Overcome Anxiety: How I Rescued Myself From Anxiety?
March 2020 witnessed the once-in-a-lifetime event in the history of the human race.
The entire world was under lockdown as this was the only way to combat a novel virus that began as an endemic and became a pandemic within a span of just two months.
And what made this combat unique relative to those carried out in the past? Well, the combat with the novel Coronavirus was far more psychological than physiological in nature.
The statistics clearly indicate this!
A study among hospitalized patients in China showcased that 34.7% of patients had symptoms of anxiety and 28.4% of depression.
Another large study from 194 cities in China during the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that 16.5% reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms and 28.8% moderate to severe anxiety symptoms.
But, here I want you to keep aside these statistics for a moment and pay attention to my story.
How & When I Was Detected With General Anxiety Disorder (GAD)?
It was 1:00 pm on a Monday afternoon in the month of March 2020 that I came to know about our last client slashing the contract to just 40%.
I and my twin sister run a content agency. During that time, all our clients canceled their content marketing plans.
Most of them had not earned a single penny from their online products or services for almost a month.
As a result, all of them, except for one, terminated their engagements with our agency. When the news about our last client came in, I and my twin just got overwhelmed.
We didn’t know what to do as we still had to disburse monthly salaries. The situation became worse as we did not have enough savings to run both the business as well as the house at the same time.
Suddenly, I started feeling dizzy and felt a tingling sensation in my brain. My heartbeat accelerated and I could not concentrate on my work.
At that point in time, I thought that maybe I was overworked that day as a result of which I was tired and hence was unable to concentrate.
I thought maybe I should take some rest to get rid of the dizziness. So, I went off to sleep.
When I woke up, I felt those pins and needles tingling in my head. I ignored it for a couple of days. However, when I was unable to get rid of the tingling sensation for more than a week, it became quite apparent that something was wrong.
I discussed the whole issue with my brother and he recommended consulting a psychiatrist.
Initially, I was quite apprehensive due to the stigma associated with seeking advice from a psychiatrist. However, going through so much pain inside, I was left with no choice.
When I had my first session with the psychiatrist, I explained to him what I was going through. After listening to my story, the psychiatrist told me subtly that I was suffering from General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). And its roots lay deep into my childhood.
What? My childhood? But wait, I didn’t suffer from any trauma during my childhood! It was pretty normal! Really?
It Takes ‘X’ Years and ‘Y’ Instances To Reach An Antidepressant
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a mental disorder that is characterized by persistent and excessive worry about a number of things or aspects of a person’s life.
It is important to emphasize the word persistent here as it is this attribute that distinguishes general anxiety from GAD.
We all feel anxious several times a day. Such anxiousness may relate to meeting deadlines at work, nursing children, taking an exam, preparing for an event, having a healthy body and mind, not spending enough time with the partner, and so on.
This form of anxiety is not pathological in nature.
However, now consider the following instance.
Say, it's been 30 years you and your family are in financial distress.
To top it all, you have been nursed by strict parents and caregivers. As an adolescent, you were always criticized for your appearance, lean body, level of sensitivity, introverted behavior, virginity, and whatnot.
And since you were an innocent girl who was brought up in the so-called protected environment, you were sexually assaulted.
Yeah! This is me and that was my life as an adolescent.
During the first session with my psychiatrist, I was quite apprehensive in disclosing my past. But the psychiatrist started a Socratic questioning session wherein he asked me a volley of questions.
And you know what! Slowly, all the instances where I was suppressed, abused, judged, embarrassed, demeaned, demotivated, and compared came in front of my eyes.
I started crying out of guilt. This feeling of guilt was due to the fact that I had not accepted all this happening to me for all these years.
I had turned avoidant to all these instances. Least did I know that this ignorance would bite my ass as a young adult?
So, how did I come out of Anxiety after having observed 18 months of pharmacological treatment, that is, having anxiety pills?
How Did I Rescue Myself From The Grip Of Anxiety?
Before I share my tried and tested techniques of bidding goodbye to anxiety, I want to throw some light on the cycle of Anxiety.
This will help you in coping with anxiety in a much better way.
The root cause of anxiety is FEAR. And it is the persistent fear that leads us to anxiety.
