A Life With Anxiety
Somewhere last year, on a fine night around 11.30 pm, I was at my friend’s house when I started feeling this sudden sharp pain in the back of my head. A wave of fear traveled through my whole body and I knew my anxiety was triggered.
Having been dealing with anxiety issues from the past four years, I sort of knew it would pass in the next few minutes. Except it didn’t.
The pain had now also started developing in front of my head and became even more intense. On the back, it was feeling as if somebody has been hammering on my brain and in the front, it felt as if I have a band around my forehead which is pressuring the skull so much that it was about the time before my brain implodes. Now every last cell in my body was terrified. I had no idea why I was having such a deadly headache (or so it felt at the time), but I was sure that if I would close my eyes now, they probably won’t open the next morning, and that it were my last few hours on planet earth.
My heart was running a marathon, refusing to calm down, no matter how many deep breaths I took, I was sweating while feeling chills at the same time. I had vomited twice but tried to keep drinking a bit of water.
My brain was on ‘fight or flight’ mode and I guess it was fighting my certain (imaginary) death. I stayed in this state until 5 AM when my friend came to wake me up, only to find out that I didn’t sleep at all. My body was exhausted, had no energy and was aching everywhere.
When I revisit this night until two hours before my anxiety started, I notice a trigger. My mom was really scared about this trip I was supposed to go on, the next morning.
So when I left my house that night, she kept asking me not to go, because the trip involved crossing a valley with a zig-zag road, which is in fact a bit tricky to drive through. But that was no excuse for her to keep asking me not to go (at the moment of departure), while she had agreed that I could join the trip, two days before.
I left home quite mad at her but was still very very sad to leave her like that. I might have subconsciously adopted her fear the next few hours, and the trip turned into a matter of life and death to me.
This wasn’t the first panic attack I’ve had but this one was the most intense of them all. One night I was so sure that I was having a heart attack, that my brother took me to the hospital. While the doctors knew it was just an extreme anxiety attack, they feared that it could lead to something worse and kept me for the night, did an ECG, told me I would be fine, and gave me some medicines to calm down and for the pain in my chest (which was probably caused by gas). They didn’t really work though, and I stayed in the panic until I fell asleep a few hours later. The next day, I was as good as new.
This happened last year, after which I was officially diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). It now makes sense to me why my quarterly math exam in the eleventh std. scared me so much that I didn’t take it, and I did the same thing in college for the Master’s entrance exam for which I had been preparing for at least a year.
Another night, I had accidentally hit my head on the wall. Not funny, it was dark! So I googled the symptoms of a concussion. I didn’t have any but it said that sometimes concussions can’t be detected right away but take up to three days or a week to develop. It also stated that when you fall asleep with a concussion, you might die in your sleep.
Yeah, you know where this is going… I panicked and set alarms for every two hours that night so that I wouldn’t die in my sleep. While awake, I was scared for my life, while asleep, I was dreaming of dying in my sleep. That fear of having an undetectable concussion lasted for weeks. And here I learned that I am never ever supposed to Google any symptoms.
After a few episodes, I have noticed that the anxiety was getting triggered for a variety of reasons but one thing always common was: “I was going to die”.
In my normal days, I am a person of logic. I know that the probability of me dying of a brain hemorrhage or a heart attack is the same as every other perfectly fine 27 years old (which is minusculely low). But when experiencing a panic attack, my brain tells me all sorts of ways one can die within seconds, without warning, or having a sickness, and before anyone around can do anything to save you.
The line between what is possible and what is not gets so blurred that if my brain would tell me that there is a hungry T-rex waiting outside my house ready to eat me, I would believe that.
Now, these were a few occurrences out of many. The list goes on and the triggers get more and more bizarre.
Anxiety
Anxiety is a little piece of Voldemort’s soul inside Harry Potter that gives him hell from time to time. Harry can not control it but he is also the only one who can actually control it.
Depression and Anxiety are so common these days that people might see it as normal and thus, misunderstand it as “easy to deal with”. These conditions might not be terminal illnesses like cancer or many other diseases but this mental torture can easily lead one to self-murder.
When going through an episode of anxiety or panic attack our brain dumps to our attention all the negative thoughts or events that we have ever had or heard, as the eminent possibilities.
It makes it seem more logical to be dead than to be alive at that moment. The fear subsides all other emotions and keeps proliferating itself until it becomes a Tsunami of terrifying thoughts; Too much to handle.
