Living With Anxiety

When I had my anxiety attack, my first thought was that life as I knew it was over for me. I envisioned a life of misery in which all my dreams were shattered with no place for hope. I was devastated! At the height of my terror, I even pictured myself in a psychiatric ward, heavily sedated and lifeless. I was completely lost as to what to do about anxiety until I started educating myself about it and, more particularly, learning to keep a critical mind. I am even going as far as asserting that while knowledge is power, if not handled by a properly critical mind, it can be destructive. It is this critical mindness that I would like to introduce here.

Is Anxiety a Mental Illness?

I often struggled with the idea that living with anxiety could mean having a mental illness because to me it is unsettling to perceive something perennial like anxiety as uncommon. We do not label people who catch the common cold as…I don’t know “cold holders” because the cold virus is common and anyone can potentially catch it. The same rules apply to anxiety; it is common in our society (western societies) and anyone can potentially develop its symptoms. So why call it a mental illness? My answer is to make money.

Suffering from a mental illness is not a bad thing at all but the words “mental illness” carry with them a very powerful message of impending doom as if to say,  ”Your life is over”. When we hear the words mentally ill we unwillingly conjure up images of zoombie-like individuals who are simply waiting to die or of erratic and dangerously unpredictable people. We are programed to feel that way about mental illness through education (yes in schools) and the media (google search mental illness in images), and thus despite our better jugment we cannot help but feel terror and hopelessness. While it is true that our society is more tolerant of mental illness, there still remains this stigma attached to it.

I am one of those people who do not believe in “mental illness” (the words, not the referent), I believe  in “brain disorder” or “diseased brain” because that designation is synonymous of hope, and I believe in recovery and betterment. I know that the vernacular has indeed changed over the years as we do not often hear the words” mental illness” but there is one entity that still puts forth the message conveyed by the words mental illness solely for monetary gains, it is the pharmaceutical indutry.

Lets Put Some Colors in Our Life

Drug companies are what I call the “mercenaries of mental health”, they want to save us from a life of pain and suffering as long as it is profitable. The fledgling field of mental health is profitable because it is still fairly new (1930s) and it is constantly growing as new mental disorders are being identified. When a so-called disorder ( there seems to be more psychological disorders than actual cases) is given a name, the process that follows requires to establish a treatment protocol, which is also an opportunity to come up with a new drug.

When anxiety became a “mental illness” of its own right in the 1930s (thanks to Sigmund Freud), drug companies began a quest to create the most lucrative drug on the market. Anxiety soon turned into a money making machine because people desperately need to maintain a certain level of functioning, and so drug companies flooded our society with barbiturates, then tranquilizers and finally benzodiazepines. All three types of drug became a big seller at one point until it was replaced by the next generation of “antianxiety pills”, and yet none of them cures the individual from anxiety and all three carry the potential risk of physical dependance. The success of antianxiety pills is then undoubtedly due to  very good marketing strategies. The use of powerful messages that lead you to believe that your life will be over if you do not take the pill, that with the pill you will be able to live your life as if nothing was ever changed, in short that you will be “normal ” again. I myself wanted to feel normal again and not be cast as suffering from a mental illness, and I was slowly coming around until my critical voice brought me back. “This cannot be it”, I interjected, “anxiety is not an abnormal thing to experience, it is not a mental illness but rather a symptom of a wounded brain”. I acted swiftly and immediately sought help. I needed to find ways to heal my brain in a way that was going to bring lasting results and make me strong enough to withstand stress in the future.

I do not condemn the use of antianxiety pills, I only want to emphasize that they ought to be used as a crutch until you regain some self-control and think clearly again. Unfortunately prescriptions for antianxiety pills are still on the rise with tranquilizers being the most prescribed drugs on the market. To me this is worrisome because it means that the generation to come will never learn to develop the necessary skills to control anxiety naturally. Instead they will turn their most terrifying fears into a reality by becoming subdued and zombie-like individuals under the influence of those drugs, which is what they wanted to avoid  in the first place by taking pills. An interesting fact about tranquilizer that should send a chilling sensation down your spine is that the military is currently testing the use of tranquilizers as a potential weapon to subdue terrorists and other threatening individuals, that is how powerful thoses pills are.