We as humans are fearful of so many things in our daily life. For instance, fear of heights, fear of not performing well, fear of visiting a doctor, and so on.
Such kind of fear makes you anxious no doubt. But, this kind of anxiety is not pathological in nature. Everyone experiences such anxiety at some point in time during the day.
However, it is the chronic or persistent fear that gives you anxiety. And this type of anxiety is pathological in nature.
So, now I am going to tell you how you can overcome chronic ANXIETY.
1. Understand How Your Brain Works
The human brain has two parts to it — the emotional brain and the thinking brain. The Emotional Brain is responsible for generating all the emotional responses. Whereas, the Thinking Brain is responsible for responses that require planning or thinking.
Furthermore, the Thinking Brain is quite slow in responding. This is because it needs to process and think over the problem at hand. Whereas, the Emotional Brain is immensely fast in reacting. The moment your senses
Say, for instance, you want to take the LSAT exam this year. So, you start practicing the logical and analytical reasoning questions from the prep material.
Now, to answer each of the questions, you need to understand the problem statements, perform mathematical calculations, build scenarios, reason out the problem with the given data, and finally work on the answer.
All these actions are performed by your Thinking Brain and it takes time for it to perform all of these actions. This is because the neural signals are distributed between different parts of the brain responsible for performing a specific task.
All these tasks performed by different brain parts simultaneously help in carrying out a specific action. In our example, that specific task is solving the mathematical problem at hand.
Now suppose that one of your colleagues passes a very rude comment about your personal life while you were having coffee with him and others during the evening break in the office.
Those words were so harsh and heart-piercing that you could not control your emotions. Your instant reaction was giving a tight punch to your colleague, followed by three more until other colleagues intervened and stopped you from hitting.
Do you know what happened inside your brain that compelled you to hit the guy? Well, your colleague's harsh words triggered your brain. As it typically happens, anything that we assimilate through our senses first hits our Emotional Brain. That’s because the route to the Emotional Brain is the shortest for the neural signals that carry our sensory experiences. This means our Emotional Brain responds quickly to the sensory experiences that we have in the external world.
So, when your friend said those harsh words, it directly hit your Emotional Brain. And what happens to the Thinking Brain? Well, the route to the Thinking Brain is the longest for the neural signals that carry our sensory experiences. This means our Thinking Brain responds slowly to the sensory experiences that we have in the external world. Thus, when your friend said those harsh words, it took time for your Thinking Brain to give reasoning to your Emotional Brain with regards to whatever happened in the outside world.
Now, both brains need to coordinate with each other so that we are able to live a balanced and wholesome life. In case, either of the brains gets overwhelmed or exhausted, it creates an imbalance within our brain.
So, the key to overcoming anxiety is to learn the art of responding to external stimuli through balanced coordination between your Thinking Brain and your Emotional Brain.
If your Emotional Brain overpowers your Thinking Brain, then no one can stop you from staying on the edge always.
2. Reason Out The Cause of Your Anxiety
Always remember that Anxiety comes to you for a reason. So try to find out the underlying cause of your anxiety. Here, I would like to share my experience to help you understand how come across the reasons for your anxiety.
10 years back, I was placed in one of the big four’s as a consultant in the Audit department immediately after completing my MBA. I was extremely excited as I had everything I ever wished for: a good job profile, great organization, and decent pay, least did I know that this happiness would last for only a few months?
It was the first day of our training and I was pretty excited to be a part of it. The training continued for 3 hours. It was the most challenging 3 hours of my life. The moment I came out of the conference room, my face muscles were stretched and my mind too exhausted. There was something that I didn’t like during the training.
The training continued for the next 15 days, post which we were supposed to work on the client documents. My first day of client work was a total mess. I didn’t understand what was written in the documents. I tried applying the concepts and techniques that I had learnt during the training period. But nothing was working out.
This continued for about 3 months. After working on client work for 3 months, I was still not able to work on the client work sheets on my own. I needed the help of the senior to complete the work.
This did not go down well with my manager. She thought I was not capable enough to work and hence shifted me to the PIP program after 5 months. I didn’t know the meaning of this program at that time. However, over a period of time I realized that it’s a rare chance that employees who are shifted to the PIP program are able to make a comeback in the team. 90% of the people move out of the company at the end of the program. And that day came in my life exactly after 1 month from joining the program.
