Anxiety and Overthinking
My anxiety experience in a nutshell...
But I have to add another or at least mention one that really gets my heart beating crazy fast and my mind in a whirl.
I have an extreme reaction to upsetting or angering people. I feel panicked, afraid, sad, emotionally fragile and overwrought with feelings of regret and wishing I could turn back time, rewind the whole situation, put things right, like before it all started.
Even when it's not really something I actually did or something I didn't intend to do, I feel distraught until I'm able to have the opportunity to fix things.
I obsess about the situation, replay what happened a thousand times and I cannot feel at peace with anything until I can make it right.
Even if I didn't mean it, if I hurt someone unintentionally, I feel plagued with guilt and all messed up inside.
Am I the only one?
I just hate people being upset with me! I imagine this feeling is a derivative of one of the above illustrations, but it appears to be a particularly disturbing manifestation of my anxiety.
I wish I didn't feel like this... because it's quite possible I'm worrying more than the person I think I've upset.
Not that I upset many of my fellow human beings. I'm a very friendly and kind person and caring, sometimes too much, is something I so do!
♥
I've heard it said that "if we knew how little others think of us, we wouldn't be worried about what they think of us": Remind me of that when I'm in the midst of an anxiety attack.
This is my experience. This is something I worry about. It makes me anxious. It’s one of my worst concerns.
I think it belongs in the last category “Worrying about situations and events”.
I’m a firm believer in going straight to the source and so having worked myself into a lather I go to the person involved.
And usually they, unlike me, didn’t feel anything had happened. For them it was nothing. So I’ve tried very hard to learn from this.
My own anxiety has twisted and turned me inside out when the other person felt nothing was wrong at all.
Now I try to stop myself from obsessing over things as best as I can. I literally tell my brain “No!”, scolding myself for overthinking! I offer my mind a distraction and deliberately think about something else.
Sometimes my brain complies.
