In my experience, "anxiety" isn't word that we associate with in the armed forces. Why? Because anxiety typically comes from discomfort, unfamiliarity, and situations that we want to avoid. Oddly enough, these are things that we are expected to get acquainted with during our military careers. The difference is, we are taught how to deal with this in our military environments, and in many cases, we instinctively revert to our training and rely on Standard Operating Procedures to control any discomfort, unfamiliarity, and high-risk situations. In the instance that we are expected to enter an unfamiliar environment, we are usually sent on a course to help prepare us for it. For example, if we're about to embark on a deployment, we will undergo Pre-deployment Readiness Training beforehand. We are instructed to get familiar with stress or anxiety, then work through it by trusting the skills we obtained after being deemed competent during some type of training or exercise.

The problem is that we have a course for everything in the military, but there's no course for re-entering the workforce and becoming a civilian. This is why we struggle with the decision to discharge. We receive very little guidance in the vocational differences between us and civilians. If we combine this lack of guidance with our natural expectation to get training for new environments, we essentially feel lost.