Hello everyone,
I will write this in an attempt to present to you everything that I have learned about this interesting disorder. I have written before in a thread called "My Humble Story" and I have posted many times on this forum about my symptoms and asked for advice plenty of times. In the beginning of my anxiety I used this forum a lot and if it wasn't for it, I don't know where I would be. So this is my small token of appreciation with a little disclaimer about the site as well (more on this later).
This will be a VERY long read, sorry about that.
The Beginning
"Just try not to do that again" were the words I would always tell myself when I was a little kid and had done something that upset me, something like picking up gum off the floor and chewing it and then realizing that it was dirty and getting fear because of it. I have always had anxiety, but as children our brains are not developed enough to process the plethora of information and senses and so we tend internalize these for later processing.
I have only realized this as an adult that I've always had anxiety as a kid. Fast forward 18 years and my first real symptoms of anxiety are happening with all of the usual dread (you can check my posting history from 2005). There is no point in discussing why, but a year or 2 into it, i realized I've developed a full blown disorder.
The Middle
I find myself bouncing from one side of my brain to the other, constantly trying to figure out what it is that is afflicting me and how I ended up this way. I was an adventurous child always looking for ways to excite my life through taking sometimes completely uncalculated risk, this is how I ended up injuring myself so many times, but that's okay, i take pride in my own recklessness. Now, I can't seem to walk to the store across the street without buckling at the knees.
I have gotten through the waves of anxiety, going between feeling better and back to feeling the worst anxiety. I wrote a post on here once titled "My Humble Story" and while I was on the right track, I still ended up relapsing (more on this later).
I start attending deep insight therapy (more on this later)
The End
I find myself crying on my couch, its raining, again. I haven't left my couch in 3 weeks. I am not working and I haven't seen my gf in 2 months. I am on the brink of what I think is complete failure and doom, the only time I go outside is to attend my therapy sessions in which I complain and try to figure out my anxiety, slowly deteriorating myself in the process.
My birthday comes along, I am alone. I don't celebrate, I have nothing to celebrate. My gf breaks up with me 2 days later and I've visited doctors more than I care to remember about simple symptoms. At one of these trips I take my mother with me, the doctor makes fun of me for being 27 years old and bringing my mom to an appointment. "It's been 7 years and i've read everything there is to read about anxiety and yet I am still here. What else is there?"
It has been a little bit over a year since I began my recovery process. It hasn't been easy, here is my journey through it.
The Basics
There are a lot of things to say about anxiety, but there are some basic things that I had to first understand. If i were to make progress at all, I needed to really understand anxiety, not just read about it.
Anxiety is a symptom of an unhappy life. It is a fire that is constantly fed. It is a circular disorder.
Anxiety is very behavioral and habitual and every little habit that you do is adding to the fire.
To break any habits you must first be aware of them, and so awareness is the key.
You must understand your life as a ying and yang. The body feeds your mind and your mind feeds your body, you must support both at the same time, you must work on both at the same time. Why did I relapse after my first success story here? Because I hadn't developed the proper attitude to change my life.
Anxiety is a way for you to change your life, to understand more about yourself, to learn life the way it is meant to be learned. If you continue living the same life, you will continue to experience anxiety. You must cut through to change your life, you must adjust your attitude to change. Change is difficult, but it is necessary to grow and that is what this is all about. Personal growth, personal strength and personal understanding.
I've read about acceptance many times and I've always wondered how does this work, I accepted that I have anxiety a long time ago, but it just hasn't gone away. I have read about exercise/sleep and diet being essential and yet I still relapsed.
You won't get anywhere unless you change the way you think about yourself, your life and your anxiety. You must see it in a different light.
The Start
I woke up with a new attitude. I am 27 years old, time for me to grow up. Whatever happens, happens.
1. I stopped going to deep insight therapy
2. I started going to CBT therapy
3. I started exercising (jogging)
4. I changed my attitude to that of I am going to beat this (thats all you need at first)
5. I experienced a lot of pain mentally: exhaustion, frustration, fear, fear, fear.
6. I tried to say "Yes" to every invite and went there looking for pain.
7. I started realizing what I enjoy in life (beach, water, sand, nature)
8. I spent more time with myself in the places where I enjoy life (beach, water, sand, nature)
9. I only thought of positive memories.
10. I shut the door to the past, I've learned from it, but I seldom revisit it.
11. Every day is a new day to practice, don't let it go to waste.
12. There are no good days, there are no bad days. It's life, accept everything as it comes.
It is hard for me to put everything on paper as it happened, since I have learned a lot and it's been a pretty long time, but let me try.
I stopped going to deep therapy, what I found was that it promoted more questions in my life. I didn't need more questions, my mind is already ravaged by a 1000 questions about myself, my anxiety and what was that feeling i just felt in my stomach. I don't need to know where this all came from, I need a hands on approach to beating it.
