Anxiety Really Sucks!

When I started this blog, I had just been diagnosed with panic disorder and agoraphobia, which was my first official diagnosis. That was over three years ago now. I now don’t even meet the criteria for panic disorder – yay me! But what does this really mean? Am I truly recovered? Has my anxiety been expelled from my mind, much like a demon might be exorcised in a horror movie?

These are difficult questions to answer. First off, my anxiety is certainly not gone – I still struggle with social anxiety and there are still things that trigger my panic response. I have to closely watch how often I’m eating to keep my blood sugar stable, I have to remember my deep breathing techniques, and I have to keep a healthy balance of not avoiding my anxiety triggers but also not surrounding myself with them.

Even once you recover from an anxiety disorder, you never truly get rid of the anxiety. It lingers around you, a ghost of its former self, but present nonetheless. I may not have a panic attack when I try to board a bus, but I still get uncomfortable if I don’t show up much earlier than the departure time, and sometimes I still get that tight feeling in my chest while riding the bus, reminding me that I don’t like being confined into a small space for a long period of time. I like having escape routes thanks to the agoraphobia I once suffered from.

Something that I’ve learned over the past few years is to keep everything relative. Sure, I still suffer from some anxiety, more than most people, and yeah it sucks. But when I started this blog, my anxiety was crippling me, strangling me so that I couldn’t complete the simplest of tasks like going grocery shopping or working out at the gym. Compare yourself not to other people, but rather to the old you. If you’re doing better now than you were in the past, that’s progress – and that’s what counts.

It’s important also to continue with the treatments and techniques that helped you overcome your anxiety disorder. For me, it’s been a lot of mindfulness, breathing techniques, and positive visualization. I believe that I’m in control of my mood (to a certain degree) and I have to keep believing that, lest the anxiety take its grips on me once again. I’ve learned to talk about my feelings more often – telling people I’m anxious helps me intellectualize things, to hear my feelings out loud helps me to control them. Whatever techniques you used to overcome your anxiety, don’t forget them once you’re feeling better. Maybe you don’t need to practice them as often as during your recovery process, but always keep them in mind.

One last thing I wanted to say was that I realize many people who might stumble across this blog are not yet recovered. Don’t get discouraged that other people have overcome something you haven’t – remember, don’t compare yourself to other people, compare yourself to yourself. Every little step counts, every time you can make it out the door and walk around the block is a small victory. I have reached recovery, and you can too!

Around the time that I started this blog (back in late January/early February), I started experiencing very bad dissociation for the first time. I’ve written about my experiences with dissociation for Summer Beretsky’s blog Panic About Anxiety before, so I won’t rehash that for you in this post. I’m not experiencing the sort of acutely disturbing dissociation that I described in that post. Instead, I’ve been experiencing a sort of low-grade depersonalization for the past few months.

Unlike my bad experiences where I feel like I’m a video game character, lately I find myself just zoning in and out of awareness more often. A good example: once in awhile, when I’m alone, I’ll forget where I am or how I got there. The memories flood back almost immediately, but it’s unsettling, and it used to cause me a great deal of anxiety. Occasionally, it feels like I’m not physically present, but merely an observer to some alternate reality. It’s sounds a bit odd, but I’ve come to accept it just comes with the package of chronic anxiety.

Luckily for me, while I can’t seem to escape these experiences, I can certainly control how they affect me. Unless I’m in a particularly troubling situation, I’m generally not scared of these dissociative episodes anymore. To combat my anxiety, I’ve learned a host of grounding techniques that have really helped me. I wanted to share a few concrete examples with you today.

Also, just a quick note: grounding techniques are often prescribed for sufferers of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but I’ve found them useful in many different contexts. They are especially effective at diminishing the effects of my dissociation, but are also great for keeping panic attacks at bay as well.