I was called in the conference room and made to sit in front of a panel of 8 people, including my manager. There, I was asked to sign my resignation letter and take a leave from the office within the next 15 days. When I heard this coming from the other side of the desk, my head grew heavy and I didn’t know what to do.
Inside, my soul was crying and my heart was bleeding. The job for which I had literally fought hard and had stayed unemployed for 18 months post college was being taken away from me. All my hard work was in vain. I just signed the documents, took my stuff, ran downstairs, and made my way towards the garden area. I literally started crying and screaming as this was the first time that I had literally faced a failure in life. I had been a good performer all through my life in school, college, and then university. But, now I was being asked to leave work for non-performance.
Years passed by but my subconscious mind was not able to remove the memory of this incident. In fact, this incident made me all the more serious towards life and work. I could not see anything else apart from work in life.
But this episode made me realize one thing, and that was, that I was not the right fit for the job. I didn’t love the kind of work I was doing and hence that impacted my performance. It was like asking a fish to climb the tree. I was not meant for that job profile, hence whenever I worked on it, I used to feel fearful. My brain was always in the ‘fight or flight’ mode as immense worry activated the fear hormones in my body. The excess release of such hormones either compelled me to fight or resist the situation; or to take a flight or escape from the situation.
Remember, you must undertake a job that matches with your cognitive and social abilities. This is because you have to spend good part of the day working on it. I chose a profile that was not in tandem with my reasoning capabilities. Hence, it gave me a lot of stress. Immense stress impacted my autonomic nervous system and it came to a point where it released excess stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
My personal recommendation is that before applying for a job, you must go for a Cognitive and Behavioral Assessment. Such an assessment helps to understand your personality traits, social skills, and logical skills. Further, an understanding of cognitive and behavioral capabilities helps you to know the kind of job profile you are fit for.
For instance, my Cognitive and Behavioral Assessment says that I’m an introvert who is not at all sociable, loves in-depth research, sticks to the rule book, has great logical reasoning, is unable to work under pressure, and is highly inflexible to change.
Imagine, my job profile had too hard deadlines. That is, I had to complete the audit worksheets comprising a portfolio of thousands of financial securities within a span of just three hours and report the errors to the manager. Such strict deadlines made me nervous. They made me focus on the consequences rather than the work process. Result, I turned out to be a non-performer.
Thus, the second step to escape from anxiety is to find the underlying cause of fear or constant worry. Once you know the cause, you will be able to come up with a solution soon.
3. Stay Away From Anxiety Triggers
It is important to note that once you are able to come across the root cause of your anxiety, you will also be able to understand the triggers that lead you to experiencing the fear loop.
What’s this fear loop?
Let’s say you visit your friend’s farm house over the weekend and while having lunch, you spot a snake on the lunch table. The moment you see the snake, your emotional brain gets a signal that there’s danger.
As mentioned earlier, there are two sides to human brain. One is the emotional side called the Emotional Brain and the other the intellectual side called the Intellectual Brain.
When you spot a snake, your senses first send a neural signal to the emotional brain. As soon as the emotional brain receives the signal, it compels you to take action. The action may be that you either run away from the place where you saw the snake or you try to call someone who can make the snake turn away.
Chances are that you will first run away from the place where you saw the snake. This is because the emotional brain is used to reacting to situations instantly. It is that old brain that runs on emotions and not on reasoning. So, whatever decisions it makes, those decisions are quite spontaneous. Unlike the intellectual brain, the emotional brain does not give you time to think. All it does is reacts to the external stimuli.
In this case, the snake became a stimuli for your emotional brain. As a result, it got overpowered with fear. This fear turns severe to an extent that you start fearing from the fear and its accompanying involuntary symptoms like increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure, deep breaths, and choking throat.
This is called the fear loop.
Thus, to avoid the fear loop from building up, one of the important strategies is not to expose yourself to triggers that lead to fear in the initial phase of anxiety. Once you get to know your triggers, you will able to deal with the fearful situations in a matured way rather than avoiding such situations all together.
Remember, everything takes time to learn. What I mean to say is that it is impossible to learn the art of dealing or responding to the fearful situations within a single day. Do not be too strict with yourself with regards to dealing with fearful triggers instead of avoiding them in the initial days. Give yourself some time to understand the emotional triggers.
