Severe Anxiety - I would really appreciate some support.

[TimWulder]

Hi there,
This feels very strange for me to do this. I'm not usually somebody that posts on medical forums etc. However I'm coming to my wits end about my anxiety.

I'm 21, from the UK, just finished university. About 3 months ago I started to have occasional short panic attacks, such as when driving or when very tired, which came with a feeling of derealization. Then about a month and a half ago, this feeling became pretty much constant. It has taken over my life! Basically began with feeling very 'spaced out', like things around me were strange and unfamiliar. It has now moved on to depersonalization, appetite problems, sleeping problems. I have given up driving (I know avoidance is an issue to tackle but I feel genuinely unsafe behind the wheel so this is for the good of others on the road as well as me).

However, it is the thoughts I am perpetuating all the time which are driving me round the bend. I'm unsure if they stem in some way from the derealization etc, but I have reached the point where I am questioning everything in our human world. From how our minds and bodies work, to what we are as human beings, to what is reality, to what is time and space and what came before the universe. Basically everything has begun to fall into the 'unimportant' category for me. I know I am perpetuating these thoughts and they are driving my anxiety round but I feel like they are too important to dismiss. Its as if I can't quite deal with being human anymore, what it means to be alive and conscious of our surroundings and eventual fate and not just rely on instinct.

I have now contemplated suicide as an option (no active thoughts of carrying it out as of yet) due to the overwhelming nature of what I'm thinking about.

Life now just seems strange to me. By this I mean everything: from the space we occupy, to the natural world, to manmade objects and even the people around me. My own mum and dad seem strange and distant to me. I can't quite comprehend that the people around me are conscious beings too with the same fears and problems as me. I feel so alone.

I have seen my doctor and a psychiatric nurse about this. I have been offered CBT, though I feel like these thoughts are too big. I have got to the point of questioning everything around me and even what I am myself. So how I am going to change these thought patterns I don't know. Pretty much all activities, inside and outside my house, seem strange and scary to me, so I don't know how I'm going to change my behaviour.

Basically just wanted to hear from ANYBODY who might have experienced this. This questioning of what everything is and means 24 hours a day. This feeling of questioning what it is to be human and how we can contemplate all this stuff and still be alive.

Tim

[cali-iso]

Hey Tim,
I just finished University as well, and I used to get massive feelings of derealization whenever the stress would push my anxiety to flare up. It got the point where I felt like it was ruining my life- I felt so unattached to everything that happened around me and everyone that surrounded me, and began to question the reality of everything I was experiencing. It's a hard position to be in, and a harder one to have to explain to people who have never experienced it.
My advice would be to see a doctor or therapist- if you think these thoughts are too big for CBT alone, you can always look into meds first to lessen them and then CBT to help you learn how to control them. Sometimes these things are too much, or at least that's how it felt for me.

-Isobel

[TimWulder]

Thanks for the replies. I find the thoughts so hard to get rid of because, well, they concern literally EVERYTHING. I understand the nature of anxiety and how it will pick up any fears you have and just keep going with them, probing more and more depths. But this is ridiculous, it really is just like I've woken up here, in this reality. At present I don't know how everybody doesn't just crawl into a cave and shiver at the meaningless chaos of the universe. I have always been interested in the sciences and this has perhaps made it all worse. Rather than accepting things as interesting and inevitable, I have become fixated on what we as humans cannot really ever comprehend in our state e.g. what time is, different dimensions, the fact everything including every person that ever has or will live all came from some precursor nothingness. I even think about how reality could be perceived in different ways e.g. if we were in another universe, with different laws of physics and of course this is going to hurt me because how could we ever contemplate anything else if we exist here.
Sorry to go on but this stuff has just taken over my thinking and scares me because even though I can consider it, I can never understand it.

I'm not sure if I want to treat this anxiety e.g. by medicating or if I need to come to terms with all this stuff to help me. I mean people before me have considered all the same things and not gone mad.

[acasey]

i know exactly how you feel. your not going to go mad. this is all stress induced, trust me!!! when the thoughts come just say "thats another stupid thought". your are going to continue to have these thoughts until your stress levels go down and your mind and body have had time to recover. when you are stressing about your symptoms it is keeping them around. you have to accept your symptoms. just tell yourself that you are stressed and this is your bodys way of telling to you need to get your stress levels down. these are only symptoms. they mean nothing about you as a person, they do not mean there is something more serious wrong with you and they are honestly nothing to fear. as soon as you lose the fear of your symptoms your stress levels will start to go down and your mind and thinking will slowly go back to normal. In the beginning i was convinced that i had lost my mind, there was something seriously wrong with me. but by accepting my symptoms for what they were, and losing that fear of it all, my stress began to go down and my symptoms and crazy thoughts were fading away. the last two weeks i was under alot of stress. Planning my sons birthday party, assisiting with planning my best friends wedding (im the maid of honor), arguing with my spouse, nd sarting my very first job as a nurse. my symptoms returned. if this was anything more then stress then i would no have eliminated then in the first pace. so now that they are back i know what to do. contain my fear, accept the symptoms, ive along side them, and keep my stress under control, and they again will go away with time. and thjats what you need to do also. hope this helped :)

[acasey]

also visit anxietycentre.com. it helped me soooo much!