MyAnxiousMind

Today I had lunch with my grandparents, you wouldn’t think that would be an anxiety producing event but you will come to learn that most things in my life are. In anticipation of lunch, I feared the drive the most, a 20 miles commute on the Interstate. What is so scary about an Interstate on a Sunday afternoon? It was on the freeway, nearly 3 years ago that I had a massive panic attack that set off the latest phase of anxiety that I am still in the midst of.

Lunch was great, I enjoyed my time there as did my children and my anxiety, if I had to rate on a scale of 1-10, hovered around a 4. When I returned home, I wrote a brief entry in my journal to record my feelings of the event. In a future post I will talk more about some of the coping tools that I am making use of, the journal being a key coping tool.

Typically, when I go out into a fear producing situation I manage to cope just fine, however upon returning home I find that I am exhausted both physically and mentally. Rather than celebrating how well I managed in a fear producing situation, I pour all my focus into why I am feeling so bad and the next step is to despair. This time, I made a resolution to be conscious of how I was feeling, before, during and after lunch.

Upon returning home I did notice that I was a bit run down but rather than focus on the negative, I choose to celebrate how well I did. This must be a conscious decision everyday, when your mind is so trained in focusing on the negative, you can not let a day, nor a single moment pass without forcing yourself at first to think differently. In the beginning, it will feel awkward, like a right hander trying to throw a football left handed, but with time it will start to feel more and more natural.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is characterized, in my case, by a constant background hum of anxious thoughts and physical sensations.This constant hum ebbs and flows, the peaks would be considered the classic “panic attack” which are very rare for me and the valleys would be hours where I don’t think twice about how I feel or what I’m thinking.

On a typical day, my anxiety level is at its highest in the early morning. I typical wake up and the anxious thoughts are already out-of-control: “how can I ever make it through the day?”, “things would be better if I just stayed in bed.”, “maybe I should call into work sick today.”, “what if I feel off, dizzy, weak, weird, sick at work, at lunch, at a meeting?”.These thoughts are endless and usually start to snowball within seconds.

Along with anxious thoughts, I typically in the morning and in other anxiety provoking situations do a “body scan”. I scan my body for how I’m feeling physically. Am I dizzy? Does my stomach hurt? Is my heart beating too fast? Is my head fuzzy? Do I have any energy? Am I weak? Are my muscles tense? What I have learned is that by asking the question my body usually responds to support what I’m asking. Is my heart beating too fast? Even if it wasn’t before, it is now.

If I’m unable to stop this onslaught early enough, the whole day will be spent running in circles trying to understand why I feel the way I do, which leaves me in a state of mental fogginess, a place I call “the weirdness”. In this place the world looks foreign, my own skin looks foreign — like looking through think, frosted glass.

When you feel like you are the only one in the world that could possibly feel the way you do, the world becomes a very lonely and scary place. In a desperate attempt to calm my fears and to in some way understand what was happening to me, I have spent hours upon hours scouring the Internet for anything and everything “anxiety”. I have collected many links, lifelines, to news stories, blogs, and YouTube videos of people like me.

When I am feeling down, scared, and alone, I turn to these lifelines to bring comfort that there are others who know the pain and frustration that I feel.The story of Laura Anglim, not only is one of those stories that has helped to make me feel more normal but her story, is my story.

“For the past six years, Laura Anglim, 26, has been convinced she is going to die. Her days are often spent searching the internet for symptoms for illnesses such as breast cancer, Hodgkinson’s disease or brain tumours. In her mind, she’s had them all.” …read more

the river washed me far away,
foreign in a normal world,
my skin not mine like a dream,
and yet i fight to stay.

sleep and wake blend to grey,
wander in a mossy fog,
hold tight, i fear to fade,
and yet i fight to stay.

my broken soul lost, dismay,
no place to feel safe in,
no place to escape to,
and yet i fight to stay.