“Okay sweetie, let’s break this down to pieces together… shall we?”
I say my words as I start to breathe a little slower after I kept breathing heavily on repeat as thoughts creatively found a new way to shatter my brain and break my bones.
This was the moment I began to get to know and understand what anxiety really is and how to handle it;
Yes, you can’t really get rid of it, it’s kind of an old wound that is always open, you can’t remove it from your body but surely you can handle its pain a lot better when you understand where it’s coming from and how to use the right bandage, the one that suits you best, cause when it comes to mental health, not every solution applies to all. We’re different and we perceive things differently. I will teach you in this piece everything I’ve learnt so far, so you can use it your own way.
First things first, what do people who have anxiety look like?
There’s of course a misconception about us; do we mumble? Do we have a hard time talking and expressing our thoughts? Do we sweat a lot? Do we look scared most of the time? Are we all introverts? Do we ever get things done with all the worrying and thinking?
Breaking news everyone: People with anxiety are actually high achievers!
They are your successful colleagues who don’t show off but execute brilliant work in less time than anyone else. They are your best friends who just got certified, promoted, and are looking to add more to their knowledge and career.
What we suffer from and go through is far beyond shown or known -unless you had a chance to actually witness an alarming situation where anxiety decides to show its face instead of wrestling internally in silence.
Okay so, what is anxiety?
The concept of anxiety became clear to me with time. My anxiety showed up for the first time in my early teens. At first, I thought it was me being shy but, as I grew older and bolder, I began to realize it had nothing to do with that. In fact, researchers didn’t really find a rote cause for anxiety, but what they found so far is that anxiety happens when you get separated from an attachment figure
Let me explain this slowly...
You see, anxiety is actually a thinking pattern. It’s more of a coping mechanism than it is an illness.
There happened a certain event or a situation where it all started, it was calm in your mind then chaotic ever since, most probably it happened during your childhood. This changed the nature of how your brain works and the default settings to how it perceives things were changed to an alarming setting where certain things alert your subconscious mind and make your conscious mind believe you are under a threat, so you act differently than a person with no anxiety would act.
That’s the major difference between a person without anxiety and someone who suffers from it; it's the way our brains are wired. That’s where the suffering begins and we fail to explain anything to anyone because whatever we say is always processed through an anxious brain, it’s way too different depending on the number of triggers aligned with each thought. We process things in layers not as a whole; an idea is never just one, it’s a dozen, a hundred little ideas within one. The intensity of thoughts is an obstacle in communication and interpreting bare ideas as they are and that is very difficult to explain. It’s like looking at the sky, all you see is a clear huge space, white and blue look peaceful to photograph, but the sky has so many components; the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets all lingering in outer space.
What does your ego do to your anxiety? Is it on your side or against you?
The ego is your overprotective mother, it wants to keep you safe. When you have anxiety, your ego will hub into the time travel machine to make you watch your past and future life and keep you away from anything that removes that sense of safety made-up safety in your anxious mind, the kind of safety you had to create to make you feel like you have things under control. Your ego is your inner gangster voice telling you things like, “You know why you can’t love again,’’ “You’re better off on your own,”
“Life is better with no one running your peace,” or “There’s no need to change anything”…
Panic attacks and physical pain
For years and years, I hated my panic attacks to the core, I always thought they were ruining my life, making me weak and incapable of controlling my emotions, and I hated everything that triggered them. Until I learnt what they mean and why they exist. There’s an undying bond between the mind and the body; in our case, our anxious mind gives us a sore body. When your mind is overwhelmed with anxious thoughts and reaches its limit, your body takes over and forces you to relax. Yes, you read correctly, those panic attacks and whatever physical pain we go through are the body’s way of shutting up the mind and going into a state of calmness. It's even trickier because, to stop a panic attack, you need to acknowledge the scary thoughts instead of running away from them or telling yourself they're not real.
One thing I want to tackle that I don’t think a lot of people talk about enough is...
How anxiety affects how you are perceived as a person
Radge and anger issues
As I explained earlier, it’s hard to spot people who suffer from anxiety because it can appear in different forms, what you might witness on a daily basis is that your anxious mind is easily irritated so you can appear as a person with some anger issues from time to time as you explode at the tiniest things unable to explain why did this annoy you so much as you can feel the effort you do to calm your thoughts is huge and when someone interferes with this it can become quite unbearable.
An unspoken urge to be in control
Losing control can make us feel like our world is crashing and so we can get a bit obsessed to save everything thinking it’s about to drown, disappear or leave. It’s hard for us to react calmly to a problem and so you appear as if you’re over-reacting.
Isolation Vs Social Interactions
We require time alone to recharge our batteries even though, at the same time, we don’t feel good alone. It’s like we want quality time with people and we can’t really take in social interactions more than a couple of hours, and we want to stay alone but we can’t take the overthinking too.
Now with all the techniques I’ve tried, I want to share with you What works and what doesn’t
Let’s start with what doesn’t work:
Convincing yourself that there’s nothing to worry about, that things will be okay, that you are over-reacting and you should think more rationally, and that your mind is playing tricks on you, all of that will not make your anxious mind any less anxious, on the contrary, your thoughts will do a lot of effort to prove to you that they’re very real.
Thinking you are weak for feeling the way you do, your anxiety is not a character flaw, it doesn’t make you any less you, in fact, you triple your efforts than most people when doing anything and you get it done even faster and better.
Believing fear makes you stuck, and anxiety makes you think you’re late in the success train but, most of the time, you’re actually moving forward, you just don’t pay a lot of attention to your wins.
What does work is
Self-talk is crucial, especially for those with anxiety, as we spend a significant amount of time in our heads. You listen to yourself more than anyone else in your life. Therefore, it's important to make your inner voice less critical and more supportive. Think of it as your best friend—someone who always has your back, is there for you, and has your best interests at heart.
Accepting yourself a huge part of struggling with mental issues is that we can’t accept what we are because we just want to be normal just like anybody else, we want regulated emotions no intensity no constant self-blame or doubt no triggers no mind alarms nothing. We want normal we crave it so much it hurts. But the moment you start to accept that having anxiety or any mental issue does not take away any of the good in you, you will feel a lot better. Accepting that yes you don’t get to feel okay all the time and I do realize that by “okay “I mean in less pain, in less over your mind, and less nervous is hard but once you do, you will know that you just have to go through your day with an annoying guest that over welcomes his stay but eventually will leave.
With this, I leave you with a virtual hug and lots of love.
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