Every person may feel anxious or worried sometime in their life, but in my case, I was very susceptible to it and it had been making my life very difficult and agonizing. Anything even slightly worrisome or exciting would cause my anxiety to peak, in turn, causing my physical and cognitive abilities to sharply decline, which would, of course, make me unable to properly deal with any issues present in that situation.

My anxiety first started at 4 years old. When the Russo-Georgian war had begun, I and my family were staying in a village called Mejvriskhevi, which is near the south Ossetian border. On the 7th of August, at midnight, sporadic explosions and gun firings were initiated from a distance. My parents got terrified and started packing as they were aware something terrible had to be going on because relations between Russia and Georgia had been tense for a while. By the morning they had finished packing, woke me up and we were ready to leave. Seeing my parents so unnerved and panicky, I started investigating what was going on. My parents didn't want a 4-year-old kid to be struck with fear so they tried their best to distract me from reality, but hearing all the commotions from around, I quickly realized that there was some sort of chaos, thus my first anxiety attack kicked in.

We soon got in my dad's car and left off. While on the way to Tbilisi, traveling through the city of Gori, a Russian helicopter came out of nowhere and kept flying right over our car for a while. That was the moment I had been the most frightened I'd ever be in my whole life. Luckily, the helicopter soon flew away and we arrived in Tbilisi safe. Nonetheless, my psychological health had taken a huge toll.

Initially, I didn't have any problem dealing with school because all of the subjects seemed fairly easy and untroublesome, but later on, in 7th grade, I moved to another school, which I'm currently in, that specializes in maths and physics. The biggest hardship of studying in this school is that we have to take 8 exams each year. Getting anxious during the exams, my cognition would deteriorate, which caused me to fail multiple exams and severely affected my grades, eventually in 8th grade, because of bad exam scores, I had almost been expelled.

That's when I finally realized I had to do something about this issue.

I started looking for solutions, trying everything from exercise and a good diet to eastern spiritual practices like meditation. While these methods helped me to some extent, I was still struggling. That is, until one day, while casually surfing the web, I came across an eerie article talking about a technique called "reverse psychology". It is a method of persuasion by which a person is persuaded by asking them to do the opposite. After researching it further, I decided to try out this "miraculous" technique, all the articles were so eagerly advocating, on myself.

Previously, every time I would get worried I would keep repeating to myself: "calm down, everything's going to be okay!", basically forcing myself to stop worrying, which wouldn't do much good. Instead, I tried doing the opposite: Every time I felt a rush of anxiety, I welcomed it and instead of trying to lessen it, I physically tried to make myself feel more anxious.

Surprisingly, instead of the anxiety escalating, it immensely diminished. Using this method, over time, anxiety stopped being such a big deal for me and its vast influence on my daily life came to an end. Consequently, My grades and exam scores have skyrocketed and I've started to live a happier, healthier life.

What I've learned from this experience is that the psychological trauma I had received from the Russo-Georgian war made me cognitively associate nervousness with a major issue, which, in turn, made me develop a fear of being nervous in general, thus conquering my anxiety I had to conquer my fear of being nervous, using reverse psychology my brain has torn that link between nervousness and a grave issue and understood that in reality, when I'm nervous, there is not always a huge problem existent.