Navigating Anxiety and Body Image in Your 20s

Something that nobody tells you about hitting 20, is not only how much we change mentally, but also how many physical changes we go through. We constantly hear people preaching about how we will soon reach ‘Mental Maturity’, but what they neglect to mention, is the changes that come when we hit ‘Second Puberty’. Our eating habits will change, we start to fill our faces, and we grow curves in places we never knew we could. It’s easy to assume during this period that ‘I’ve put on weight’, but it’s not quite that simple.

Naturally, as we age, our bodies continue to change; our weight fluctuates, blemishes come and go, and our hormones go out of whack. Yet, nobody warns you to expect these changes to happen throughout our lifetime. I know that, as a woman, we are religiously told about puberty, and what it means to menstruate. Then, skipping some key chapters between, are told about tales of menopause. But what about the stuff in the middle? When our periods finally regulate, when our eating and sleeping habits change, and we discover that our metabolism isn’t what it used to be.

These are also the times when we begin really experiencing life; we experience love, loss, and we begin our journeys of trying to discover who we are as a person. We experience real, adult, stress for the first time, along with anxiety, and depression, and we finally (and unfortunately) learn of the profound impact our mental health has on our daily lives.

We go from stressing about homework, to stressing about what it means to live.

As a now 22 year-old, I can admit that my 20’s taught me the severity of my anxiety disorder. You can read more about my experience with anxiety here: How Anxiety Affected Me ‹ Your Anxiety Aid ‹ Reader — WordPress.com, but here’s the downlow:

At the age of 20, I had moved away from home for the first time, and as a consequence, I had to resort to using medication to calm my anxiety – something I had never done before. Nobody really talks about the jump of anxiety between being a teenager and an adult, but from personal experience, it was tough. I had gone from being 19, living with family – to living alone, feeling the wrath of binge eating habits and convincing myself that I both: 1) was routinely having heart attacks, and 2) had a cancerous brain tumour that was itching to take me out. (Side note: I of course had neither of these, and please let this serve as a reminder that health anxiety sucks).

The moral of the story here is that it can be incredibly frustrating experiencing all of these new sensations and bodily changes. The irony between weight gain, and the healthier eating habits are just one of the common struggles we will face.

I just feel as though this is a topic that needs to be talked about much more openly, as I can admit it took me far too long to realise that what I’m experiencing is completely natural. I realise now that I need to stop yearning over my (too skinny) 17-year-old body, and need to learn what my adult body now needs.

This is something I hope you can come to realise, if you too struggle with body image when hitting your 20’s.

I hope to go into more details and exploration of this soon, so we’re not alone in this journey of beginning adulthood, and experiencing life for what it really is.

Join me on this journey to learn how to look after ourselves, and nurture our bodies as they now are – not as it once was.