How Anxiety Plays With Your Mind
Your brain is all over the place when your anxiety is flaring, and trying to deal with it is often a hit or miss. It doesn’t even have to be something you consciously think about, or focus on, but you definitely feel it. Settling heavy and muggy into your chest, like a thick smog creeping over your back, and a sick feeling in your belly. It’s anxiety when you’ve suffered for years; you start to get used to it, you manage to come up with some coping methods and stick to them, and then sometimes, if you’re me, you stop noticing how your anxiety affects you.
You start to think it’s just you. You start to think, ‘Oh, I’m just not capable of that’. You make excuses for yourself. You get used to the fear. And all the while, you’re convinced something is wrong with you. You hate how different you are to what you see around you.
And that’s just the beginning of how anxiety plays with your mind. How it plays tricks on you and everything you do. It convinces you you can’t do what you want to do. It convinces you you’re not as good as the rest.
So, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but don’t worry too much — you’ve not reached a dead end! It might take a while to realise, or if you’re me, a couple more years on top of everything else, but eventually, you’re going to recognise one or two of the tricks anxiety gets up to.
All in all, I’ve been able to recognise about 4 main ways my anxiety affects me and my thought processes, and the accompanying overwhelming moods those bring down on me. It’s a lot to deal with, and if anyone ever tells you anxiety isn’t exhausting, make sure you correct them!
Time to get into the theories.
It Makes You Forgetful
One of the most annoying tricks my anxiety tends to play on me is the forgetfulness. Of course, this can be quite obvious: I’m so focused on something I need to do later on, that in some way, shape or form frightens me, and thus I forget most things I need to do right up until that point.
I forget to clean the dishes, or load the dishwasher, despite looking straight at them and thinking to myself, ‘those need doing.’ Because that little reminder is immediately displaced by the anxiety lurking in the background, and I can’t focus on anything else. Or I forget to literally feed myself, because my brain truly believes there are more important things to be thinking about. It’s honestly all-consuming.
But it even makes me forget the solutions I’ve come up with to the worry inside my head. The solutions I’ve thought long and hard about, clutching at my hair in that stupid tic of mine that I’m not even sure comforts me, to stop feeling so anxious and to try and get on with the day. I manage to dispute something, and I make myself feel better, but then 5 minutes later, I’m back to worrying about how I’m going to cope with what’s coming up.
It takes me another 2 or so minutes to realise I’ve already solved my problem, and then I have to note it down, to make sure my mind doesn’t have another breakdown about something that I’ve already been able to comfort myself about.
How do I manage to forget about that little detail? And how have I not learned my lesson by now? Well, that leads me perfectly onto the next way my anxiety tends to act like a trickster.
You Feel Overly Obsessed
Because you just can’t stop thinking about this one thing you’re going to have to do today, or tomorrow, or at the end of the week. It doesn’t matter the period of time between you and the anxiety causing event; your brain knows it’s coming, and it can’t stop thinking about just how bad it’s going to be.
And in the moment, those feelings are hard to dispute, aren’t they? Once again, the forgetfulness comes into play. You can’t really remember the last time you went through with a similar activity, like the last time you went to get your eyes checked to see if you need new lenses, and so you sit there and worry over what might happen.
Will the optician look at me strangely when I can’t read the bottom line of letters? Did I manage to do that last time? I’ve been noticing my vision getting a little swimmy recently — will they pick up on that? Is my eyesight just getting worse and worse? What can I do about that? Am I going blind? What are they going to think about me, because I clearly don’t take care of my eyes?!
You see. It’s irrational. It’s exhausting. And it happens every time I’ve got a commitment coming up. And I’m not the only one it affects like that.
You Can Barely Face a Social Situation
Speaking of commitments, social situations are one of the worst ways my anxiety can present itself. I will admit I’ve gotten a lot better at going outside to see my friends and loved ones, and making casual conversation with strangers in shops when the time calls for it. But a couple of years ago, I used to be terrible at trying to maintain normal human interaction.
I would find all kinds of excuses to not have to head out, or I’d just smile and nod when someone spoke to me, with any kind of oral response getting stuck in my throat. I couldn’t force the words out at all, and it was like there was an actual mental block in my brain. Something was holding my tongue from the back of my throat, and nothing came out of my mouth but air. So I would just shut up and clam up, and a lot of people would tell me I was a really great listener.
I suppose it wasn’t all bad then.
But anxiety can make seeing someone who knows you and loves you, or someone on the street who literally knows nothing about you and has no expectations for you, the hardest battle you’ve ever fought. It makes you sweat, physically even. And it makes sure you second guess every single interaction you have with another person. You over analyze every single thing you said, and every movement you made, and every facial expression you pulled.
When you have anxiety, even just raising your eyebrow in a way that seems interested, but not too much in case they think you’re erratic, is a form of performance art.
And Any Kind of Success Makes You Uncomfortable
And your performance is something that’s going to make you uncomfortable, no matter how well you pull it off, or how well someone compliments your accomplishments. A teacher at college marking your essay with an A? Well, your brain chimes in with the very useful question of, ‘Why wasn’t it an A+?’ But if you did manage to score an A+, your brain tips you over the other side of the scale — it starts to ask you, ‘Why do you have to show off all the time?’
It seems like you can never win when it comes to success. You can’t stand the thought of never achieving any, and you can’t stand the thought of actually holding some in your hands and being happy about it. You start to get comfortable with muddling along, and you can’t seem to break away from that mould, even as you grow up and move into a career. Or try to, at least.
And that’s where your imposter syndrome starts to develop, because there’s a link between the two. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
So what was the goal with this story? Well, for myself it was to just write out exactly how my anxiety can mess me up, ruin my day, and make getting to sleep at night terribly hard. Because it never stops. You rarely ever run out of energy when it comes to being afraid.
And I know I’m not alone. Generalised anxiety, social anxiety, and even specific phobias all share these tricky traits. It’s such a complicated matter most of us have to deal with (which 1 in 10 people in the UK suffer with at some point in their life), and it’s something we should talk about a little bit more.
Anxiety makes us feel alone, and makes it hard to reach out for help, because we think we’ll be belittled, and we don’t think we deserve any. But we do, and I want that noted down for people to read when they need it most.