Mental Grounding is all about keeping your mind focused in the present reality. Here are some examples:

• Orient yourself in your physical surroundings. Sometimes I get so lost in my anxiety, I lose tract of myself and where I am. Try asking questions like, “Where am I?” or “How did I get here?” Sometimes just providing yourself with an answer to these simple questions is enough to pull you back down from your anxious plane. 
• Orient yourself in the present moment. Similarly to losing myself, sometimes I also lose track of time (on a small scale and a large scale). If you have a watch or cell phone, check the time. Remind yourself of the date and day of the week. Ask yourself what month it is, and why you like or dislike that month.
• Be intellectual. I use this tactic a lot. Remind yourself that you’re not actually floating away from the present moment, you’re just experiencing anxiety/dissociation. A typical reminder I might give myself goes something like, “Justin, you are present in this moment right now, you just feel otherwise because of your anxiety. You are experiencing dissociation, which is a common phenomenon among sufferers of anxiety like yourself. There is no danger.”
• Keep your mind occupied with other, more difficult, things. During some of my worst panic attacks, I find doing mental arithmetic helps me stay grounded. Starting at 2, begin doubling numbers until you lose track of where you are or can’t do the mental arithmetic anymore. When you reach that point, start over. Keep going until you get bored. Chances are, if you are able to feel boredom, you’ve outlasted your anxiety. (This doesn’t work as well for dissociation, unfortunately.)

Physical Grounding is about taking advantage of your senses to bring you back into the moment. Here are some examples:

• Try the “3 by 5” technique. List three things you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell. 
• Become more aware of your body. Think about your arms as you move them around, and pay attention to how they feel. Touch your face and note how it feels. Does your skin feel warm or cool?
• Take a hot shower. The constant flow of warm water on your body will keep you grounded in the moment.
• Try a progressive muscle relaxation. The goal is feel your muscles tense and relax. It’s tedious and often doesn’t hold my attention very well, but if you can manage to concentrate, it really does help relieve anxiety (and definitely keeps you grounded).

Try out these different grounding techniques and see which ones work well for you. Some will work better than others. Maybe you’ll even come up with your own techniques.

Do you have any other grounding techniques that work well for you? If so, leave them in the comments below!

[Note: the following is the second guest post from Jared Friedman.]

Is your spouse acting differently? Are you feeling like something is wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on the problem?

The changes may be chemical, but are coming out to you as behavioral changes in the person you love most. There are signs you can use to gauge if your spouse needs mental health treatment.

Millions Affected

Depression and anxiety affect millions of people each day, and we often attribute the symptoms to long work hours, lack of sleep, or life changes, but mental illness is not something to take lightly.

Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are altering the lives of silent sufferers, and the lives of those who care for them the most. When left untreated, mental illness only gets worse.

Warning Signs

Does your spouse show the following symptoms of mental illness? Do you need to look into mental health treatment?

1. Loss of Interest

For many people with the symptoms of a mental illness, activities and hobbies that used to bring joy are no longer of any interest.

Did you and your spouse used to participate in a group of any kind, or a social activity together that he or she no longer wants to do? If your spouse had a hobby that no longer warrants any time, or interest, this may be a significant sign of a mental illness.

Withdrawal from activities, friends, and family members is an indicator of the need for mental health treatment.

2. Changes in Mood

Does your spouse express, verbally or nonverbally, feelings of sadness, hopelessness, fear, or worry? Depression and anxiety are the most common forms of mental illness, but low self-worth and constant mental and emotional discomfort can also indicate another type of mental illness.

Did your spouse used to be happy and more upbeat than he or she has been lately? Changes in mood that have impact on relationships is a tell-tale sign of mental illness requiring professional assessment.

3. Anger or Hostility

Along with emotional changes and mood swings, newly expressed anger and hostility can indicate underlying issues. Anger can present as an external expression of internal pain and sadness. If you notice progressively worse rage in your spouse, it’s time to think about mental health treatment.

4. Substance Use

In countless mental illness cases, the sufferer attempts to treat the symptoms with drugs and alcohol. If your spouse is drinking or using drugs to self-medicate, mental health treatment is probably needed. Dual diagnosis, the clinical applicability of a mental illness and a substance abuse or eating disorder at the same time, requires special treatment. Your spouse can be treated for two disorders at the same time, and can heal from both concurrently.

