Dear year 7 student,

I am a year 9 student and am struggling in my life right now. I am putting so much pressure on myself and that is interfering with my school life. 

Once, I was in my swimming class and I had a mental and physical breakdown. I was swimming and all of a sudden my body was not working normally and I could neither breathe nor stop trembling. I swam for 45 minutes in that situation and almost did not stop. The situation made me get scared and angry because I could not understand what was happening. 

After that, I realized I was probably very tired and I needed to stop. Now, I am trying not to do sports or activities that demand so much of myself when I am tired. Also, I try not to put so much pressure on myself academically. However, I would like to know if you have other suggestions to try to solve this problem. I do not know if what I am doing is the best of the options.

If that starts to happen frequently and if I do not change my actions and my routine, I would be overthinking those situations. Thus, I would not be able to pay attention in class and my grades would probably drop. That would be very detrimental for me because I will soon go to high school and will have more activities to do. I thank you in advance for your help!

Sincerely,

Anonymous

Dear Y9 student,    

I can see you are putting too much pressure on yourself. I know that it is very hard to deal with this kind of stuff, but you have to simply calm down. I suggest you to slow down your thoughts and try to not to think so much about this.

In my experience this overthinking is the main cause of the other problems that you said like physical and mental breakdown, and lower attention. But if you stop overthinking, eventually, you stop putting too much pressure on yourself. I think the main reason for the physical and mental breakdown is that you are probably making too much effort. One thing that works for me is to respect your limits, if you do this, it will help you to calm down and is a better option than just not doing sports when you are tired (but if you are really tired the best idea is to take a break).

Another thing I noticed that is bothering you is, what you described, lower attention, this is one difficult problem that is probably caused by this overthinking. Lower attention is a problem that I also go through, and it is a very difficult problem to deal with mainly because we, students, need to pay attention in classes. I would advise you to try to do some attention exercises or try to make yourself ignore this thinking and just pay attention(but this second one is harder). I think that if you ignored this, you would get rid of your problems. 

The most important thing is for you to try to stop overthinking, for the reason that  almost everything you say is caused by it. One idea is for you to get professional help, like a psychologist, but this is ONLY if nothing that I said works I really hope I could help you, and that your problems get solved! I hope it helps.

Sincerely,

Y7 - Heitor S.