happen.

4. Even if you don’t have money problems, you think about your bank balance all the time.

Your generalized anxiety leads you to obsessively check your bank balance daily. You stress over purchases large and small, even when there’s no reason to.

5. You set ten alarms for the morning.

Even though you always wake up by the third alarm, your anxiety tells you that tomorrow might be the day you sleep through them and miss your entire day so you set ten alarms every night.

6. You set reminders for even the smallest of tasks.

You’re not forgetful but anxiety tells you that you’re going to forget to pick up your paycheck or call to make an appointment. Your phone is constantly going off throughout the day with reminders for tasks that you’ve already completed.

7. You overthink our interactions with other people.

You replay conversations in your head hours after they happen and wonder if the other person thought you were weird as hell.

8. You often resort to worst-case scenario thinking.

Your mind flips straight through logical scenarios and lands on the worst-case scenario. You try to talk yourself out of it but you can’t.

9. You feel embarrassed when your anxious behaviors are public.

Sometimes you don’t want your friends to know about your anxiety but it’s written all over your face when you ask to confirm plans for the tenth time.

10. You think about the future obsessively, sometimes at the cost of the present.

Your brain won’t stop playing out every possible awful thing that could happen in the future. Sometimes you feel like you aren’t living in the present as much as you’re living in your own mind.