Anxiety Memoirs: When it's a true disorder.

In my self-help journey, I soon discovered that when most people talk about self-help around anxiety, they really mean the temporary kind that just about everyone experiences. Which is helpful! It’s guidance for a unified experience and that’s great. But what about those of us who have a true anxiety disorder? Some of the advice I read seemed great in theory, but is potentially dangerous for someone with a disorder, for example leaning into your anxiety and letting it take control in order to get to the root of it. It really can be helpful for some people and you can read more about it on the blog at katemitchellmoore.com. But for those who have had their daily life negatively impacted by anxiety, suffering physical symptoms nearly daily, putting yourself through that could do more harm than good at this point in your journey. So if that seems like it could put you into a full blown episode, I’m here to share with you a realization that really helps me.

Sometimes I get really upset that I get really upset, and so it starts this slippery slope where I start to feel hopeless, like, am I going to be on the brink of a slippery slope like this forever? Will I constantly be in battle with myself trying to fit into society and live a productive life?

For me, I feel as though I am so sensitive of a person that my thoughts can actually cause me to feel as if my thought is happening. For example, just thinking about making the decision to go out and smoke a cigarette can cause me to feel as it instead of it just being a thought, I actually took a hit of a cig and I feel it’s effects. Usually it’s that lung/chest feeling and tummy turning, but sometimes it even gets my digestive system going and makes me have to go no. 2, like, pronto.

With that in mind, of course it makes sense that someone who lives like this has a sleep disorder, right, where the body doesn’t fully rest because it’s operating in accordance to the dreams, as if it were reality. I mean, if my thoughts can so easily trigger my sympathetic system (one of two parts of the autonomic nervous system) then imagine what my dreams do. (Anyone else have super intense dreams that cause them to wake up with, and carry into their morning the residual emotions from the dream?! Super hard to feel refreshed and ready to tackle your day this way).

Now, at first upon realizing this, I thought that meant our brains, or at least mine, really are as powerful as I always thought and we actually can use our minds to cure our bodies--lol. I then immediately realized the chance of me being a clinical freak and having a low key superpower was not very likely. Which led me to finally realize that it’s my anxiety. My intense feelings were just a symptom of my anxiety, my sympathetic system constantly on the precipice of fighting some life threatening danger.

Psychology tells us that an overdose on a hard drug is more likely to occur in a new setting because the brain starts to equate the external stimulus of their usual using spot with being poisoned, since that’s really what we are doing to our bodies when we ingest substances we know aren’t good for us for recreation. Not to shame anyone, I’ve tried quite a few drugs in my rebellious experimental days. But anyways, this is also how tolerance works! Your brain prepares itself for the poison by recreating the effects of the drug just slightly, with the help of it still being in your system from the last time, even though you haven’t even hit the drug yet. This causes it to not be quite so intense. So when you are doing that drug in a new place, your brain doesn’t have that external stimulus to trigger that preparation your brain would otherwise do, so the effects of the hit are much more intense than they expect. This is why people OD in public places even when they hadn’t increased their dosage from the last time.

Using this information about the brain and body, I realized my sympathetic system was reacting similarly in result of my anxiety disorder. So basically, as you may already know, anxiety is when your body is in fight or flight mode. Without getting too science-y, the symptoms of anxiety—elevated heart rate, increased perspiration, racing thoughts etc.—are all meant to prepare you for a quick action to keep you alive, except it becomes a disorder when there is no life threatening stimulus to cause it. When this goes on for a long time, your body starts to equate very normal life occurrences as being life threatening, or as poison to tie it back to my drug and tolerance psychology example, preparing you for that danger.

So if you are wondering if you will feel this way forever, or if this is simply just what living feels like, I’m here to tell you it is not! There is hope. It’s just going to take some time while you trial and error with your primary care physician and other members of your health team such as a therapist or psychologist. I do not advise struggling with your anxiety alone. This is an illness and it requires professional help.

Feel free to reach out to me on here if you resonate with anything I’ve said! Everyone likes to know that they aren’t the only one who feels some way, which is the whole reason I'm sharing my own experiences. I wish love and health for each and every one of you.