I Have Anxiety (and a LOT of it)

WHAT IS ANXIETY?

To be brief, anxiety is fear. It’s the butterflies one feels in the pit of their stomach right before they approach their crush. It’s the nervousness that you feel when you’re in front of the class and your palms are so sweaty you’re certain they’ll slide off of your arms.

Honestly, anxiety is a necessary fight of flight self defence mechanism.

However, people with anxiety disorders have a self defence and fear driven instinct… on over drive.

THE BASIC ANXIETY DISORDER: GENERALISED ANXIETY

In general, the most common anxiety disorder is the generalised anxiety disorder. GAD for short. It’s characterised by constant and obsessive like worrying.

People with GAD are so far in their head that they can’t hear you telling them they’re being irrational.

It’s a worrying that can result in paranoid like feelings, delusions, being constantly on edge and higher stress levels than average. (Among many other side effects.) To paraphrase, GAD is constant anxiety for no particular reason.

It’s the “bad feeling” in the back of your head making you think about all the worst case scenarios.

OTHER ANXIETY DISORDERS

There are a vast number of anxiety disorders. They all have different names with different symptoms and if you’d like me to elaborate on them in a different post I’d be glad to do so, but we’ll go over the basics.

To name a few other anxiety disorders: social phobia, agoraphobia, post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. These are all mental disorders that at their core are spawned from anxiety.

And they’re all very valid and important to take note of. Anxiety isn’t something that goes away. If you break your knee you need to heal it, this is the same principle.

MY ANXIETY DISORDER (WHY WE NEED TO KILL THE STIGMA)

Recently I’ve been diagnosed with generalised anxiety, social phobia, agoraphobia with a panic disorder. It’s quite a mouthful.

Sadly, even though the diagnosis and treatment is recent, I’ve been living with this problem my whole life. To say the truth, I don’t remember a time where I wasn’t constantly worrying about everything.

Throughout my high school, I’ve never once eaten in the cafeteria. I’ve even had anxiety attacks in classrooms. Raising my hand in class to ask a question would give me heart palpitations. There were many people who I just couldn’t talk with because my anxiety would get so bad I’d feel like I was dying.

And I thought it was normal because nobody in my family ever told me other wise.

You guessed it, it wasn’t normal.

To kill the stigma of having a mental disorder would allow other people to realise that they need help and it would get them help. I don’t agree with the trendy “haha I’m mentally ill” joke that’s going around but normalising and accepting medication and help would simplify so many things.

A mental illness needs to be healed, not concealed.

If you could do me a favour, don’t ever tell anyone that “just going outside” will solve everything. Especially if you don’t know what they’re dealing with inside in the first place.

Sue