Mr Jingles
10-22-2015, 10:21 PM
Dear Anxiety Forum,
I've dealt with strong depression and anxiety the last few years. Six months ago it really peaked, and every night was insomnia and waking up with panic and adrenaline throughout the early morning, then constant depression and panic throughout the day. I had very little hope. I felt like all day long I was just trying to survive. I wished many times it would just end. I had strong social anxiety due to panic attacks often happening while with others. This made it hard for me to reach out at all. I felt so alone.
Today things feel a lot different.
I'm hoping to help you to not suffer as much as I did. I'm not sure how to do this, so I thought I'd just start sharing my experience and see what the reaction is.
I haven't "figured out" anything on this journey. Not for lack of trying! The last four years have felt like a struggle to figure out how to put the depression, then the anxiety, behind me. Instead of figuring it out, I kept making the same basic mistake literally thousands of times, in thousands of different configurations. And the pain of that repeated mistake finally changed something in me.
My mistake: trying to control or manage feelings and thoughts. AT ALL. If I try to manage my thoughts and feelings, I will do good at it for a while, and feel like I'm progressing or getting some control over what scares me. Cognitive Behavior Therapy was an example of this for me. Good initial results and I was full of hope, but then it would always crash. HARD. I think the crashing happened because ultimately I was using CBT to try to manage and "stay ahead of" the thoughts and feelings. And for me, any kind of management just backfires. In the backfire, I'm traumatized by a day or two of full-on panic and helplessness and zero hope, and the cycle continues again.
I found the book "The Happiness Trap" to be extremely useful. You can download an introduction to it for free on their site (Google it) and that intro explains the approach quite well. The book came along about two months ago in my journey, and I was very primed for it. I had learned something through all my mistakes and that learning made me ready for the key teaching in to book.
The key teaching of The Happiness Trap (and of the approach behind the book, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), seems to be:
We will never control the thoughts and feelings. Give up trying. The best we can do is to get a little distance and reduce the reaction to them, SO THAT we can start taking action around things that matter to us again. This will start us feeling some meaning and control of our lives again, and that will result in a feedback loop that will help us, through action, to get to where the panic and depression is still there, but it's become more background rather than the constant front and center we likely feel right now.
This key learning totally echoed what I'd learned from my thousands of trials making the same painful mistakes. And I've gotten so much from putting it into practice. It gave me the clarity around what I'd learned, and the confidence to stop trying to manage the thoughts and feelings. To just STOP. And do the scary thing of starting to take action again.
I'll stop here for now. Let me know if you have any questions, or have had similar experiences, whatever. I'm hoping to take this post and my further additions in a direction that is helpful to the forum.
I've dealt with strong depression and anxiety the last few years. Six months ago it really peaked, and every night was insomnia and waking up with panic and adrenaline throughout the early morning, then constant depression and panic throughout the day. I had very little hope. I felt like all day long I was just trying to survive. I wished many times it would just end. I had strong social anxiety due to panic attacks often happening while with others. This made it hard for me to reach out at all. I felt so alone.
Today things feel a lot different.
I'm hoping to help you to not suffer as much as I did. I'm not sure how to do this, so I thought I'd just start sharing my experience and see what the reaction is.
I haven't "figured out" anything on this journey. Not for lack of trying! The last four years have felt like a struggle to figure out how to put the depression, then the anxiety, behind me. Instead of figuring it out, I kept making the same basic mistake literally thousands of times, in thousands of different configurations. And the pain of that repeated mistake finally changed something in me.
My mistake: trying to control or manage feelings and thoughts. AT ALL. If I try to manage my thoughts and feelings, I will do good at it for a while, and feel like I'm progressing or getting some control over what scares me. Cognitive Behavior Therapy was an example of this for me. Good initial results and I was full of hope, but then it would always crash. HARD. I think the crashing happened because ultimately I was using CBT to try to manage and "stay ahead of" the thoughts and feelings. And for me, any kind of management just backfires. In the backfire, I'm traumatized by a day or two of full-on panic and helplessness and zero hope, and the cycle continues again.
I found the book "The Happiness Trap" to be extremely useful. You can download an introduction to it for free on their site (Google it) and that intro explains the approach quite well. The book came along about two months ago in my journey, and I was very primed for it. I had learned something through all my mistakes and that learning made me ready for the key teaching in to book.
The key teaching of The Happiness Trap (and of the approach behind the book, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), seems to be:
We will never control the thoughts and feelings. Give up trying. The best we can do is to get a little distance and reduce the reaction to them, SO THAT we can start taking action around things that matter to us again. This will start us feeling some meaning and control of our lives again, and that will result in a feedback loop that will help us, through action, to get to where the panic and depression is still there, but it's become more background rather than the constant front and center we likely feel right now.
This key learning totally echoed what I'd learned from my thousands of trials making the same painful mistakes. And I've gotten so much from putting it into practice. It gave me the clarity around what I'd learned, and the confidence to stop trying to manage the thoughts and feelings. To just STOP. And do the scary thing of starting to take action again.
I'll stop here for now. Let me know if you have any questions, or have had similar experiences, whatever. I'm hoping to take this post and my further additions in a direction that is helpful to the forum.