It’s a conundrum: many college students develop anxiety – for a variety of reasons – and a significant number are simply too anxious, worried, or embarrassed to seek professional support on their own or talk openly with their parents, friends, or peers about their anxiety.
It’s a real catch-22.
If you’re a young adult in college, you get it: college can be stressful, and the new and added stressors can lead to anxiety. The new stressors that may contribute to anxiety include:
- Super-high expectations from parents to perform
- Super-high expectations from self to perform
- New environment/learning environment
- Increased difficulty of coursework
- Absence of familiar support system
- Absence of protective habits in place before college
- New social situations/environment
All that pressure can build up – and we’re not even talking about bigger picture stress- and anxiety-inducing questions like what am I going to do with my life? and am I on the right career path?
We get it, too.
If you have an anxiety disorder of any severity, the stress of college can exacerbate the disorder. If you didn’t have an anxiety disorder before you enrolled in college, the new stress can contribute to the development of an anxiety disorder that meets clinical criteria for diagnosis.
In some cases, you may stay in school and do your best to manage, but in other cases, it may all be too overwhelming, and you feel totally crushed under all the pressure. If that happens, you might decide to move back home and regroup, which makes sense. You need to return to a place of safety and stability to reset and decide what you’re going to do next.
However, that doesn’t always solve the problem.
College Students: Returning Home and Anxiety
If you decide to return home, your anxiety may not automatically disappear. The change of location and a return to a familiar, comfortable, and comforting environment will likely help, but in some cases, it’s not the solution.
In fact, you may encounter new sources of stress upon returning home, such as:
- Conflict with family
- Distance from peers/friends
- Worry about what you’re going to do next
- Shame about returning home.
First, we need to reassure you that there’s no shame in doing what you need to do to take care of your mental health. If you need a break from school to get healthy in mind, body, and soul, do it: your health and wellbeing take priority over all things: sometimes you need a break to handle things so you can come back even stronger.
The gymnast Simone Biles is a perfect example. She took a step back from competition at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics to manage her mental health, then came back three years later at the 2024 Paris Olympics recharged and ready. Now she’s the most decorated gymnast in U.S. history. Her story is an object lesson in the value of recognizing what you need and making space for what you need, despite intense external and internal pressure to toughen up and push through.
Here’s another thing that impacts anxiety, especially for college-age people: relationship stress. If you return home from college to manage anxiety and then go through a breakup with a romantic partner, it can be the final straw and move you from managing fine to overwhelmed and not fine at all. Different things cause anxiety to escalate in different people: for you, it may be a breakup. For others, it may be family conflict, fear of the unknown, or something else entirely.
What You Can Do About Your Anxiety
If the scenario we just described sounds like your situation – meaning you’ve gone from managing fine to not really managing – there are two very important things you need to know:
- You’re not alone. We’ll share data on the prevalence of anxiety disorders in college students at the end of this article, so you can see that millions of people your age face similar, if not the exact same, challenges that you face.
- Professional treatment can help. The earlier a person with a clinical mental health disorder of any sort gets help for that disorder, the better the outcome.
The symptoms of anxiety can prevent you from full and active participation in the basic functions and responsibilities of daily life. To learn more about the symptoms of anxiety, the various types of anxiety disorders, treatment for anxiety, and the consequences of untreated anxiety, please visit our anxiety treatment page:
Anxiety Treatment at BACA
To get an idea of whether your anxiety meets the clinical threshold for diagnosis of an anxiety disorder, ask yourself these questions:
Does it happen at inappropriate times?
Does it happen all the time, as in every day for two weeks or more?
Is it severe enough that it interferes with typical daily activity?
If you answer yes to any of those questions, we recommend taking the first step toward getting professional support, which means reaching out to a qualified mental health provider to arrange a full psychiatric assessment.
What Happens When You Call BACA?
We know you have the strength to make the call.
If you returned home from college because of anxiety, you already made a difficult choice that shows strength and self-awareness. And if you’re still at school, getting to this point in this article means you have the perspective to know you need to make a change, and that professional support might be part of that change.
Making the call is a big step, but you can do it.
Here’s what happens when you call BACA:
- An experienced admissions counselor will answer the phone and talk to you in a compassionate, understanding, and supportive manner.
- Your admissions counselor will listen closely and answer every question you have. They won’t rush you. You’ll have time to think, ask more questions, and learn everything you need to know about how we assess, diagnose, and treat anxiety disorders.
- Your admissions counselor will ask questions to better understand what’s going on with you in order to learn how we can support you in the best way possible.