The way you have learnt to recognize triggers that make you fearful, you will also learn how to deal with those triggers over a period of time.
4. Do Not Take Recreation For Granted
In the wake of meeting deadlines or out of curiosity to solve the problems, we forget about recreation. Recreation is the most ignored aspect of a modern day man’s life. Due to increase in standard of living expectations, the modern day men and women tend to overlook those things that gave them eternal happiness at one point in time.
Those things may include pursuing a sport, travelling different places, reading books, pursuing hobbies like art, dance, photography, music, etc.
Many of us believe that due to the nature of modern day work and paucity of time, it is impossible to do something that intrigues us. I was one of them who believed in the common adage that “Time is Money”. This belief made me work for 8 long years without pursuing things that once gave me happiness.
I took recreation for granted and believed that people who invest their time in pursuing recreational activities were wasting their lives. ‘Work-Life Balance’ was a term that I hated the most. I did not believe that there can exist a concept of work-life balance. But I was absolutely wrong.
Real heroes are those who know when and how to switch on and switch off their working or thinking brains. Honestly, I knew how to turn on my ‘Thinking Brain’, but I didn’t know how to turn it off.
I’ve learnt the harder way that continuous work without pursuing any recreational activity leads you to anxiety pills and anti-depressants. Even if you earn money or fame for the work done, it comes at a much bigger cost.
When I say this, I do not mean that you should not be passionate about your work or should not take your work seriously. What I mean to say is that you must not forget that until and unless you have good health, you will not be able tow work towards your cause.
I’ve seen days where my mental health did not allow me to work for days. This was the result of working day and night 365 x 24 x 7 for 8 years. In those 8 years, I used to consider weekends as the bonus period offered to you to work towards your dream project. Instead of relaxing, I used to work over the weekends so that I was able to finish the left over tasks.
I hardly remember any good moment in my life in those 8 years. Harsh but that’s the truth! I no wregret that I could have spent those years with contentment, pursuing work as well as things I loved doing as a kid. I regret that I could have spent that time working as well as meeting people who are important to me.
There is a concept called ‘Work-Life Balance’. People who are successful in practicing that in life are the real leaders. They are the ones who taste success in their lifetime as they value their work as well as their life.
5. Do Not Shy Away From Seeking Professional Help
This is the toughest part. Most of us are stuck in that stereotypical thought towards mental health. Due to the fear of society judging us, we fail to seek professional help.
We live in the 21st century and still we believe that medication for mental wellness is something that we should not undertake. We have the fear that our friends and family would judge us and label us as ‘mentally sick’ people if they come to know that we are taking medication or seeking therapy for mental wellness.
If we have that thought process, then remember one thing that we are murdering a soul with our own hands. There might not be any punishment for such a crime as the murder happens in a silent way. But the truth is that we are deliberately killing a soul just out of fear of society, a society that doesn’t matter to us more than our kids, our family, and our loved ones.
Therefore, people who have moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety, they must visit a psychiatrist or a psychologist. They are professionals who know better than us on how to treat a victim of anxiety. These professionals are there to help your loved ones come out of pain that they have been experiencing since years.
Final Thoughts
Anxiety is real and it hampers your daily functioning if not treated. I didn’t know that I had GAD until it came my way. The symptoms are crystal clear, however, we tend to overlook them intentionally. This maybe because either we lack knowledge, or have a stereotypical thought process with regards to mental illness.
Whatever maybe the cause of anxiety, the reality is it needs to be treated soon. The above-mentioned points helped me understand anxiety and come out of it. These are a result of the amount of research I have done on the subject and whatever experiences I had in my life.
This does not mean that this is an exhaustive list or the only ways through which you can escape anxiety. Hence, I would love to know your experiences in case you or your loved one have ever experienced anxiety. This would help me to understand the subject better as well as to practice the suggested ways to get rid of anxiety.
In case you would like to share your thoughts via email, you can share it at selfhelpzerotoeternity@gmail.com. Just consider me as your friend who has gone through pretty much the same as you have and do not hesitate in sharing your experiences with me. Maybe, this conversation can help both you and me in knowing something that we were not apprised of earlier. Looking forward to your response eagerly, dear reader.
