Here’s What Everyone Needs To Understand About Anxiety
Anxiety is a very complex mental illness that a lot of people including myself have. We don’t really know when an anxiety attack will occur. Sometimes it will happen without an explanation or other times it can happen with one. The exercises like breathing and walking around are 50/ 50, sometimes they work, other times they don’t.
Many people, I think, really don’t understand anxiety like they say they do. Before you meet or start working with someone with anxiety, you need to be willing to listen, learn, and educate yourself. The key to understanding an anxiety attack is to sit down and learn how to handle and help them when the attack strikes. If you don’t, then the patient-caregiver relationship between you two will not work very well.
One of the biggest things people need to be alert about when your dealing with someone who has anxiety is their triggers. This means the things that will set off their anxiety- these are things you need to avoid. You may not think there are triggers for it, the truth is, there are. For example, some of my triggers are, people’s tone of voice, when a wrench gets thrown in my daily routine during the week, meeting new people, and when life gets overwhelming and stressful making me feel like nothing is going right.
If your anxiety gets to the point where you really can’t manage it on your own (which I hope it doesn’t) if it does, there are things to help manage it such as medications and therapy. Therapy does not help the anxiety totally go away. It will, however, help to manage it. Therapy for me has been the hardest decision I’ve made in my life, to be honest, but it’s been the safest and healthiest choice. In order to do therapy, you have to commit to doing the work to help yourself, if you don’t, then it won’t work for you the way it's supposed to help.
If you need to seek help, do it. Anxiety is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. As we all know, there’s always that one rotten apple in our families that’s not with us or supportive in us getting better. If this is someone in your family, get rid of them! When getting better, you need to focus on you and you only, nobody else! Don’t listen to what that person says or thinks about your treatment. Let them sit back and watch from afar that you're bettering yourself and they are making themselves worse.
While anxiety is hard, we somehow manage to make it through each and every day, no matter how hard it may be to do so. We make it through with the help of our strong healthy support systems. The people that care, the ones that don’t want to see us struggle every day, the ones that are with us every step of the way while we go through treatment, that’s how we make it through.
Anxiety took me over four years ago, it stole my life, the way I functioned every day, and my personality. I didn’t know who I was and what was happening to me. I expressed one day that I wanted to “rip my chest open.” And pull out the anxiety on my own wherever it was, yes, it was getting that bad. Doing this though would also mean I would be inflicting self-harm to myself. Thankfully with the help of therapy, I’m here four years later.
Anxiety warriors keep fighting. Know you matter and the world needs you. Some days are hard I know, but I know you can make it through. Fight for the ones you love. You are brave and have been put on this earth for a reason. Hold on and hang in there!
