Lord Jazzinho
01-23-2014, 05:53 PM
----As a result of chatting with people here lately I have been reminded of just how vile a thing Chronic Anxiety really is. Now before I continue I must make this clear, I do not believe that Chronic Anxiety is a disease or an illness to look at it in these terms can lead you to a very hopeless position, for me anxiety is on condition, a problem that can be solved.
----Everybody is capable of feeling anxiety and it is a healthy part of most peoples psyche. Normal anxiety is a part of the spectrum of emotions the we are capable of and its function is help us perceive threatening situations and decide how to act. In cases of chronic anxiety (us basically) the anxiety response is hyper stimulated, this is when it becomes a problem and problem that can hold you in its grip very tightly. Reading these pages it soon becomes apparent that anxiety is a very different thing to different people but at the same time anxiety can be a number of different things to any one person.
For me its was bully that undermined me, a wall that kept me in the house and habit similar to an addiction when I felt that I had to justify it our people were not taking it seriously. Anxiety is vile because it is all of those things and more and really is only with hindsight that you can see just how nasty a condition its because it seeks to dominate your mind, only when it subsides you begin to realise just how much it coloured your thoughts, your feelings, your outlook, your behaviour, your whole life.
----Some of the things I remember from my time in its embrace seem totally ridiculous to me now. Firstly and foremost I stayed in the house for a solid eight years and when my kidneys failed I was rendered unable to take advantage of all the treatment that could have saved them because I just could not face leaving the house, I was resigned to the treatment failing and thats exactly what happened (now oddly kidney failure didn't cause me much anxiety and this was because by the time it happened I'd already had that much anxiety I just flatly refused to allow my self any more and as compared to what I'd already been through it just never seemed like that big of deal). When I used to feel that people didn't my anxiety seriously it felt like an attack on me so I would use the only weapons I had to fight back, the lists, and in doing that all in effect I was actually doing was arguing as a champion for anxiety and thereby reinforcing it in myself, when someone would tell me about their hardships I would feel perversely competitive and then sometimes have arguments which amounted to which one us had suffered the most again arguing for and reinforcing anxiety.
This is what I mean by habit and addiction the habit part of it is to deal with every situation with full anxiety no matter how small, the addiction part of it is that you don't even want to hear things that may help if you feel that a person is belittling your condition and thus your suffering, you don't want to hear a word they have to say even if they are offering you the answer. This is why anxiety is so vile it undermines your confidence in yourself, it changes how you see yourself, I makes you believe that all situations are hopeless and that only the worst will ever happen for you then it uses your imagination to conjure all manner of terrors for you to worry about. It convinces you it has value and makes you argue for it and defend it, it makes you feel like a victim of your life because you are powerless, it makes seek out things that feed it so it can maintain its dominant position in your thoughts and feelings and then the stress of it all makes you physically ill. It feels like a disease and makes you think you will never be without it, it is truly vile. Whilst you are within its to change anything seems impossible.
----There are however many things you can do to combat it in small way until things change enough to give you the space to really hit back at it. I should also make this clear and I don't suggest that anyone follows my example but some of you may also feel this way. I felt that if I could not defeat anxiety by myself there really was no point because I would be dependent on therapists and/or drugs. If I was however able to defeat it myself then I would truly know how to deal with it and be less venerable to it in future and this is what I did, a good number of things went right for me along the way and it fifteen years in all but I got there.
So heres some of things I did, I had one hope for my future and I held on to it with every fibre of my being it may have changed slightly but now I am pursuing it. Take every last drop of positivity out of every day that you can e.g. my kidneys failed but it got me out of the house and actually apart from the physical side of kidney failure, it has been a very positive experience for I got a good supportive doctor from it, it got me out of the house and able to go out and it made me more confident as I found an environment where I was treated properly for the first time. Every opportunity you have to laugh take it.
