Hey guys, I’m 16 years old and I’ve been suffering with anxiety since about 12 years old. I wouldn’t say it’s severe but I feel like my life has been so restricted because of my efforts to resist it and hide from it. It all surrounds a fear of vomiting in public. in my head I feel like that is the worst possible thing that could happen and it stops me from doing normal teenage things. The thing is it’s not the vomit itself because I feel no anxiety if I’m sick at home but it comes up when I’m out. I’m scared to go on sleepovers (I always say I’m busy, my friends don’t know about the anxiety), out with my friends to restaurants and school camps. My mind goes in circles because I can feel an anxiety attack coming on and I know it’s happening because it’s happened countless times before but because it gives me physically nauseous symptoms my mind convinces me that i’m Going to be sick even though I know it’s just anxiety. Because of it I take measures such as not finishing meals when I’m out with friends and choosing specific foods that are “less likely” to make me sick. Anyways, I really need help and I WANT TO help myself get better and take action. i’m Sick of missing out on sleepovers and events and I feel like it’s already started to impact my life especially for the future e.g. dating and going on trips. I don’t know how to help myself though because when I’m in that moment the anxiety feels sick and I’m convinced I’m going to throw up. Anyways thankyou I hope someone can answer :)

Hi maria123,

Thank you for your post :) I'm sorry that you're struggling so much with this - I hope that you've had a chance to check out our other threads with people going through the same situation? There's a lot of people here who are afraid of vomiting too and it causes lots and lots of anxiety.

Have you ever thought about getting help from a counsellor? That way they can really work with you one on one which is a bit limited in what we can do here.

Ultimately, I think one of the things that would really help is trying to explore the worst case scenario. If you did vomit, what would happen? What might your friends think? For me, my friends would be super disgusted because vomit is kinda yuck, but then they'd probably ask if I was okay and help me try and feel better. For me it would be super embarrassing at the time and make me want to crawl in a hole - but then my friends are awesome so they're not going to want to run away from me. Do you think that this might happen to you too?

It's a weird question I know, but our brain likes to explore worst case scenarios even if they're super unlikely to happen - so knowing that you can face them will make the anxiety easier to bear. Chances are though that if you've been dealing with all this nausea for so long, it's unlikely that you'll actually vomit too.

Hope this helps a little