How My Anxiety Turned Into My Disorder

Recently, I came across an article on facebook during my daily morning commute to work. I was immediately absorbed by its title, which was composed of the very thing that plagued my own life, Anxiety. 

One of the things that I have come to understand is that anxiety is NOT a weakness, its prime preys are those who are the most empathetic. Unfortunately, I am an intensely empathetic being who feels everything so deeply to the point where it is sometimes too difficult to compute what is normal stress from what is harmful.  

Don't get me wrong, empathy is a great thing and I like being susceptible to what others are feeling because I can connect with people more; but Y'all, it's exhausting. 

Back to this article. I really did not want to read another depressing article about how Anxiety takes over the lives of people, but I surrendered.

As I expected,  the article was indeed relatable, as they all are. I think the reason being is that a lot of us do live with anxiety, whether visible or not.  

It detailed all of the circumstances in which anxiety influences emotional states surrounding even the littlest of things such as the enigma of unresponsive texters: 

" If a friend takes a little too long to answer a text, I start making assumptions. They don’t want to talk to me. I’m annoying them. They’re ignoring me on purpose. They don’t like me. They hate me. If I receive an answer after five short minutes, I will still look too far into details. If the text is short or sounds snippy, then I will worry that I am wasting their time, that they are only answering me to be polite. I will fool myself into thinking I shouldn’t have sent the text in the first place....It doesn’t matter how long I have been friends with someone. I need constant reassurance that I am loved. Otherwise, I will jump to the worst case scenario. I will assume that I have done something to upset them, that they don’t want me around anymore, that the friendship has ended.

Some could rationalize and think the lack of a reply is just someone who has become too busy to reply at that specific moment, or maybe something else important came up. However, this article insinuated that to the mind of a person who may have the fear of rejection, one might have anxiety over the fact that they are just being ignored or severely, that you have some vendetta against them.

I, personally, am the latter.  I hate when people don't text back because I feel as though Apple has made it extremely easy to reply, so if you can't even "react" to a text, then you are just irritating and I immediately start rethinking our friendship. 

After reading, I realized that on one hand, I couldn't help but continue to click on these articles because of the relatable nature, but on the, I also realized that I genuinely disliked reading these articles because it forced me to identify anxiety as something that I also identify with.

To be honest, I am pretty open about my anxiety with those who ask because its the only way to describe my symptoms at certain times, but I have never once truly accepted the fact that it is something that inhibits the quality of my life. Probably because it hasn't always been that way, but something that was exacerbated through recent events that I experienced. I can tell you, though, that my anxiety did not just appear, it had been cultivated through years of tension and stress that I personally placed on myself. 

I recognize that some of my personal stress lies within experiences and events that I did not properly or "healthily" process. I tended to autopilot through a lot of my insecurities and hardships so much so that I did not allow myself to be cognizant of how some of these experiences were harming my being. It was definitely scary, to say the least. 

Finding Someone to Talk to, but...

In society, there is a focus on band-aiding the ramifications than engaging with the idea of anxiety as a symptom of a deeper issue. There also seemed to be a lack of conversation surrounding the benefits of professional therapy. After reading multiple articles, tweets, short stories, science journals that are scattered around the internet by thousands of sufferers, I have realized that a common pattern in a lot of them was the lack of conversation surrounding the root of the anxiety and that's important because most times, there is a trigger. Anxiety is a symptom of a larger issue and; therefore it is important to identify the root of the issue and find ways to heal from it.  

Nevertheless, I also understand the apprehension of seeing a specialist because of what is known to be this "cookie cutter " technique of dealing with patients who suffer from anxiety, depression and a vast array of other mental health issues.  As a skeptic of big Pharma, the overuse and over-prescription of these drugs are the most concerning to me, personally. The prescribing anti-depressants and benzodiazepines is an epidemic so I am wary of doctors who use that as a very first means of eradicating the problem.  There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with taking medication if one needs it to recover from chemical imbalances and other physiological disorders that have become difficult to handle. 

There are degrees of anxiety and no one person's symptoms are like the next. A tougher "life experience" does not always correlate to an enhanced degree of anxiety because people deal with emotions differently and some are just more sensitive to impairment than others.

I understand that eradicating the root of anxiety is a big step in taking care of my anxiety for good. The most difficult part sometimes is identifying the event(s) that exacerbated it. Now, I totally get why "energy" is an important concept to  our health.  It is important to become aware of the energies that we allow into our lives and into our personal spaces because those energies, whether that be actions of others or negative vibes,  can influence your inner peace and throw off the equilibrium. However, I also am aware that it is not as easy to toss out toxicity when its the one thing that makes us comfortable. 

There have been lots of things in my past that have truly hurt my spirit and they are things that I should learn to identify and fix before my symptoms get way worse. Although my form of therapy has been the listening ear and logical thinking best friend, I am going to find a therapist will give me a different perspective, as well as a method of working through my experiences. I have never been one to stigmatize therapy because If most people had a judgment-free space to share their problems, we'd be better equipped to handle situations.

Other Remedies:

Remedies such as exercise and natural supplementation can assist in eradicating most of the physical symptoms that can arise alongside your anxiety, but complete elimination lies within the investigation of the true issue that is causing your symptom of anxiety.

I hope that the contents of this article helped or gave you just an ounce of encouragement to talk with someone about the anxieties that you may be experiencing. 

Never did I imagine how stress, both psychological and physical could manifest itself in all types of scary symptoms. It may take a while to eradicate the root of the issue, but dealing with it before your body's defense mechanisms do, is a smart choice.  I am not going to speak about how my personal physical symptoms have altered my lifestyle, but let me know if that is something that you would be interested in hearing in the future.  

Keep well and keep your mental health swell.