 Hey, Casey Adalgo here, a writer for psych2go.net, and today I'm going to be talking about anxiety and a phenomenon known as derealization. Have you ever been panicking over a test and forcing yourself to stay up all night to study? Only to realize that it's getting harder and harder to read? Maybe the words are beginning to change shape, or maybe they're beginning to blur. Maybe they simply begin to fall off the page in front of you. This alteration and the perception of the external world are kind of sort of hallucination. In this case, the textbook you are studying from, and the fact that you can't read from it anymore, could be a form of derealization, which stems from your level of anxiety. Derealization occurs when a person's subjective experience of the world around them becomes altered in such a way that it begins to seem unreal, like in the example above. This phenomenon was studied by David Truman at William Patterson College of New Jersey. He used a questionnaire to poll 221 undergraduates on whether they were experiencing symptoms associated with depersonalization and derealization. Following this questionnaire, participants were then asked to rate their level of anxiety using the IPAT anxiety scale. Results showed that participants who were experiencing depersonalization or derealization also had higher levels of anxiety, and those who were experiencing both had the highest level of anxiety. The study then went on to explore what types of anxiety produced more episodes of derealization and depersonalization. It was found that those who suffered from phobiac anxiety, a term that Truman came up with for the study, tended to have more episodes. This meant that people with phobias seemed to have more episodes of derealization and depersonalization. However, the study did not take into account mental health illness, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or generalized anxiety. Would people who experienced these disorders also experience episodes of derealization and to what extent would they experience them more than people who experienced phobiasic anxiety? Since the study didn't answer this question, this all has to remain as food for thought.