5. Detachment From Reality

Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder lead people to do things out of their normal character. The chemical imbalance leads to an inability to live a “normal” daily life, and can even lose touch with reality. If you notice a detachment of any kind in your spouse, seek the guidance of a mental health professional.

Treatment is available for every mental illness when approached the right way. Any signs of mental illness are cause for immediate intervention.

Jared Friedman has a masters degree in psychology from Pepperdine University.

[Today is a guest post from ex-anxiety sufferer Ryan Rivera.]

If you suffer from anxiety, whether it stems from work, school, a friendship, a romantic relationship, your home life, or post-traumatic stress, it is important for you to have a safe place to retreat to where you can privately examine your thoughts and feelings without feeling overwhelmed or pressured. This is why many people choose to keep a private journal.

Keeping a journal is an easy, stress-free way to privately express yourself. It can be as simple as writing down a description of what you do each day: you’ll find yourself adding little details about how you felt and what you thought about the people and events you encounter, and pretty soon you will be able to write entries entirely made up of things you are thinking about. If you enjoy writing, keeping a journal is an inherently soothing experience.

Whatever your skill or interest level, you will find that journaling is a reliable way of decreasing your anxiety.

How to “Write Right” and Achieve Anti-Anxiety Effects

Putting pen to paper may not seem like it would be much help at first glance, but that simple action can have a multitude of benefits for anxiety-sufferers. Find out below how allowing yourself to literally “read your own thoughts” can relax you in the short term, while making you less susceptible to anxiety attacks in the long term.

• Create A Familiar Space – Journal writing, when done regularly (for example, right before you go to sleep) becomes more than just a chore. Your journal is a space for you to say whatever you want and examine how you really feel without any judgment or pressure from the outside world (and can be carried with you almost anywhere you go). The anxious brain appreciates reliable routines and spaces where it can feel safe, and over time you will begin to find that just picking up the pen in your hand and opening your journal to a fresh page in and of itself has an instantly calming effect on your mind and body.
• Take Your Mind Off the Stressor – When you are anxious, sometimes what you need the most is a temporary escape. Journal writing can serve as an opportunity for meditation, not just on the event, person idea causing you stress but upon any subject you can possibly think of. When you need to calm your mind, writing in detail about what you see around you, or things that make you happy (such as baby animals, walks in the woods, your favorite holiday) can help you to stop obsessing and reach a more positive, functional mental state.
• Get to Know Yourself – The added benefit of journaling is that it forces you to make time for yourself. In the midst of texting and running errands and getting to our jobs and various appointments on time, it’s a rare moment when you are allowed to get in touch with yourself. Use this time to organize your thoughts. This allows you to find out, almost from an “outsider” perspective, what your thoughts/experiences “sound” like when written out, which can give you valuable insight into what parts of your mental process are less rational than you may have realized, and show you how you can behave more rationally next time.
• “Tell Yourself a Different Story” – To help prepare your mind to better handle anxiety in the future, try writing “stories” or brief narratives in which you encounter and overcome your fears. Describe the scenario as vividly as possible, writing down exactly how you will behave and what you will say. Another good way to “rewrite” bad mental habits is to list any negative thoughts or stresses you are having that day, and then write an accompanying list of positive, believable thoughts or “solutions.”
• Expose and Halt the Vicious Cycle of Anxious Thoughts – Writing while experiencing anxiety can help you examine your thought patterns when you reread the entry later, or even while you are writing it. Watching for thoughts that reoccur within the writing can reveal to you to the beliefs that trap you in that loop of anxiety, which you can then address directly (for example, by asking yourself “what belief would be more useful to me?”).

Whether you are dying to go out and find a beautiful and artfully designed journal that reflects who you are, want to save a few bucks on an ordinary one you can leave plain-looking or design any way you want, or find it easier to imagine keeping a journal online or in a text document, today is as good a day as any to start using journaling to stop anxiety from your affecting life.

About the Author: Ryan Rivera was someone that suffered from a great deal of anxiety in his life before finding relief from many home methods. Now he has a website about overcoming anxiety at www.calmclinic.com.