As the school year winds down and students look beyond the classroom for summer jobs, internships, travel, and of course graduation, anxiety about the next phase in life can often be impossible to ignore. 

May is Mental Health Awareness month, offering an opportunity to address the stigma of mental health and support a discussion around student anxiety. In March the University of Vermont Career Center welcomed entrepreneur, author, and life coach Wes Woodson to campus to discuss his book I Have Anxiety (So What?), exploring the challenges students face both in college and as they transition into the working world. Wes took time to answer a few questions on the subject and discuss how students can practice self-preservation and prioritize mental health. A quick warning, this conversation mentions domestic violence and gun violence. 

Tell me a little bit about your book “I Have Anxiety (So What?)”. What inspired you to write it?

I grew up in a small town called Sharon Massachusetts. It’s a town next to Foxboro where they have the football stadium. I grew up being one of the few people of color in my town. I always describe that’s where my social anxiety first began. I always felt this feeling of being too white for the black kids, too black for the white kids. To make matters worse, I was diagnosed with vitiligo, a rare skin disease that causes white spots to appear on my skin. I didn’t know how to interact in big crowds. I would always try to hide my anxiety, ultimately trying to be somebody that I wasn’t.

I ended up turning to romantic relationships to fill that void of not feeling good enough, always feeling insecure. I ended up getting into a relationship that turned out to be very toxic and ended up being a survivor of domestic violence. After I got out of that abusive relationship, I was hospitalized from the biggest mental breakdown of my life.

I think that was the catalyst of all those feelings I had been avoiding, just coming down to one moment. It was at that moment when I was hospitalized in an outpatient program and I thought ‘I better talk about these things now,’ like I never felt like I could. I would tell my therapist, but I would never tell my friends that I had anxiety. I felt such a deep level of shame around anxiety.

I was thinking ‘how could I share what I’m learning with all my friends?’ The idea for the book was to take all my journal entries that I had during the program and turn it into a book, that was published in 2021. The whole point of the book is to eradicate the stigma that exists around mental health through storytelling. It was a way for me to inspire other people to not feel so much shame about having anxiety.

You’ve mentioned that Generation Z is the most anxious and depressed generation in history. What do you attribute that to?

If you think about it, our generation is the first that grew up on the internet. We’re the ones who have facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, we got everything. These platforms give us an outlet for information right at our fingertips. It also introduces the concept of vicarious conditioning.

When my grandparents were growing up, they’d watch the news – whether they’d see stories about the Vietnam war going on, or some atrocity, but then after the news was over, they would just go back to what they were doing. For us, having access to twitter, facebook, and Instagram, we can hear about a mass school shooting in California, but almost feel the level of angst, pain and trauma as if we were actually in that classroom.

Social media is a big driver of anxiety and depression. The comparison to our peers, everyone lives this perfect life on social media, and where we think we’re not good enough, and we attribute our angst to our high social media usage.

The prevalence of social media, and the accessibility to all of this content and influencers and perfection, the striving to be what we see. That builds anxiety as well.

Perfectionism is a big driver for my social anxiety. I really thought I had to aim for this idea of being perfect. My parents met when they were 15 and got married when they were 25 – around the age I am now. When they got married, they had an expectation to create a better life for their kids than what they had when they were kids. That’s normal, I get that. But that creates a tremendous expectation [on a child] to succeed. I know they meant well and tried to motivate me to achieve more, but on the back end it made me question, ‘am I good enough?’

It's like one’s success or failure is a reflection of somebody else.

Exactly. And that explains this big level of angst and depression. I think right now Gen-Z is driving the conversation forward and talking about these things. That’s why I think this book works so well is because I’m validating what another Gen-Zer probably already experiences, like ‘Oh! If he’s talking about this stuff, maybe I can talk about it too.’

You’re a big proponent of therapy. Not just therapy for the sake of therapy, but the right therapy for the individual and putting in the work to achieve results. While Generation Z may be the most anxious and depressed, would you say they’re also the most open to addressing mental health and therapy?

Yes and no. Yes, in that we’re starting to have these conversations more than ever, but I also believe no, because there’s still a considerable number of us who just don’t want to get that help, which stems from the stigma [of asking for help]. It wasn’t modeled for us as kids by our parents. I just spoke at a high school, and one student asked, ‘What do I do when my parents don’t believe in mental health?’ It’s like we want to talk about it, but then feel judgment by your own family if you do talk about it.

I appreciated your viewpoint that anxiety and imposter syndrome is like “conspiracy theories you tell yourself about yourself.” How do you block out that noise?

I had that breakthrough in therapy! These lies we tell ourselves are never true, but we believe them for some reason! I want to validate how hard it is to notice that it’s a lie, especially when you feel like that lie is coming from inside.

I learned this trick from a friend when he was going up for a job promotion, and how he had to pitch his reasoning for deserving this job promotion, highlighting specific projects that showed his ability to perform at this next level. He calls it a ‘brag sheet.’ I thought to myself ‘What if every time I hear that negative voice telling me the conspiracy theory that I’m not good enough, what if I had a brag sheet of my own that was reminding me, I am good enough?’ I have a list in my phone of every single thing I have succeeded at in my life – not just professionally, but personally as well – in school, in sports, all of my successes that I can remember all the way back to like my 2nd grade soccer participation trophy. My takeaway from the lists is that it’s longer than I expected, and it also reminds me that wait, I am good enough!

If you had one message to share with a Gen Z-er, (one in college, one about to jump into the working world) what would that message be?

I would say that anxiety is very real, it’s not fake, but it’s almost always lying to you, trying to protect yourself from a perceived danger. If I could boil my message down to one thing, it would be that you are not what your anxiety says you are. My anxiety was always telling me that everyone’s watching me and judging me and saying I’m not good enough. But my I am not what my anxiety says I am.

As a successful entrepreneur, as a successful navigator of social anxiety, what advice would you give students about life after college?

I graduated from Babson College. Everyone has that angst about things like, ‘What’s my internship going to be? Where am I going to end up after graduation? What’s my career?’

The one thing I learned after I graduated in 2020, right when the world pressed pause, and everyone was sent home, I had friends whose job offers got rescinded, and they were like ‘oh my goodness, what do I do?’

I had this realization that no one has it figured out! So why should I have all the answers? We were told that we have to have it all figured out by the time we’re freshmen in college, and if we don’t have it by then, we definitely need to have it figured out by graduation, and that’s just not true. Nobody has it 100% figured out. There are so many different ways of being successful in life, and you just don’t have to have the answers all figured out.

Woodson graduated from Babson College in 2020. His book, I Have Anxiety (So What?) was published in 2021, which focuses on demystifying mental health and helping Gen-Z address mental health and self-improvement.

For more information on mental health care and counseling at UVM, please contact Counseling and Psychiatry Services (CAPS) at 802-656-3340, or visit https://www.uvm.edu/health/CAPS.