Anxiety is like a blanket. Either it’s comforting and familiar, or it smothers you until you don’t even realize that there’s an outside world. For example, writing these words right now is making my chest heavier and my breathing more thought out and slower. My fingers are somewhat sticky, I have a dizzying headache coming on. It might even be enough to make me forget what I’m doing. Sometimes my anxiety has the ability to transport me to different places. These places are what I like to call alternate possibilities. They’re scenarios that all could happen right now at this moment, but aren’t actually happening. Sometimes, these alternate possibilities worsen my anxiety and I get stressed or upset by events that haven’t actually occurred. To some this may sound silly or crazy, or maybe even typical of anxiety. However, the way it happens in my mind isn’t so typical. You see, I don’t always catch myself when this is happening. In fact, I usually don’t catch on until later when the “episode” has passed. I catch it in reflection. It seems that it’s only in this reflection stage of my anxiety that I can pick out my tendencies and work on them, learn from them in some way.
Since finishing this paragraph, the anxiety has now passed and I’m in the reflection stage. From here I can now tell you a few things I’ve learned from my anxiety over the past year.
1. You have to trust yourself before you can trust others
This may sound like a complicated or even nonsensical statement, but let me explain. What does trusting yourself mean to you? What does trust mean to you? To me, trust means confidence. Confidence in someone or something. To trust yourself is to believe that you're going to be okay and to have confidence to say that you will persist no matter what. This means you don't have to rely on anyone else to keep you going, or something to make you get out of bed every morning. If you don't have this, it leads to instability and a general lack of trust towards others. Trusting yourself is one of the hardest and most important lessons my anxiety has taught me and it's something I still work on every day. If you don't know what you're capable of and how much work you're willing to put into your own happiness, it's literally impossible to instill trust in someone whom you're also relying on to function.
2. Let. Things. Go.
If you've ever had experience with any type of anxiety or depression, you know that this is the absolute hardest part of every day life. Things happen. Inevitably, things go wrong and people disappoint you. Another one of the hardest lessons I've learned is that there are many, many things in life that you just can't control. A lack of control is what, for many people, induces anxiety and causes an overage of stress. The unknown can be an extremely scary thing and I get that. However, what I also have come to understand is that nothing is more detrimental to your physical and mental health than holding onto something that will only cause emotional pain and stress. There is no incident that is worth disrupting your entire life. Allowing these things to take over your memories and create negative associations with things is guaranteed to make you less happy, less trusting, and more paranoid. Don't do it.
3. Take care of your physical health, too
Anxiety is most often thought of as a mental health disease and while this is true, it also has the potential to greatly affect your physical health. During a really rough patch of my anxiety my freshman year of college I became extremely ill due to a really weak immune system. I was getting kidney infections and UTI's all the time, I was diagnosed with (IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome), I was having back spasms, etc. Though these are all serious health conditions that do need to be addressed, it was determined by my doctors that these conditions were all linked to my anxiety in some way or another. When you have anxiety, your body has a tendency to overwork itself while also typically being either sleep or food deprived, or both. Additionally, people who have anxiety have a tendency to ignore their other health issues by simply brushing them off as side effects or as unimportant. This is the worst thing possible to do. Take the time to go in and get your medical issues taken care of. If not, the consequences may be severe.
4. Let people know when you need help
Talking about my feelings, and in particular talking about my problems is my least favorite thing to do. I suck at it, people don't really care about it, and it's extremely awkward in my opinion. But there are times when it's necessary. Telling someone you need help doesn't necessarily mean you're reaching out to them and telling them your life story. You don't have to lay out your 10,000 problems. Instead, it can simply mean having company on a night when you feel as though you really can't handle everything that's going on. It can mean explaining your thought process on a specific incident or experience. If you're someone who feels as though therapy or medication is what will help you to be able to function, seek those things out in the healthiest way possible. Call your doctor, have her set up a mental health evaluation (which isn't anything to be ashamed of), and go to the appointment. You'll thank yourself for it when something new comes up and it's time to buckle down and deal with it. Find what works for you and seek it out.
5. Forgive yourself
You're going to fuck up. There are going to be days that you have a million things to do and there's no way you can find the energy to get even a single one of them done. I have those every couple months minimum. You may be someone who has them multiple times in a month, or even multiple times in a week. This is okay. You know what's not okay? Holding onto those days and using them as catalysts for more like them. Resentment is your worst enemy, anxiety or not. Resenting yourself? Even worse. You will never be able to be productive if you don't forgive yourself for a time that you needed to shut down. Take that day, or two, or three, and lay in bed. Eat ice cream or your treat of choice, and cry. Write in a journal, take multiple showers, do whatever it is that you need to do in order to feel okay again. Then look at yourself in the mirror and say, "You needed that."