Rachel Christine Nowicki

We live in the age of anxiety, as is commonly said, so sooner or later you will experience some symptoms of anxiety but the outcome depends heavily on how it is handled at the beginning. You may choose to stick with the quick fix or you may go beyond that and decide that you want to get rid of it completely. I and countless others are living-proof that anxiety can be controlled for good through natural methods. Living with anxiety is not a death sentence, it is a revival because it forces you to rethink your life choices and to change your perceptions. Bring some colors into your life by considering other possibilities and other explanations for what is going on within you, and as you get closer to the truth you will be able to secure a “normal” life for yourself, or I should say a better life.

Epilogue

I would like to add that I do not condemn the pharmaceutical industry, quite contrary I am grateful for all their accomplishments in contributing to improve our life. However, I do condemn their insatiable greed and their use of the vulnerability of people whose mental health is jeopardized to make money. Thus I reiterate the importance of educating yourself in as wide a range of alternative options as possible. Keep an open mind

This is my true story living with anxiety drug free. I want to share with you my worst and my best moments, in the hope that it can help those of you who are struggling with anxiety. By the way, there is a happy ending.

Living with anxiety can be difficult and at times even unbearable. The anxious person’s mood seems completely unpredictable triggering panic attacks from one minute to the next. As a survivor, I know how it feels to wake up every morning wondering how I am going to go through the day without giving up or running back home where I felt safe.

What to Do About Anxiety

In order to take on the everyday challenge of controlling anxiety I resorted to a very strict routine of mental and physical exercises that aimed at keeping my anxiety at a low level – I remember one slogan from a website on anxiety that caught my attention, “Remember you cannot be anxious if you are relaxed!”. It was going to be my motto and my mantra from that day on .

It took a lot of work and constant effort to eventually gain control over my anxiety. It was not easy and I admit that, like many other people in my situation, I was seduced by quick fixes and easy tricks that would have quelled the anxiety, if only for a moment. I remember for example the allure of Valium as a way to help me get a full night sleep, albeit not a good night sleep, or even alcohol to keep me relaxed and elated, only to wake up the next morning feeling as if my anxiety had increased exponentially during the night. Those behaviors reflect an attempt at self-medicating the unwanted symptoms, and their powerful enticement lies in the fact that  even though they provide temporary relief, when one is constantly suffering even a short time of “no suffering” is priceless – it is very tempting.

Sipo Liimatainen

The Allure of Self-Medicating

Anxiety has often been dubbed the illness of the industrialized society because its demanding and fast-paced lifestyle has taken a toll on people’s health  from the blue collar who is expected to put in more hours than his body can bear to the executive whose responsibilities are so great that he can no longer sleep at night, and not forgetting the mother who has to perform her duty by any means necessary. As a result, vulnerability to mental and physical breakdowns are an inherent part of living in this society. But there is just simply no time to be sick, because you have to be able to function and contribute to the society through your productivity at all times. In this society, time is dissolving and all that is left is tomorrow and there is no room for the Present as everything we do is in anticipation of tomorrow. Hence, if we are feeling a little under the weather, we tend to pop up an Advil in the hope that we will be on top of our form the next day.

The same scenario applies to anxiety; as it slows us down and render us useless we become willing to take anything that provides instant relief. We see that being played out in the 50s and 60s during the psychopharmacological revolution, when the goal was for every ailment to have a pill for it. Anxiety had its tranquilizer (Barbiturates and Benzodiazepines) which quickly became a fast-selling and very popular type of medication. The lure of the tranquilizer came from the two primary facts that it was easy to use and that it provided  instant relief.

60 years later history repeats itself as we see more and more people popping up a Xanax whenever they feel a little tense or edgy. I am not making a case against taking anti-anxiety pills when suffering from debilitating and/or excessive anxiety but I wonder about those people who take a Xanax whenever they feel a little beside themselves. That is what I call self-medicating. Using a pill for a minor mood imbalance that would probably have resolved on its own. Indeed in some cases of mild anxiety, it is alright to let yourself experience a little edginess because by doing that you become used to the feeling which in return makes it less scary and intense.

