It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that a type-A
first born, ambition-driven, stressed-out, hard-wired worrier (that’s me) spent
the years between 1998 and 2004 in the grips of a full-on, medication-taking,
shrink-seeing anxiety disorder.
Ever the over-achiever, I got the full Monty when it came to
symptoms: panic attacks. Heart palpitations. Vertigo. Hyperventilation.
Irritable bowels. Agoraphobia. Racing thoughts. Fear of being left alone. Fear
of being trapped. Fear of the drugs that might break the cycle of the symptoms.
It was half a decade of nearly unrelenting misery. It is not
an exaggeration to say that there was barely a waking moment during that time
when I wasn’t either panicking, afraid I was going to panic, or thinking about
how to escape a situation if I began to panic. It was, and excuse my language,
a 6 year long shitstorm. In retrospect,
it seemed like a couple of decades.
Humans are wired to constantly scan for danger. You know
your friend who doesn’t exist? That’s because his ancient ancestor failed to
notice the saber-toothed tiger behind the bush.
But people with anxiety disorder take that natural ability
up 10 notches, and discover danger in things that aren’t a problem. During my
reign as the queen of silly fears, I had a hard time closing the door in public
bathroom stalls, because I was convinced the lock would get stuck and I’d be
trapped. There were only a couple of people that I could ride in a car with, because
I knew that, if I decided I needed to get to a hospital, would get me there posthaste, no questions asked. Otherwise,
I had to drive. And speaking of hospitals, I was constantly on alert for those
little “H” signs on highways that indicate there's one at the next exit. What,
you’ve never noticed those? That’s because you’re not pretty convinced that you’re
moments from dying ALL THE TIME.
Any time there was any chance that I couldn’t fully control
a situation, which, let’s face it, is all the time for most of us, I’d freak
out. I practically had to knock myself unconscious to get on a plane, because
if it started to crash, I wouldn’t personally know how to fix that, and I sure
as hell couldn’t trust the pilots to care enough to do their best. I remember
exactly where I was when I had a panic attack because it started raining, and I
knew I couldn’t make it stop.
You’d certainly be forgiven for asking what in the world
this has to do with #100DaysofHealth.
Well, here’s the thing. I spent a lot of time during those
years grasping for ANYTHING—medications, alcohol, religion, sleep, food,
talismans, you name it—that would give me a little relief from the
always-dialed-up-to-8-out-of-10 fear cycle. And one of the few things that actually did help was something
I heard from anxiety expert (and former sufferer) Lucinda
Bassett. I’m paraphrasing, because I read her workbook so many times that
it ultimately fell apart, but it was something like: “Ask yourself how you can UNDERreact to any given situation”.
We all have certain triggers to which we over-react. People
with anxiety disorders simply over-react to more things. Most things. OK, in my
case, everything. You’d be amazed at how readily people with this condition can
turn a irritation into a life-threatening situation in their heads: “Oh, no, is
my tire flat? I’m on the highway! I’m going to have to pull over, and then I’ll
be trapped here!! What if I can’t get the spare out?? What if no one stops to
help me??? What if someone does stop to help me, but they murder me instead????
What if they never find my body, and the murderer gets away with this?????” Heart
races, adrenaline pumps, rational thinking gets drowned in a tidal wave of
chemicals, and then it turns out there’s no flat in the first place.
In the mental martial arts, the counter-move to all this
crazy thinking is to do just the opposite: to make things LESS of a bad thing
than they seem in your head. To imagine, if you really MUST project beyond what’s
actually happening, the BEST silly thing (“Is my tire flat? Maybe Brendan
Fraser is on this same highway, and maybe he’ll stop to help me, and maybe he’ll
fall in love with me and we’ll have babies together!”) (So I’ve always had a
thing for the Encino Man. Sue me.), instead of the worst.
Underreacting isn’t always easy, but it feels a lot better
than overreacting, and it’s usually closer to the truth of what the
consequences are, when all the dust settles. It’s a much less stressful way to
live, and gives me much more room in my brain to deal with the world, as
opposed to taking up all the space in there plotting solutions to problems that aren’t actually happening.
What reminded me of all of this was…yesterday’s weigh in.
I’ve
done what I was supposed to do all week: eaten real food, worked out 6 days out
of 7, (mostly) stopped when I was full, all the stuff I was supposed to do, and
my net weight loss for the week was…ZERO.
I spent half the day coming back to that in my mind. Did I
do something wrong, then forget about it? Was I not working out hard enough?
Was it the salt? Have I slowed my metabolism by not eating enough chocolate? Am
I just too old, and my body won’t give up the weight no matter what I do? OMG,
this is so frustrating!!! Am I totally wasting my time here????
Yeah, I know. Plateaus. Water weight. Muscle weighs more
than fat. AND ALSO, #100DaysofHealth isn’t about my weight, it’s about strength
and flexibility and clarity and being able to survive the Zombie invasion. So I
made a conscious decision mid-afternoon yesterday, and that was to NOT WORRY ABOUT IT. At all. To assume that
last week was a fluke, this week will be better, and even if it’s not I’m still
reaching my goal of getting stronger and more capable of dealing with the
adventures I’m certain are still in front of me.
Underreacting, in other words.
If you’re not an anxiety sufferer, you can stop right here,
because this next part is for people who are.
Every time I mention that I had this disorder, someone
approaches me and shares that they or someone they love are in the throes of
the same thing, and they want to know how I got over it.
Here’s the first thing you should know: I did get over it. I’m
not “recovering”, I’m not controlling it with meds, I’m not at peace with it—my
anxiety disorder is GONE. Now, when I have a heart palpitation (which are
NORMAL, by the way), I barely notice. I get nervous in various situations, yes, but I recognize it
for what it is—a momentary ramping up of my adrenal glands because something
exciting has just happened, or is about to—and I do pretty much everything that
used to terrify me.
What cured me was a combination of anti-anxiety meds (Paxil,
to be specific) and studying/practicing relaxation and coping techniques,
primarily Lucinda Bassett’s Panic to Power course. This is often tough for
people with the disorder to hear, because one of the many fears you probably
have is that you’ll take a new medicine and it will kill you, or cause you to
become a zombie, or alter your personality beyond recognition. I get it: I
dislike putting drugs in my body to the point where I barely take aspirin, but
I can tell you that what it did for me was give me a little space between the
trigger and the reaction to DECIDE how I was going to handle it instead of just
freaking out. It let me have enough peace to actually practice things like
under-reacting and facing issues instead of hiding from them, until I was good enough at it that I didn't need the pharmaceutical boost anymore.
Obviously, don’t do anything like this because I told you
to; see a qualified medical professional. Just don’t do nothing. Don’t try to
figure it out for yourself; I don’t care how smart you are, this isn’t a
problem you can think your way out of. Don’t suffer because your anxiety is
telling you that if you try to cure it, the cure could be even worse.
There. Is. A. Way. Out.
It won’t be instantaneous, and won’t
be without work on your part, but the worst thing about anxiety is that it
continually shrinks your world. You know what I mean; you have a panic attack
at the amusement park, so now you don’t go to amusement parks. You get
vertigo at a restaurant, so now you don’t go to restaurants. You feel like you
can’t breathe when you’re with people, so now you avoid people. Anxiety disorder
steals your joy, then it steals your freedom. It’s a bastard that lies to you
and makes you smaller and convinces you that you’re less than you are. Fight
back. Fight back. Don’t let it tell you that you can’t win. You WILL win. Fight
back.
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