9 things everyone should try to understand about Anxiety.
Of course, when I tell friends and family that I suffer with two major anxiety disorders, and depression, they want to help. But how can they when they don't understand the disorders themselves. My mother in particular says that she has depression, and that it simply makes her sad and want to go to bed for an hour. Man oh man, if only it really were that simple!
Then there are those unfeeling idiots who tell you to just 'snap out of it'. I'm sorry, do you think if we could do that, that we wouldn't have done it already? I mean, nobody wants to suffer with this!
So, after scouring the internet, (like you do), I've found a couple of articles that really put what I want to say in the nicest terms, or at least, the most honest terms.
- Anxiety does not travel in a straight line.
For folks who move through life without an anxiety disorder, I
imagine fear and panic as emotions that are pretty straight-forward:
something happens, or is projected as going to happen, that causes an
apprehensive or frightened response. But for a person with an anxiety
disorder, things don't work that way. Perhaps this is best illustrated
by example. Let's think of something minor — like, say, losing your car
keys. That would of course be frustrating for anyone. A person without
anxiety might think something along the lines of, "Oh no, what a
hassle!," or maybe even, "Oh no, this is going to screw things up for
me for a few days!" But for someone with anxiety? Well, that train of
thought might look more like this: "Oh no, my car keys are gone! What
if I don't find them? What if I try to get them replaced but it's not
possible or it takes forever and something happens and I need my car
and I can't get in it? What if the thing that happens is that I need to
drive someone to the hospital? What if that person is my best friend?
What if they're dying and the only way to get them to a hospital is my
car and my keys are still gone? Oh, god, I LOST MY CAR KEYS AND NOW MY
BEST FRIEND IS GOING TO DIE AND IT'S ALL MY FAULT."
- Anxiety is not rational, and boy do we know it.
Like, seriously, I promise you: we know. You really cannot spend all
day every day listening to the thoughts of an anxious person and not know
that a large portion of those thoughts make approximately no sense at
all. This is
one of the most frustrating things about having an anxiety disorder:
knowing as you're freaking out that there's no reason to be freaked
out, but lacking the ability to shut the emotion down. Rather than going off only when something is really dangerous or
scary, the anxious person's mental landscape will fall to chaos over
all manner of things, however tiny or inconsequential. In fact,
sometimes the thing that causes the reaction is so tiny or
inconsequential that even we don't know what it was. Other times,
something that has caused a reaction in the past is a total non-event in
the present.
- With Anxiety, some days are bad days and some days are good days.
I mean, don't get me wrong — this is true of life in general. But I
mention it because it's the thing I most often find myself wishing
everyone in my life already knew: some days are good anxiety days, and
some days are bad anxiety days, and whether I'm having a good anxiety
day or a bad anxiety day is going to affect the way I react to the
things and people around me. If, for example, I'm having a bad anxiety
day, and somebody in my life gets angry at me? There's a pretty decent
chance that I'm going to either a) have a panic attack, b) burst into
tears, c) say anything I can think of to make their anger go away, or d)
all of the above. Of course, I can't (and don't) expect the people in
my life not to get angry at me, or to only get angry at me on specific
day; sometimes I do things wrong, and make people angry, and that's
normal, and healthy, and okay. But I wish it was also considered normal,
and healthy, and okay for me to say, "Hey, I'm having a bad anxiety
day, can we do this another time," and trust that the person I'm saying
it to knows it's not a cop-out or an excuse so much as a delay — and a
request for kindness.
- Anxiety is physically painful.
Of course it's emotionally painful, too — in fact, I'd argue that the
emotional pain is the worst of it — but most people know that part, and
not this one. So: surprise! Anxiety hurts. Panic attacks are the
pinnacle of the physical pain piece for most of us, since so much of
that experience is centered around the sensation that your chest is
tightening to the point that you can't breathe. But anxiety can also
cause headaches, nausea, heart palpitations, muscle tension, insomnia,
dizziness, and exhaustion. There are people who have deeply painful
gastrointestinal responses to anxiety (ever heard the phrase "tying
your stomach up in knots?"); there are people who, when anxious, hold
their muscles so rigidly that they end up pulling or tearing them. It
hurts. It doesn't hurt the same way for everyone, but it hurts.
- Not all Anxiety is created equal.
I, personally, have generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety — or, as I like to
think of it when we're at home, "everything everywhere all the time
always disorder." But anxiety comes in many different varieties and
flavors, and so do people's experiences of it. Some people suffer from
generalized anxiety; some people deal with social anxiety; some people
have specific phobias. Some people come by anxiety genetically; some
people develop anxiety as the result of a specific event; some people
have anxiety due to their brain chemistry. Some people have been anxious
all their lives; some people develop anxiety as a teen or adult; some
people eventually overcome anxiety, or at least figure out how to
manage it to the point that it's negligible. Some people medicate their
anxiety, and some people don't. Some people see a therapist to help
them with their anxiety and some people don't.
- Anxiety and Depression are linked.
Not all anxious people have depression; not all depressed people have
anxiety. But they are known within the mental health community as
common companions — and, in fact, one can lead to the other. If, for
example, some hypothetical person with an anxiety disorder had the
tendency to freeze up when overwhelmed, and had difficulty reaching out
to the people in their life when that happened, then that hypothetical
person could, hypothetically, remain frozen for long enough that
eventually the anxiety (and all their other feelings) could bleed away
and leave just the stagnation — in other words, depression. You know,
hypothetically. That could occur.
