Leaving Home: university anxiety

For many young people, the transition to university is framed as an exciting leap into adulthood — new friendships, freedom to study your chosen subjects, and perhaps most significantly, independence. Yet for all its promise, this move can stir up powerful and often confusing feelings beneath the surface. Anxiety about starting university often goes beyond academic or unfamiliarity fears, reflecting deeper psychological factors from early experiences and attachment patterns.

The Anxiety Beneath the Surface

When a young person prepares to leave home, they're not just packing up their treasured bedroom — they're navigating a symbolic separation. Even if a young person seems confident on the surface, feelings of vulnerability, abandonment, or guilt can lie just underneath.

Anxiety in this context may not always make rational sense. A student might worry obsessively about forgetting something important, feel intense homesickness within days of arriving, or experience a vague dread they can’t quite explain. These can be expressions of unconscious fears — perhaps of no longer being held in mind by their parents, or of losing a sense of identity that was shaped within the family unit.

Attachment and Separation

Young people with secure attachments are often more equipped to handle the separation of university life, as they carry an internalised sense of safety and support. But for those with more anxious or avoidant patterns, the move may feel destabilising.

This can show itself through struggles with letting go, fearing they’ll be forgotten or replaced. This can manifest as clinging to family through constant calls and texts or struggling to join in and becoming isolated. On the other hand, they might throw themselves into independence but secretly feel disconnected or emotionally flat, unconsciously defending against deeper fears of intimacy or vulnerability.

University as a New Stage for Old Conflicts

University life is rich with new relationships — with peers, tutors, and potential romantic partners. Psychodynamically, these new connections often serve as transferential figures, onto whom the young person projects feelings and expectations rooted in earlier relationships. The inevitable conflict around flatmates and chores can unconsciously evoke a frustrating sibling or a difficult family life. A dismissive lecturer might stir up the same feelings a critical parent once did. Without realising it, the student may be reliving old dynamics in a new context.

This can create emotional turbulence, especially when these projections are unexamined. If the student becomes aware of these patterns however, it opens a chance to rework old dynamics and form more mature, authentic relationships.

The Loss of the Familiar Self

Beyond external relationships, the psychodynamic view also considers the internal world — the inner landscape of self-beliefs, defences, and identifications. Going to university often confronts a young person with questions like: Who am I without my family?

Without the identity I had at school?

These are not just surface-level questions — they strike at the core of ego development. The move can feel like a small psychological death: the loss of the "familiar self" and the birth of something not yet known. This in-between state is inherently anxious. Some students may respond with regression — retreating into childlike behaviours, or idealising home. Others may attempt to prematurely solidify a new identity, clinging to rigid beliefs or groups to stave off uncertainty. To see this captured with humour – please do watch Fresh Meat on BBCiplayer.

Holding the Anxiety: A Way Forward

The goal isn’t to banish anxiety, but to understand it. Anxiety often carries a message — about past wounds, current conflicts, or future fears. If a student can be helped to reflect on their feelings, to name and explore them without shame, they’re more likely to move through the transition with resilience.

The anxiety that university life provokes are not signs of weakness or failure — they are signals of deeper emotional work in progress. If we can meet these anxieties with curiosity rather than judgment, we support young people not just in surviving university, but in growing through it.

If something in this post resonates with you, counselling could help you explore it further.

You’re welcome to get in touch to arrange a free 15-minute call and see if working together feels right.

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