In my opinion, deep therapy did not help me at all, in fact it made me worse. I spent more time ruminating and thinking, something that is dangerous for a person with an obsessive nature.
Instead I went to a CBT therapist, she taught me a new attitude and she drilled it into my brain.
I don't need to know the answers, uncertainity is my friend. I am no longer trying to control my anxiety, I am trying to play with it, ignore it and at the same time, accept that this is who I am.
I repeated such phrases as "Whatever happens, happens.", "Everything will happen the way its suppose to", "I don't need to know answers, I just need to enjoy the now."
You need patience, patience, patience and perseverence.
Awareness
The other important thing I did was to start trying to become aware of things that were making my anxitey worse. I realized, there are so many things we do, simple things, that promote our anxiety.
I used to walk around the block, thinking it will clear my head. It doesn't it promoted more rumination and more thinking. I stopped doing that.
I used to write things down in a journal, thinking i am expressing my thoughts. It doesn't it only serves to remind me that I am fighting something. Something that doesn't even exist.
I used to check my pulse, thinking that I need to keep track of what my heart is doing. I don't, it only made me feel like I am weak and I need to be on constant look out.
I used to ask for reassurance, "do you think i'll get better?", "do you think this will go away?", "is this cancer?"...thinking that I will find answers somewhere. You don't, this is a compulsive behavior and is actually very dangerous. Don't ask for reassurance.
I used to argue with my mind, "NO I AM NOT CRAZY here is 2000 reasons why!!" thinking that I must control everything my mind thinks/says to me, only to realize that you must never fight with your brain. Instead I started accepting everything it said to me "yep, im crazy..feels good to be crazy". This is called flagging, if you have a thought that scares you, you start trying to rationlaize/understand it, flagging the thought to your brain to try and figure it out because it is something important and bothers you. Since the thought is now flagged it comes into your brain subconsciously and you continue to fight and understand it. Instead you must not flag the thought, I would think of all the scary thoughts and thoughts that provoke my anxiety and then think them on purpose..over..and over..and over again.
You must become aware of all of the habitual and behavioral things that increas your anxiety and once you notice it, then you can change it. Symptom checking, safety items and everything I mentioned are all habitual ways of increasing your anxiety, by paradoxically making you think that they are what you need to stay alive. "Don't go there, it might get scary" is your anxiety mind.
Recovery
Recovery is VERY VERY VERY slow. Just like anything else in life, progress is made over months and months and years of repetition of positive habits/behaviors. Recovery is almost unnoticable.
You must allow your body to self heal and it will. The brain usually takes the least path of resistance and at the moment it is the door that leads to anxiety it is the only path it knows of. You must create other paths and doors for it and try to go through those doors as often as possible, in the process you will train your brain in a new direction, but this takes months and months of perseverence. When you are trying to lose weight, you can't do it in a day or 2 it takes months and your body will finally respond and start losing weight. This is the same exact process, you are creating new connections in your brain and trying to solidify them, it takes time, it takes setbacks.
Setbacks
Setbacks are probably the most important part of the recovery process. Progress isn't made in how long you can stay anxiety free. Progress is made in how often you can change your state of mind from being anxious to being content with being anxious. Progress is made in a split second, a very important moment. Your mind learns that you can do this and progress is made in that moment. This is very important and a lot of people don't understand this.
You must go out and if anxiety comes you must learn to deal with it, progress comes in the moments when you change your attitude from anxious to excited. Progress is not made when you're anxiety free.
Once you being your recovery you must first realize that your body has been producing such an overload of stress hormones that your body is filled with them and still producing them. This is like swimming upstream. Once you begin to desensitize and alleviate stress, you will still feel the stress. Just because your body is used to this, so you will be stressed out and anxious even when you have nothing to be stressed out and anxious about. This is because you're slowly pumping the stress out of your body, while at the same time trying to close the "stress faucet". It is important to not get discouraged about this.
Things that I have accomplished since beginning my recovery.
1. New Job/Car/Gf
2. Take the subway no problem
3. Learned how to Surf
4. Snowboarding in the winter on 9 trips (overnight). Last time i snowboarded was 12 years ago.
5. Ski lifts, elevators, traffic jams...are now completely boring to me, i fall asleep.
6. Family dinners/occasions (still tough for me, but i do them, albeit uncomfortable)
7. I am out every day doing something.
8. Travelled to Spain and Ibiza for 2 weeks and took 4 flights. 2 transatlantic flights.
There are way more things, but I don't want to make it about that honestly. I can write for hours and I am not going to, I would rather you ask me questions if you have any. Then I can direct my response directly to the topic and to you.
So please ASK ME QUESTIONS because there is simply too much to write about, so if you're interested about certain things or you want to know my opinion on something, please ask me. It will be that much easier for me to organize my thoughts.
Stan.
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Originally Posted by theharvestmouse
