when did it start for you?

[clay]

have you dealt with high anxiety your whole life or did it develop along the way sometime? was there a moment that threw it over the top? When did you realize that you had an anxiety problem?


I just realized I had an anxiety problem September 2010 when I couldn't work for 2 weeks because my anxiety was so bad. i had a terrible panic attack at work but I didn't know that's what it was. I ended up at the ER twice and my doc twice in one week before I realized it was anxiety. but I see that I have been rather high anxiety all my life. I've always been an anxious person but had trouble recognizing it. I've never been good with recognizing when I am stressed but my body has responded to the stress whether I mentally recognized it or not. I had a tick in one eye throughout high school when I was stressed. In college I had SEVERE IBS. Now I get all kinds of stress-reactions.

[danstelter]

My wife deals with a lot of your anxiety symtoms, so you have my sympathy.

For me, social anxiety has been lifelong. My earliest memories as a child were of having a burning hot face, tingling in my face, arms, and neck, and clinging to my dad's leg so I didn't have to go play with all the new kids at a party. It got really bad for quite some time, far worse than that incident, but now at 28, I can say that I am past most, but not all of it.

It's not fun and is incredibly isolating - I hope you find the help you need to reduce the effects on your life.

[Varjo]

It was the end of July, end of summer. Before this I had never experienced anxiety as a problem.

This happened after a week of drinking and partying and lack of sleep, so I think my mind was over worked and over stressed which contributed to the start of this I'd say.

I remember the night before it started laying in my bed and stressing about this issue with a friend who was suicidal, I was very worried she might do something and I would lose her and I remember it being hard to sleep because I couldn't contact her and couldn't stop worrying about her well being. Either way, I feel asleep eventually, I woke up in the morning from a nightmare, really early, and realized I was still stressing about losing her, then I started stressing about school starting again and about having to get my life together and about the fact that I was supposed to move out of this town within the year.

I decided the best way to deal with this was to write it all down, so then I drunk a couple of cups of coffee and wrote everything down and I felt a lot better. Then I went to unwind and watch tv, a few hours later the coffee withdrawal started hitting me and I could feel myself getting stressed again, then before I knew it I had a very intense panic attack.

I couldn't stop this panic attack for over a week, I couldn't sleep properly, my heart and thoughts were racing all the time, I had terrible migraines and feelings of derealization. After that general anxiety has always lingered in my head. Really, now that only thing that makes me anxious is the idea of feeling such panic again. I don't worry as much about other things anymore, but what terrifies me is that loss of control and the more I stress about it, the more I start to feel out of control and it just feeds my anxiety.

So that's pretty much my story.

[mamascrazy1985]

I have always been really careful about everything growing up. i was shy and nervous about everything, Mine started with GAD 3 years ago almost when i had my second daughter. she was about 6 months old and all i really remember was being really really stressed out. know i have concluded that high stress is causing my anxiety i am fine throughout the day when im not stressed but if something bad happens it makes it all very much worse. then it takes a couple of days to forget my anxiety symptoms again. its all a cycle and it sucks.