- They’ll walk you through our entire process so you know – ahead of time – what’s going to happen every step of the way.
What you’ll learn during that first phone call is that everything you have to say matters to us, and that our priority is helping you move forward from where you are to where you want to be. To learn more about our admissions process, please visit this page:
Intake and Assessment at BACA
One thing we want you to understand about BACA is that we tailor each treatment plan to you. First, we meet you where you are. Next, we listen and learn. Then we collaborate with you to clarify your goals for the future and help you reach them. And if you enroll in one of our Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP) or Intensive Outpatient Programs (PHP), we offer something transitional care services to help you manage the change from a highly structured, immersive program to one that’s less structured and less immersive.
This is a unique service we know has a big impact: after a PHP or IOP program, transitional services help you stay on track. We support you as long as you need support. You can back up to a more immersive treatment program, or you can gradually engage in treatment less and less frequently, as determined by your progress, level of comfort, and clinical need.
If you’re too anxious to call for help for your anxiety, please give us a try. Most college students who tell us they were afraid to call at first say this:
“It’s really not that bad – I’m actually relieved.”
We promised above we could prove that if you’re a college student or young adult with anxiety, you’re not alone. We’ll end this article with the latest data on anxiety among college age people. Let’s take a look at the data now.
Young Adults, College Students, and Anxiety: Facts and Figures
We gathered this first set of information from a peer-reviewed journal article called “Trends in Anxiety Among adults in the United States, 2008–2018: Rapid Increases Among Young Adults.” In these initial data sets, we’ll include numbers on all adult age categories, to show that rates of anxiety among young adults of college age are high when compared to older adult age groups.
Here are the trends in past-month anxiety prevalence the researchers identified:
Past-Month Anxiety 2008-2018: Adults and Young Adults
- Adults 18+:
- 2008: 5.12%
- 2018: 6.68%
- 18-25:
- 2008: 7.97%
- 2018: 14.66%
- 26-34:
- 2008: 5.36%
- 2018: 9.39%
- 35-49:
- 2008: 5.69%
- 2018:c5.98 %
- 50+:
- 2008: 3.60%
- 2018: 3.76%
As we can see, rates of anxiety increased more for the 18-25 age group – i.e. college age – than for any other adult age group.
Next, we’ll look at rates of past-two-week anxiety, i.e. people with mild, moderate, or severe anxiety symptoms in the two weeks before answering survey questions, as published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS):
Past Two-Week Anxiety 2019: Adults and Young Adults
Any Anxiety:
- Total: 15.6%
- 18-29: 19.5%
- 30-44: 16.6%
- 45-64: 15.2%
- 65+: 11.2%
Mild Anxiety:
- 18-29: 12.1%
- 30-44: 10.2%
- 45-64: 8.8%
- 65+: 7.1%
Moderate Anxiety:
- 18-29: 4.3%
- 30-44: 3.5%
- 45-64: 3.5%
- 65+: 2.2%
Severe Anxiety:
- 18-29: 3.1%
- 30-44: 2.9%
- 45-64: 2.9%
- 65+: 1.9%
Again, we see rates of anxiety highest in the youngest adult age category, 18-29, which includes most college students. The last set of data we’ll share comes from yearly surveys on college students only, conducted by The Healthy Minds Network as part of the ongoing Healthy Minds Study.
Past Two-Week Anxiety: College Students 18-30
(88% of college students surveyed were 18-30)
2020:
- Total: 34%
- Moderate: 18%
- Severe: 16%
2021:
- Total: 34%
- Moderate: 18%
- Severe: 17%
2022-2023:
- Total: 36%
- Moderate: 19%
- Severe: 17%
When we compare the overall percentage of adults with anxiety with the total number of college age adults with anxiety, we see that the prevalence of anxiety among college-age adults is 125 percent greater: around 35 percent for college-age adults, and 15.6 percent for all adults 18+.
To close, we’ll put numbers to these percentages, to confirm that if you’re a college student with anxiety, there are millions of young adults who also have anxiety. Out of roughly 18.6 million college students in the U.S.:
35% equals about 6.5 million college students with any anxiety.
18% equals about 3.3 million college students with moderate anxiety.
17% equals about 3.1 million college students with moderate anxiety.
It’s true: if you’re a college student with anxiety, you’re not alone. In addition, please understand with an accurate diagnosis followed by professional treatment, delivered by an experienced clinician, you can learn to manage the symptoms of anxiety and live a full and productive life on your terms and in the manner you determine is best for you.
