Your Anxiety Is Not Your Identity — And a Queen Who Proved It Centuries Ago

TL;DR

Anxiety is one of the most common experiences for teen girls — and one of the most misunderstood. It is not a personality type, a weakness, or something to just push through. It is a signal that deserves real attention. And a 13th-century queen who ruled an empire while her entire court questioned her legitimacy has something powerful to teach you about what resilience actually looks like.

The Feeling Nobody Names for You

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being anxious in a world that tells you to just be more confident. Like confidence is a switch you flip. Like anxiety is just pessimism with better PR.

If you are a teen girl navigating school pressure, social comparison, family expectations, and the permanent performance of social media — your nervous system is handling a load that no previous generation of teenagers has had to carry in quite this way. The anxiety you feel is not irrational. It is a completely logical response to genuinely complex circumstances.

What matters is not whether anxiety shows up. It will. What matters is that you stop confusing it with the truth about who you are.

What Anxiety Actually Does to Your Brain

Your brain has an alarm system — the amygdala — that evolved to protect you from physical danger. It is fast, instinctive, and does not particularly care about being accurate. When it fires, your body floods with cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate climbs. Your thinking narrows.

The problem is that this system cannot distinguish between a tiger and a test result. Between real danger and social humiliation. Between a crisis and a hard conversation. For teen girls especially — whose prefrontal cortex, the brain's rational centre, is still under construction — the emotional alarm fires loud and often.

This is not dysfunction. It is development. But it helps enormously to know what is happening — because anxiety convinces you that the story it is telling is true. It is not always true. It is just loud.

The Things That Actually Help (Honest Version)

Name it out loud or in writing. Research in affective neuroscience shows that labelling an emotion — actually saying or writing 'I am anxious right now' — reduces the amygdala's activation. It is not therapy-speak. It is biology.

Breathe out longer than you breathe in. A longer exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the calm-down circuit. Four counts in, six counts out, repeated five times, produces a measurable physiological shift within minutes.

Move your body. Cortisol and adrenaline are meant to fuel physical action. Without it, they just circulate and amplify the anxiety. Even a ten-minute walk metabolises what anxiety has flooded into your system.

Tell one person. Not to fix it. Just to say it. Being witnessed in what you feel reduces its weight in ways that are hard to explain but consistently true.

Get professional support if it is interfering with your daily life. iCall at 9152987821 offers free, confidential support from trained professionals. Anxiety that is frequent, intense, or stopping you from doing things you want to do is not something to just manage alone.

What Does Not Help — Even Though It Feels Like It Does

Avoiding the thing that makes you anxious feels like relief in the moment. Long-term, avoidance teaches your brain that the thing was genuinely dangerous — making the anxiety bigger next time. Approach slowly, in small steps, but keep approaching.

Scrolling your phone activates comparison and fragments attention — both of which feed anxiety loops. It also delays sleep, which is one of the most significant drivers of next-day anxiety levels.

Telling yourself to stop being anxious has precisely no effect on anxiety. Your nervous system does not respond to commands. It responds to regulation — which is the breathing, the naming, the movement, the connection.

She Walked So We Could Run: Rudrama Devi of the Kakatiya Dynasty

In the 13th century, in what is now Telangana, a girl was born into a royal family that had no sons. Her father — King Ganapati Deva — made a decision that was almost unprecedented in medieval India: he declared her his heir, gave her the name Rudrama Devi, and began training her to rule.

The court did not accept this quietly. Nobles questioned her authority. Neighbouring kingdoms — the Yadavas, the Cholas — saw a woman on the throne as an opportunity for invasion. There was a near-constant undercurrent of the message that she was illegitimate, insufficient, and that it was only a matter of time before the real power asserted itself.

Rudrama Devi did not wait to feel confident before she acted. She led military campaigns personally. She suppressed internal rebellions. She defeated the Yadava king Mahadeva in battle. She administered the Kakatiya kingdom — which at its height covered most of present-day Telangana and Andhra Pradesh — with a sophistication that Marco Polo, who visited during her reign, documented with evident admiration.

She ruled for approximately forty years. She died on the battlefield, in her seventies, leading her forces against a rebellion. She did not retire. She did not defer. She fought to the end of her life for the kingdom she had built.

What strikes me about Rudrama Devi's story is not the dramatic battles. It is the daily act of showing up in a role that everyone around her questioned — and doing it anyway, year after year, decade after decade. That is not fearlessness. That is action in the presence of fear. Which is the only definition of courage that has ever been true.

Your anxiety is not evidence that you are wrong about who you are. Rudrama Devi's court told her she was wrong about who she was for forty years. History proved otherwise.

How are you building your version of courage in the presence of anxiety? Tell us in the comments. We want to hear from you.

— Daughters of India