Common Self-Medicating Behaviors

John Mendoza

Another example of self-medicating behavior is smoking pot. I am sure that a lot of you will probably disagree (and please do tell me your opinion) with what I am about to say but please just keep an open mind to it. Smoking pot is the worst thing you can do when you have a mood imbalance because overtime it intensifies the imbalance. I am not a doctor and I only speak from experience (seeing it and reading about it) but I know people with anxiety who smoke pot as a way to help them calm down and be relaxed for whom the anxiety has worsened overtime. The worst is that they do not even notice the change because in their mind they are already suffering from anxiety, so they become completely dependent on weed to feel sort of normal again, albeit at a higer dosage to counterbalance the tolerance effect. Since smoking marijuana for a long period of time has been linked to higer anxiety and even psychosis in scientific studies, then it becomes clear what it is really doing to the individual it is putting them inside a vicious cycle. You smoke pot to relieve your anxiety, but then the anxiety increases in intensity and form and so you smoke more weed more often to get that same result you had initially.

Alcohol is another crutch that is often used to “treat”anxiety because after all its main effect on the brain is to depress or slow down the nervous system. Thus, after a few drinks we feel laid back and elated and we are even able to sleep at night – alcohol suppresses REM sleep, which is the dream state of sleep, so you never get a restful sleep after drinking heavily anyway. The effect is instantaneous and, having experienced that myself, very tempting. I could feel my anxiety slowly fading away almost instantly. That was of course a false impression because it was only being subdue or numbed by the alcohol, which does not mean that it was not still there. It was not until the following morning that I would feel the wrath of anxiety, because I would wake up with such an intense feeling of dread and overall discomfort that it was quite difficult to calm myself down. I remember one time forcing myself to go out and do some shopping in order to keep my mind away from myself because my anxiety was so intense ( I did not sleep that night) that I was afraid of having another anxiety attack. I need to specify here that I am not a heavy drinker, 3 glasses is the maximum I can ingest, so it did not take much alcohol in my system to affect my anxiety – whether you are a light drinker or a heavy drinker, the anxiety is the same. There is evidence of the negative effect of alcohol on anxiety in the scientific literature of which I was well aware of but the temptation was too strong, and I naively thought that it would be different with me!

The main problem with self-medicating is that it takes your mind away from what is really beneficial to your health in the long-term. The quick fix method will allow you to keep going in the short-term but in the long-term it will slow you down dramatically. There is no magic pill when it comes to anxiety, if you want to get rid of it you need to identify and remove the triggers and then work on yourself. There are healthy ways of regulating your anxiety which are also easy and quick, but they require constancy and you will need to find some time to do them. I describe a few of those techniques I practiced in an older post.

Epilogue

It is thus important to keep in mind that the only way to be able to control your anxiety is to make the necessary changes in your life once they are identified. Even if you are taking anti-anxiety pills as a prescription, you run the risk of having to take them for the rest of your life if you do not take the time to be more in touch with yourself and to change, because if you are having anxiety there is no doubt that something in your life is not right and it needs to be taken care.

I cannot stress enough the benefits of working on yourself for your mental health in the long-term. It DOES work.

Since my anxiety attack it has been an exciting journey filled with self-discovery and growing self-awareness which has led me to realize that I had been living in a fog for so many years. This is the positive side of living with anxiety (as long as anxiety is under control) because you are constantly keeping yourself in check and in the process you tend to compare the person you are now with the person you were before anxiety hit you, and then you find out all the things that were wrong with you. In my case, all the signs of an imminent breakdown were there and among them was my failing ability to concentrate.

From Flawed to Declining Concentration Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: The Problem with Concentration” »

Controlling anxiety is a must first step toward recovering from anxiety and regaining a sense of self-agency (a psychological term that simply refers to the concept of being in control of your actions and decisions). More particularly, it is important to lower your anxiety at the moment of an attack in order to be able to function normally and think rationally. I also found that reducing anxiety on a daily basis helped me lower the frequency of my panic attacks until they disappeared completely.

