Crying on the phone to my wife in a Walmart parking lot with a paper due at midnight and one sentence written. That’s what I think about first when I reflect on being an anxious student.

I remember thinking, I need to write this paper, but to do that I need to listen to music. To listen to music, I need headphones, but mine are broken. I need those specific headphones that wrap around the ear but are not plastic because that would hurt. Only Walmart has them, but I don’t like Walmart because they are a big corporation (and what will people think if I am supporting them?).

Walmart, however, didn’t have my exact headphones, so after being paralyzed in the aisle for a bit, I went to check out. The person in front of me was being rude to the checkout clerk. That felt very heavy, and I still had a paper due with no headphones. Two thousand words, and I had one sentence done. I called my wife and broke down in tears, totally paralyzed and overwhelmed by anxiety.

I didn’t know then, but I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Particularly, I have subtypes of “just right”/perfectionism (I had to get my opening paragraph just right), morality/scrupulosity (I shouldn’t shop at a big business, the person should not have been rude to the clerk, etc.), sensorimotor/somatic (the headphones had to feel right), relationship (will my wife think less of me for procrastinating this long, then leave me), etc.

I didn’t understand why things were so hard for me and why my days were constantly filled with stress and anxiety. Today, it is much clearer, and I have made immense progress, though I still continue treatment and support.

Anxiety in the classroom

The first step for other students with anxiety is how to notice it. For all humans, but particularly young people, we don’t know what we don’t know. They might assume that “this is the way life is.” About 33% of students (aged 18-25) experience “any mentals 1. Assuming the majority of college-age students are 18-25, that means about a third are trying to navigate university settings while also juggling anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, bipolar disorder, etc., or some combination! The International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) has great resources on their Anxiety in the Classroom website, and I encourage readers to go there to learn more. I can speak, of course, from my own experience.

Learning while ruminating

I thought I was good at multitasking. It turns out that we, as humans, are not. When we are multitasking, we are actually attention switching. Notably, we lose 40% productivity with this attentiong 2. For me, I would often be so lost in intrusive thoughts and ruminating that I would miss 100% of what I was hearing. By the time I reached my second year at university, my anxiety and OCD had progressed so far that I was constantly ruminating on intrusive thoughts about the meaning of life, death, religion, and overall existentialism. I was even pulling out books in class to try to find the answers. So much so that my teacher noticed and pulled me aside after class. I “got caught.”

But I had to know. If I was dropped in the desert and told there was an oasis within walking distance—how did I decide my direction? It was imperative! Sometimes, the rumination was so deep, I would almost “wake up” out of a fog and not realize what had happened for the past several minutes (even while driving).

Other times, my Relationship OCD (ROCD) would flare up, and I would be thinking about the text(s) I sent. Did she see them and ignore them? Did I bother her? Or should I send more and clarify? I’d like to hear from her, so maybe she wants to hear from me. But maybe I’m also bothering her, and she thinks it’s too much. Meanwhile, I totally missed something about some country annexing another.

It can also be Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). (More info on the difference between GAD and OCD can be found on the NOCD website 3). Maybe anxiety about work: Oh no, that conference is next week, and I don’t have the training finished. I mean, I can think on my feet, but they will want PowerPoint slides, and I haven’t finished. I can maybe do it after class today, but I need to make dinner. Maybe tomorrow, but we have that team meeting, and oh shoot, I was supposed to prepare something for that too! Meanwhile, missing the formulas taught in physics class.

Or it can be ruminating on the class itself: Oh man, I need to get at least a B in this class for my major. Yikes, I am so close to a C. What if I fail? Then I need to take this again and stay another semester. That costs more money and more time. Ugh, I don’t want to do that! I have to do better on my next essay. I have to. Meanwhile, I'm missing the content I actually need to pass the class—population growth in ecology!

Ruminating can be on anything. It can be an intrusive thought; it can be an exciting opportunity that your brain is spinning about. It can come with physical compulsions, it can come with mental compulsions,, or it can come with no compulsions at all. Regardless of the content or level of anxiety, it still interferes with the encoding and storage part of memory. We can’t retrieve a memory later (i.e., for an exam) if our brains never encoded and stored the information 4. If we are totally “in our heads,” the lesson from the instructor never reaches the "get information in" stage (encoding).

Learning while sleepy

It is simply more difficult to concentrate when we are sleep deprived; this affects our ability to focus on and gather information presented to us and our ability to remember even those things we know we have learned in the past.

(Harvard Division of Sleepe 5)

I had immense trouble falling asleep. I also had immense trouble waking up. I remember in my electronics class learning about an inductor that initially fights changes to current. My body fought changing my state—falling asleep or waking up. I tried everything. Sound machine, music, meditation, softer bed, harder bed, different pillows, blue light in the morning, trying to stick to a routine, taking naps, not taking naps, melatonin, darkness, getting up and walking around, staying in bed, drinking water first thing in the morning, even seeing a sleep doctor! It would take me 2-3 hours to fall asleep, then I would often be late in the morning and always tired.

Finally, finally, when I started exposure and response prevention therapy for OCD, did I actually start to make progress. It was my anxious thinking that was keeping me up. That was so hard to hear and process at first. It felt like it was “my fault” for not being able to sleep. But of course, for any of us—until we have the tools, we don’t have the tools. Slowly with time, I learned to not engage with the thoughts. Not every thought was important. I didn’t need to chase them down and remember them for tomorrow. (Some tools I kept—routine, dark at night, sound machine, melatonin sometimes, etc.) Now I’m down to around 30 minutes, which is a huge improvement in my well-being!

In school, though, when I’m tired, or when anyone is tired, it is harder to learn. Personally, I was less likely to ask questions or engage in discussion, ruminate more, and/or actively try to do things to keep myself awake, which then goes back into multitasking and failing to encode information.

What you can do

For educators and parents, it is important to know what students might be going through. There will be impairments to learning until the mental health obstacles are addressed and the students receive support.

For students, there are typically resources at your school or university for free. There is also the previously mentioned Anxiety in the Classroom website from IOCDF. For those with OCD, the “gold standard” treatment is exposure and response prevention therapy. Other helpful practices for managing anxiety in school include mindfulness, meditation, yoga, exercise, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), self-care, and community care.

References

1 National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Mental illness.
2 American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Multitasking.
3 Lowenstein, F. (2025, January 10). Do I have OCD or anxiety? NOCD.
4 Harvard University. (n.d.). How memory works. The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
5 Harvard Medical School. (n.d.). Sleep and memory. Division of Sleep Medicine.