At this state even if Harry musters all the courage in the world, to destroy the Horcrux inside him, he needs to have the right tools like the sword or the snake’s fang. (if you haven’t yet, please watch the Harry Potter movies. Those movies are a treat for the brain.)
Now the first thing I ever want to hear whenever I go through an anxiety episode is that “I will be okay”. You might be reading this article to increase your awareness on this topic or to help yourself or to support a loved one who is dealing with it. Let them know that they will be okay in the most believable way for them.
For eg. if the person is a believer in God, remind him/her of God’s kindness and that he/she bears his strength in their heart. If they are nonbelievers, give them all the facts about the situation, pull them outside of their brain, etc.
At that point, they might be saying that they are having a stroke or brain hemorrhage or any other unusual thing and you just know that they are being completely unreasonable and absurd, but trust me… at that moment we lose the ability to be logical. All we can feel is “amplified fear”.
It always worked best for me when the words came from a doctor after telling him the symptoms of my ‘‘stroke’’.
Managing it
We can create our own sword to fight Voldemort. It is nothing but a set of practices that we will train our brain to use every time you feel you are having an episode.
I have learned a few ways to manage my anxiety and am hoping this will give you some direction on how to manage your’s:
- Breathe.
Yeah, I know everyone is already breathing but I am talking about long, slow, inhale-pause-exhale kinda breathing. Basically breathing exercises followed by a few minutes of meditation every day.
This is undeniably one of the most effective ways to calm down. I would recommend learning these things from YouTube, from Meditation or Yoga classes, from a friend, or from wherever you want. It’s your anxiety, you decide.
2. Be Grateful.
Gratitude for anxiety is the same as meditation for stress. You get a lot of fear to deal with as an anxious person. Why not pull some of your benefits secretly into your lap?
Focussing on things that I have and being grateful for them always keeps my mind off the things that I am afraid of losing. I start counting those things and most of the time I get carried away with the realization that even though something happens to me right now, at my funeral, people will have nice things to say about me, because I have loved them… and I have been loved so much by them. And this thought makes me feel okay with dying, which is weird but that doesn’t matter at that moment, right? What matters is that it slowly calms me down.
3. Talk to yourself.
A few things that I repeat to myself often during episodes are:
- Never assume the worst unless it has happened.
- There is hope and dreams at the end of the storm.
- I am gonna be alright.
The simpler the line, the lighter it lets me feel.
4. Counter negative thoughts.
It is very very difficult to be able to do this whilst having an episode but if you can manage to find a thought that can counter your fears, it’s a job half done. After that, you just have to repeat this thought over and over in your mind.
Remember the story about having a good and a bad wolf on each shoulder? Which one wins? The one you feed. So feed the good wolf.
For eg. you might try imagining the face of a loved one, smiling at you, or a moment from the past that fills your heart with peace or love. Some people call it an Anchor thought.
5. Know that you are not alone.
We all are dealing with something behind the curtain and we are never alone in tragedy.
A close friend of mine had said this line to me and it had stayed with me ever since, she had also gotten it from somebody else.
I have a few friends whom I call, whenever I think I might get an episode. They are not experts in psychology, nor do they know what it’s like to have a panic attack, but they don’t need to. At those times, being heard or talked to like a normal human being on the topic that is bothering, can be enough.
There is another friend who calls me when she feels the need to talk to someone. This makes a chain of people helping each other out.
A support system is crucial.
6. Never Google your symptoms. Like ever.
I am at the stage where thinking about it makes me anxious, writing about it has given me goosebumps at the moment.
Having said that, I know that there is not just one way to tame the bull. We all have one for our own reasons, and in those reasons are the answers to manage it. I inherited it from my mother, who has been fighting it for a long time now and she is also the one I feel safest around in the whole world.
So I know very well that there is no cure to it and it is a lifelong battle, yet life appeals to me even in the moments when suffering out-weights my will to live. What gives me the will to go through it is not medicine but the fact that I successfully dealt with it in the past so I might be able to do that again in the future.
Everyone’s journey is different. Every story is unique.
Try to keep a note of what brings meaning to your life, so it can become your anchor for keeping your mind in a safe haven and keep you from drifting away into the dark.
You choose your own material and tools to make a sword, fang, or boat and sail through the currents.
You are stronger than this. You are. I am sure I am too.