Thus I decided to put together for you a short list of a few relaxation exercises that I found to be effective in lowering my anxiety during my attack. I recommend doing each exercises twice a day at first and then only once a day, but if you find it difficult to follow that schedule, try at least doing them once EVERY DAY. Remember, there is no miracle with anxiety, if you work on it regularly you will eventually control it.

  Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: Instant Anxiety Relief Techniques” »

Controlling anxiety requires constant work on the self until the brain has relearned positive ways to process information and deal with stress. Remember that an anxious brain is like an injured limb, as the latter requires physical therapy to relearn basic movements, the former needs “mental therapy” to learn how to make positive response in place of anxiety. One method of mental therapy that I have been advocating on my site is the regular practice of meditation as a way to enhance self-awarness and eventually bring  postive thinking (to learn more about the benefits of meditation, please refer to my older posts).

I have been meditating for one year and a half now and to this day I continue to see improvements in my way of thinking and my perspective on things. In addition, my anxiety has substantially decreased to the point of being almost gone (although I know that it is still lurking in the background), but because the benefits have been tremendous I have included meditation time into my daily routine. Now meditating for me is like taking a shower in the morning or dressing up, it is something that I need to do in the morning. Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: Snoozing during meditation” »

Living with anxiety has taught me valuable lessons about how the brain operates, especially the anxious brain. The journey that started last October when my anxiety broke out has allowed me  to open my eyes on a lot of the things I was doing wrong with myself and my life, and it has transformed me into a better person –  more like a psychologically healthier person!

As the lesson continues, I have recently discovered another fact about anxiety that I want to share here with you.  Before experiencing it first hand, I had always associated that fact with folk psychology but now I have evidence of its truthfulness. What am I talking about?  - I am talking about how important it is for your psychological health to be earnest.

Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: The Importance of Being Earnest” »

Technorati Tags: controlling anxiety, living with anxiety, meditation for anxiety, what to do about anxiety

Living with anxiety is not an easy thing to do because the symptoms are not always clear-cut or pertinent for that matter. What I mean by that last statement is that I have recently found out that some symptoms experienced by anxious individuals are not necessarily linked to the anxiety, as is the case with certain physical symptoms of anxiety.

Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: The symptoms of Anxiety” »

As I mentioned in a previous post I am sort of monitoring my anxiety level to test whether the techniques that I have been using are effective in managing anxiety. Since living with anxiety is an everyday challenge, little upsetting changes can send you right back where you started, so it is imperative for me to continuously test whether I have it under control or not.

With a big change coming into my life I realized that the anxiety was still there, albeit less intense, but its mere presence is threatening to me because it implies that I could still compensate. While I  had been handling stress fairly well since I found out about the change,  last week was a lost battle against anxiety. Yet, that episode taught me a valuable lesson about anxiety. Yes, I had come to realize that there are two kinds of anxiety; one which you can live with but is relentlessly prickling you, and the other which you cannot live with  because it robs you of your life. I experienced the latter last year but now I am in the throes of the former!

Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: The Test…continued” »

Technorati Tags: controlling anxiety, living with anxiety, meditation for anxiety, what to do about anxiety

Anxiety causes a slew of complications such as physical ailments and various psychological symptoms that add to the burden of the anxious person and result in feeling overwhelmed. Some of the problems are manageable but others are simply terrifying and can lead to resignation. One such symptom is that of having thoughts of death and suicide.

It is very common for individuals suffering from anxiety and panic attack to have thoughts of death or of ending one’s life, and they are more acute during an anxiety attack or a panic attack.  I speak from experience when I say that those thoughts are frightening, because anxiety renders you psychologically vulnerable to this kind of thougths, which are usually subdued or non-existent in a healthy brain, to the point that you may worry about acting  out on them.

Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: Thoughts of Death” »

Every psychology textbook will tell you that fear is different from anxiety. The former is based on real events while the latter is based on an anticipation of future events. In other words,  fear is a normal reaction to an actual event while anxiety is the product of our thought process. One cannot help but wonder then if, considering the difference between these two forces, anxiety is more amenable to being controlled than fear? Well, anyone living with anxiety will tell you that it is far from the truth, because if it were that easy anxiety would not be a problem.

Continue reading “Living with Anxiety: The World of Fear” »