An Answer To An Unsolvable Puzzle

It’s not uncommon that people have lived with anxiety for years, stuck in the same looping habit of questioning why they feel the way they do, or just waiting for the feelings and thoughts to disappear. Imagine your anxiety being channeled through an electrical plug. The electrical plug has a fuse which represents your body’s coping mechanisms. The more stress and worrying thoughts that you pile on yourself, then the stronger the power the plug’s fuse has to deal with. The stress and worry slowly builds up until your body simply can’t take anymore. The fuse blows, the circuit shuts down and you’re left in a confused mess trying to work out what exactly just happened. You can’t operate like you used to anymore because there is nothing to control all of this surging power. You are left to work out an answer to an unsolvable puzzle. You can become stuck within the infamous loop! Fear not as this is easily fixed with the power of understanding. To the unaware sufferer it can be very difficult to return or settle down to normality again. Many victims, including myself at one time, make it depressing routine to constantly self analyse – firstly checking how we feel, then scanning our bodies for signs that there is something wrong. We do this because we’re stuck in the loop of peaking anxiety.

Everybody Knows

We often resign ourselves to thinking we have an incurable, psychological condition because frankly we often conclude that nothing seems to be working. What we don’t fully realise is that we’re thinking out of fear and consciously looking for reasons to provide fabrication and meaning for this fear. One of the worst mistakes I made was to wake up and immediately think Do I feel better today?! Funnily enough I didn’t. Being stuck in a loop at the peak of your anxiety is debilitating, depressing and awfully scary. However, use the knowledge of why you feel this way to provide a small, comforting degree of inner content. You are not going insane and in fact what you’re experiencing is alarmingly common. What’s also assuring is that what your body is doing is only natural, so no matter how long you’ve had this condition I can assure you nothing ‘bad’ will happen as a result of it. You could be anxious for the next one hundred years and your death would not be directly anxiety related. Anxiety is harmless and merely tricks you into thinking the world is crumbling around you and that you’re dying a depressing, isolated death. What’s exactly happening to you and your body during episodes of high anxiety and panic. With the power of understanding you will realise that what is happening does not warrant the fear that accompanies it. Why does an anxiety problem start? The first cause is a basic one and that’s human habit.

Don't Break Easily

When we get into a habit of worrying and constantly troubling ourselves with undesirable thoughts, this eventually takes its toll on the body. Have you ever been labeled a worrier? Or know somebody in your life who you would deem to be a worrier? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tells us that obsessive worrying about certain thoughts is just the inability to detach from or let go of a thought. If you cannot let go or lessen the importance of a thought, then the worry that accompanies it simply just sticks around striving for attention and piling up with other worries. We get into a habit of worrying until the body becomes disturbed, causing all of this anxiety and its army of symptoms to occur. It took a very long time for me to acknowledge and admit to myself that I was a worrier. It required me to study my thought patterns for a long time. The second cause is trauma. Trauma starts the anxiety problems in a similar fashion to the first cause, except it skips the build up and gives your body a raging fireball to deal with. Referring back to the analogy before, trauma basically tries pushing the equivalent of the national grid through the plug socket causing an immediate blowout. Trauma is usually started by an unexpected incident in life where the body is put into shock. I,e, the death of a loved one, personal injury or illness, exposure to a fear, loss of job, divorce, adultery, and so on. You perceive life differently compared to before the trauma, and unsurprisingly your body has a major chemical imbalance.

Meeting Your Match

You feel different and of course you now want to know why. It’s an extremely important part of your recovery to acknowledge exactly where the anxiety has come from and why it is happening to you. I unfortunately developed my anxiety as a young man with a pretty large ego. What I failed to acknowledge is that my thought patterns were very negative and damaging in terms of affecting my mental health. I developed anxiety as a result of a poor mental routine and then eventually having to deal with a shocking life event. I think the most influential factor in my recovery was forming an understanding of what was actually happening during the episodes of high anxiety and panic. Of course I was aware of the more obvious related symptoms such as the racing thoughts, a fast heart rate, difficulty maintaining steady breathing, light headedness and the odd aches and pains. But the real panic came from wondering where these symptoms actually came from and why they were happening to me. Unfortunately, I made the ultimate mistake by falling into one of anxiety’s most formidable traps. I began to fear more anxious. We begin to dwell on frightening thoughts, which in turn adds to our overall anxious state. When we feel anxious our body reacts to these anxious and frightening thoughts by releasing chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol. It is great in times of danger and acts as a great defence mechanism for the body by triggering our ’fight or flight’ response.