The reason this is on this list isn't because I think people don't
know about it. It's because I want you,
reader, to understand that we know. We the anxious are typically
super aware of the fact that there's a link between anxiety and
depression, and — shockingly — it's safe to assume we're pretty anxious
about it. For those of us who have experienced a depressive episode in
the past, it's even more likely that we're quietly freaking out on a
pretty regular basis about the chance of that happening again (which,
actually, is a rational fear, as your likelihood of experiencing a
depressive episode increases with every time you have one). Probably
don't bring it up out of the blue, is what I'm saying here. That, and
keep an eye out for it if you can; as freaked out as an anxious person
might be about getting depressed, it's really difficult to notice a depressive episode once you're actually inside of it.
- Unless you've been given explicit permission, when it comes to someone else's Anxiety, you should probably listen and not talk.
You know how it's okay when you say something nasty about a member of
your family, but if someone else does it, you're going to come down on
them like a ton of bricks? This is like that. I can talk about how
exhausting or infuriating I find my anxiety, but if you do that, it's
probably going to hurt my feelings; I can say that I wish I didn't have
anxiety, but if you say that, I'm probably going to think you're an
asshole.
Also — and man, do I wish this went without saying — it's never okay to
talk to about someone else's mental health issues with a third party,
unless you've been given explicit permission to do so, or if your
relationship with that third party is one involving legally enforceable
confidentiality (your therapist, your lawyer, et cetera). Just because
someone has told you something about themselves does not mean they're
comfortable with everyone else knowing it. I, obviously, am comfortable
with everyone on earth knowing that I'm a nervous wreck, because I
would not be writing articles on the internet about it I wasn't. But
mental health issues, anxiety included, are still heavily stigmatized
in any number of communities, and there are a lot of people who aren't
at all okay with people finding out about their struggles. There are
even people for whom that's an active anxiety trigger. So, you know.
Don't do the thing.
- As frustrating, infuriating, agonizing and exhausting as it can be, our experiences and struggles with anxiety are part of us, and we wouldn't be the people we are without them.
This is actually something I think people with anxiety, myself
included, really struggle to understand. We spend so much time trying to
work through our anxiety that it can become almost like another
consciousness living within our brain: an enemy that we need to get rid
of in order to live full, productive lives. The reality of the
situation, as usual, is more complicated than that. Though our anxiety
is something that we have to manage, it's also part of who we are. It
shapes choices we make, the way we looked at the world, and even facets
of our personalities. To look as it as an enemy is to deny that part
of ourselves any validity.
About a month ago, my GP pointed out that I am an anxious
person, that I am probably going to be an anxious person for the rest of
my life, and that my personality involves certain quirks that
are the result of anxiety. It shocked me, even though I'd known
for just over a year that I had generalized anxiety disorder — I thought of my
anxiety as a disease that needed curing instead of as an (admittedly
frustrating) part of who I was. Since then, I've tried to work hard to stop
thinking that way, and it's somewhaty helped me to dispel the lingering
sense of failure and inadequacy that I'd known for months as anxiety's
partner in crime. It's okay to be an anxious person, and that's
something worth mentioning to the anxious people in your life — they
really, honestly, might not know that.
- And finally, the most important thing I wish everyone knew about anxiety, and about mental health issues in general: if you know someone with anxiety and you want to help them, ask them what would be helpful, ideally during a time when they are calm and non-panicked.
The most unkind thing you can do to a person with anxiety is to pile
on, which can be a tricky thing, because it may be something you do
without realizing it. The thing about anxiety is that it makes
possibility-spinners of all of us — we are, as a group, the sort of
people who look at what could happen instead of what is happening,
whether we want to or not. And this results in hyper-aware,
hypersensitive people more often than it doesn't; it's impossible to
torture yourself with thoughts of how others might behave or react to
things if you don't know how others generally behave or react to
things. Your frustration with us and our spiraling thoughts, your
exhaustion at how difficult we can be to deal with, your annoyance at
our anxiety-rooted behaviors, your wish that we could just cut it out:
we know you are feeling those things. We can tell. And, perhaps more to
the point, we are feeling them also — we are also frustrated,
exhausted, annoyed at ourselves. We also wish we could just stop. The
difference between us and you is that we are thinking those things all the time,
because we spend our lives with that anxious personality that can
become so grating. There is also a great deal of guilt and
self-loathing that comes along with those thoughts for us, both because
most of us are struggling daily to feel better and because we really
don't want to bother anyone.
It is okay, if you have an anxious person in your life, to find them
frustrating or exhausting or annoying. Nobody is blaming you. In fact,
believe me: we get it. But you have the ability to walk away when you
find yourself responding to someone's anxiety that way, and that gift
(and it is a gift) is not one we share. It is better to walk away
from an anxious person than it is to feed their frustration with your
own. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to
tell them they need to calm down — we know we need to calm down, and
hearing you say it only adds guilt and failure to the pile of emotions
that was already overwhelming us. Distracting us can be helpful,
listening to us can be helpful, even sitting with us in silence can be
helpful, but please, I beg of you, don't pile on. It makes it so much harder to get to a calmer place, and we really want to do that.
As for what you should do, much though I appreciate your making
it to the end of this article, there is no advice that I, A Stranger On
The Internet, can give you that will be better than the advice that
they, The Person You Actually Know Whose Specific Experience You Are
Concerned With, are going to be able to offer. They know themselves,
and that makes them a lot more likely to know what they need than I am.
You'd be surprised by how many people are afraid to even ask the
question. Do not worry, friends. The anxious person in your life? They
know they are anxious. Your bringing it up is unlikely to startle them.
In the event that you do ask them and they don't know what they
need, then I will say this: everybody needs kindness, especially people
who are predisposed to being unkind to themselves. You'd be amazed how
much little things — a smile, a reassurance, a compliment, a sandwich —
can lift somebody's spirits, and people with anxiety are often afraid
or unable to ask for those things, even when (especially when) they
need them. So that's my advice: kindness. It's a hard one to go wrong
on.
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