Health Anxiety During a Global Pandemic

By: Kendra Franklin

Anxiety is a normal— and often even healthy—bodily response. Everyone gets anxious from time to time. Whether it’s before a big presentation, an audition or tryout, or maybe a job interview. Some of us, however, feel anxiety at times that are not necessary, in excessive amounts, or for no reason at all.

I have generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). I’ve dealt with it since I was a kid and I’ve been on medication for it for about a year now. There were times I would even say that my anxiety controlled me.

Like most with anxiety, I have specific triggers that can send me into an anxious spiral or worse—an anxiety attack. As a child, one was tornadoes. I was terrified to the point that I would sleep on the floor in front of my bedroom door to avoid windows for the entirety of the tornado season. Seeing as I grew up in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., this level of fear was incredibly irrational considering that tornadoes rarely ever happen there.

I remember the day my health anxiety first began. It was during the yearly norovirus (AKA the stomach flu) outbreak in my area when I was around 12 or 13. My younger cousin had gotten sick in the car on the way home from a family outing to a Christmas tree lighting. To be frank, I don’t even remember if he was contagious or even had the stomach virus, but the incident managed to trigger my emetophobia (a.k.a. the fear of vomiting).

Over the years my emetophobia morphed into health-based anxiety. Those who know me well consider me a full-blown hypochondriac. An unexplainable headache could only be explained by a brain tumor. A random nose bleed would mean cancer. There was an entire summer I spent pressing on my right side to check if I had appendicitis. As young as 11, I tried to count how often I would pee in a day just to make sure I wasn’t experiencing diabetes symptoms. Needless to say, I tend to have pretty bad anxiety surrounding my health.

If you were to ask me what my greatest fear was before 2020, I would have said “a global pandemic,” so just imagine the fear when I first heard about a new virus in December 2019. Of course, everyone wrote it off at first. Every other week I’d see a Twitter headline about the “novel coronavirus” and just push it out of my mind, trying to convince myself it would blow over soon. At the beginning of March I was at Universal Studios in Florida for spring break, then going to a hotel sleepover for a friend’s birthday. Within two weeks I was being sent home from college for the remainder of my freshman year.

From this point forward, my anxiety began to have a field day. I would wake up each morning with a sore throat or runny nose. Both could have just been allergies, but the anxiety did not want me to consider that. I would be out of breath after running up the stairs. However, my brain would tie that to having COVID, rather than the truth of me being out of shape. I would convince myself I had lost my sense of taste and smell or that my chest was beginning to tighten.

With all of these “symptoms” I was experiencing, you’d think I was out and about, but I was actually in the house for months, staying quarantined with my family. All of us were staying as safe as humanly possible from the virus, and yet my anxiety still tried to convince me I was sick every single day.

My anxiety didn’t stop at my own health, either. I was even more concerned about the health of my grandparents and parents. Daily, I would read articles detailing the tragic, unexpected COVID deaths of otherwise perfectly healthy people. I felt as if I were losing my mind. I had friends going out to parties and traveling. Meanwhile, I was home and terrified by the slightest urge to cough.

My anxiety continued after moving into my Philly apartment for the fall semester. Numbers were rising at Temple every day and parties were still going on, with no regard for what was happening. It felt like there were two different realities: those who were afraid of the virus and those who were acting as if the pandemic was over.

Now, the cases are as high as they have ever been, and they’re still growing. The COVID vaccines are starting to roll out, but 3,000 people are dying each day in the meantime. People are still trying to deny the severity of this virus and are not taking the proper precautions or following guidelines to keep themselves and others safe.

Though I’ve managed to gain more control of my COVID anxiety, I still wake up every day a bit anxious, thinking I have the virus and have infected those around me. I calm myself each time I have those thoughts and take a moment to remember that I have been taking the proper precautions, as well as getting tested if there is reasonable suspicion.

It's been almost a year since quarantine began, and my anxiety is in a bit of an awkward place now. Cases are affecting more people I know. It’s just moving in closer towards me and my circle, suffocating me. I worry about how this pandemic will affect important milestones in my life and the lives of those around me.

To ease my overwhelming anxiety surrounding this, I had to come to terms with an unfortunate truth. Half of this country refuses to take this pandemic seriously. I cannot control them, this virus, or the current state of this country. What I can control is how I adapt to these changes, remain hopeful for the future, and most importantly how I stay vigilant in protecting myself and those around me from this virus.