5 truths about living with anxiety
Have you ever felt so scared of an impending situation that you spend time catastrophizing all of the possible terrible outcomes? So nervous about public speaking that you your heart races, your palms sweat and your legs shake? So worried about a loved one that you can think of nothing else for weeks? Sure you have. It’s called anxiety and it’s gut-wrenching but it passes, your worst fears fail to materialize and you move on. Now imagine feeling this way all the time, everyday and you’ll have an idea of what chronic anxiety sufferers go through. I have battled anxiety for most of my life but through the years,. I have developed coping strategies to manage it and while it doesn’t prevent me from living a full life , it will likely be part of my life forever. Here are 5 things I tell people who are curious about living with anxiety.
In this most serene of settings, I was worrying endlessly about a hypothetical situation at home…
Nobody wants to live with anxiety - Living with any kind of chronic anxiety is debilitating and most people will do almost anything to eliminate it from their lives. Chronic anxiety arises out of a combination of innate personality, childhood experiences, traumatic events or other issues. People often assume their extreme anxiety is a normal part of life that everyone experiences until they are finally diagnosed well into adulthood.
Perspective is elusive - People with an anxiety disorder find it hard to keep situations in their proper context and are prone to catastrophizing. This means they often take benign situations and play out the worst possible outcome in their heads, regardless of how unlikely. For example, if an 8 year-old tells her parents she hates school, an anxious parent might take that one data point and assume the child will fail tests in elementary school, fall in with a bad crowd in middle school, drop out of high school at 16, get fired from a series of jobs and end up in jail at 25. And this can all take place in the span of 5 minutes.
They can’t just let it go - A neurotypical person who experiences anxiety only occasionally or not at all, might find it hard to understand what it’s like to live with chronic anxiety. They will often tell an anxiety sufferer to chill out, don’t worry or let it go. While well-intentioned , this advice usually just adds to the stress someone is already experiencing because they are unable to let it go, even if they want to. A more helpful approach is to sit quietly with them, remind them of all the times things didn’t turn out terrible or give them some space to process.
They know their fears are irrational - People who assume they will be fired after every mistake, that their plane will crash to the ground in flames, or that every headache is a tumour know full well they are being irrational. They are aware of the statistics on air travel safety and they know that the vast majority of headaches will pass without incident. But it doesn’t matter. Their rational self and their emotional self are at odds with each other and the emotional self is louder, more persistent and more annoying.
Relief is fleeting - People with chronic anxiety are always waiting for the hammer to fall. Even if there is absolutely nothing going wrong in their life, they rarely get to sit back and enjoy the peace. They are always on the lookout for something to worry about, a new catastrophe lurking around the corner, waiting to fill the hole that was left after the most recent worry resolved itself.