Try to get interested in something that fills some of your time I play guitar and I'm not worrying when I'm playing guitar. Accept yourself as you are and your situation and try be at ease with it. These are the things I was able to do when I was strongly in the grip of anxiety which enabled me to survive long enough to turn the tide. They weren't much but they were enough. A lot of nasty things have happened to me in my life and for about four years it was just constantly one thing after another, in those sorts of times all you can do is cling on but you are not victim of life, you are not even a victim of anxiety as hard as it may be to understand you are a participant in it and its perpetuation. The trick is to one day at a time, in baby steps, understand how you are participating and stop. Hope this is useful :)
----Everybody is capable of feeling anxiety and it is a healthy part of most peoples psyche. Normal anxiety is a part of the spectrum of emotions the we are capable of and its function is help us perceive threatening situations and decide how to act. In cases of chronic anxiety (us basically) the anxiety response is hyper stimulated, this is when it becomes a problem and problem that can hold you in its grip very tightly. Reading these pages it soon becomes apparent that anxiety is a very different thing to different people but at the same time anxiety can be a number of different things to any one person.
For me its was bully that undermined me, a wall that kept me in the house and habit similar to an addiction when I felt that I had to justify it our people were not taking it seriously. Anxiety is vile because it is all of those things and more and really is only with hindsight that you can see just how nasty a condition its because it seeks to dominate your mind, only when it subsides you begin to realise just how much it coloured your thoughts, your feelings, your outlook, your behaviour, your whole life.
----Some of the things I remember from my time in its embrace seem totally ridiculous to me now. Firstly and foremost I stayed in the house for a solid eight years and when my kidneys failed I was rendered unable to take advantage of all the treatment that could have saved them because I just could not face leaving the house, I was resigned to the treatment failing and thats exactly what happened (now oddly kidney failure didn't cause me much anxiety and this was because by the time it happened I'd already had that much anxiety I just flatly refused to allow my self any more and as compared to what I'd already been through it just never seemed like that big of deal). When I used to feel that people didn't my anxiety seriously it felt like an attack on me so I would use the only weapons I had to fight back, the lists, and in doing that all in effect I was actually doing was arguing as a champion for anxiety and thereby reinforcing it in myself, when someone would tell me about their hardships I would feel perversely competitive and then sometimes have arguments which amounted to which one us had suffered the most again arguing for and reinforcing anxiety.
This is what I mean by habit and addiction the habit part of it is to deal with every situation with full anxiety no matter how small, the addiction part of it is that you don't even want to hear things that may help if you feel that a person is belittling your condition and thus your suffering, you don't want to hear a word they have to say even if they are offering you the answer. This is why anxiety is so vile it undermines your confidence in yourself, it changes how you see yourself, I makes you believe that all situations are hopeless and that only the worst will ever happen for you then it uses your imagination to conjure all manner of terrors for you to worry about. It convinces you it has value and makes you argue for it and defend it, it makes you feel like a victim of your life because you are powerless, it makes seek out things that feed it so it can maintain its dominant position in your thoughts and feelings and then the stress of it all makes you physically ill. It feels like a disease and makes you think you will never be without it, it is truly vile. Whilst you are within its to change anything seems impossible.
----There are however many things you can do to combat it in small way until things change enough to give you the space to really hit back at it. I should also make this clear and I don't suggest that anyone follows my example but some of you may also feel this way. I felt that if I could not defeat anxiety by myself there really was no point because I would be dependent on therapists and/or drugs. If I was however able to defeat it myself then I would truly know how to deal with it and be less venerable to it in future and this is what I did, a good number of things went right for me along the way and it fifteen years in all but I got there.
So heres some of things I did, I had one hope for my future and I held on to it with every fibre of my being it may have changed slightly but now I am pursuing it. Take every last drop of positivity out of every day that you can e.g. my kidneys failed but it got me out of the house and actually apart from the physical side of kidney failure, it has been a very positive experience for I got a good supportive doctor from it, it got me out of the house and able to go out and it made me more confident as I found an environment where I was treated properly for the first time. Every opportunity you have to laugh take it.
Try to get interested in something that fills some of your time I play guitar and I'm not worrying when I'm playing guitar. Accept yourself as you are and your situation and try be at ease with it. These are the things I was able to do when I was strongly in the grip of anxiety which enabled me to survive long enough to turn the tide. They weren't much but they were enough. A lot of nasty things have happened to me in my life and for about four years it was just constantly one thing after another, in those sorts of times all you can do is cling on but you are not victim of life, you are not even a victim of anxiety as hard as it may be to understand you are a participant in it and its perpetuation. The trick is to one day at a time, in baby steps, understand how you are participating and stop. Hope this is useful :)