It’s finals week, and you’re staring at your notebook, textbook open. All of a sudden, you get this aching in your chest, and you start to struggle to breathe. You’re sweating and on the verge of tears; you don’t know what’s happening. You run to the bathroom to throw up and feel like the entire world is spinning. There’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening, and you don’t know where it came from. You feel like you can’t speak.
This is an anxiety attack, and it’s something a lot of people don’t understand. When you have anxiety, explaining it to someone is sometimes the hardest thing. A lot of people will tell you, “It’s just in your head,” or, “start to breathe slowly.” It’s not cool when people underestimate how severe of a problem anxiety can be. Sometimes, people also tend to think people talk about it for attention, which is one of the most discouraging and frustrating things someone with this disorder can hear.
You go to the doctor, and he hands you a prescription for pills. Oh, and here’s the list of side effects. Take this one once a day, at the same time every day, and take this one when you feel like you’re having an anxiety attack come on. Oh, and here’s a pill you can take to help you sleep to cancel out your insomnia. Are you not able to focus? Take this; it’ll help you.
You feel like a health experiment. You’re destroying your body with medications. Pill after pill, your body becomes dependent on something that’s alien. Forget to take your daily meds? You’ll be throwing up in the bathroom because you are actually addicted to it, and you’re going through withdrawal. Did you get a sinus infection or strep throat? Good luck finding the right antibiotic because you’re allergic to penicillin and amoxicillin, but anything else that the doc would prescribe, you can’t take with your anxiety medicine because it’ll cause heart failure or some form of sudden death.
Life with an anxiety disorder is not easy, and there’s very little awareness of that.
It’s finals week, and I was staring at my notebook, textbook open. But I didn’t get an aching in my chest. Not this time around. I looked for help before it happened. I opened my Bible to a scripture that my friend recommended.
Philippians 4:6-7: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
It is so hard to do at first because you feel that God cursed you with this terrible disorder. But after true, constant prayer, you will begin to change. Constant prayers to the Lord about my anxiety, about my stress, about my struggles, helped me to become calm. His peace does guard my heart, and He does guard my mind. And He will guard yours, too. All you have to do is ask.
He wants us to ask Him for help. He wants to be there to save us, every day of our lives, in every situation. He’s an addiction I know I’m OK with having.
