My Journey with Anxiety

The first thing I would like to start off with, is my journey with anxiety and how it all started for me.

Anxiety hit me out of the blue. For days, I was completely unaware of what was happening to me.

This is how it started, I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep one night, but I couldn't. Soon after, I felt like I could not breathe properly and started to panic thinking, "what is happening to me?" I somehow managed to fall asleep and woke up the next day without the slightest thought of what had happened the night before, yet, when night time rolled around again the next day I had this fear in the pit of my stomach that I could not seem to understand. I remember going to my mom and telling her "it feels depressing at night," not knowing what I felt was anxiety.

I continued many days trying to fight off the feeling that I got at night time. I didn't quite know what that feeling was. I just knew that it came at night time. Everyday, I would wake up with new hope and I would think to myself that "today I am not going to get that feeling," yet everyday at night I would get the same feeling over and over again. I started to lose my patience and started to become less and less hopeful because despite all my hope I still had to deal with the same feelings every night. 

This is when my mom decided it was time to take me seriously and tried to help me as best as she could. At this time she didn't know what was going on with me either. When I had felt like this for over 2 weeks I decided it was time to start searching Google for my symptoms and try to understand what was happening.  That is when I came across an anxiety article and quickly said to myself, "no that's not me." However, as the days went on I realized "oh yes that is me!"

I told my mom I was feeling anxious. That the feeling I have been telling her about is anxiety and that I needed to visit the doctor. My appointment was scheduled and my doctor confirmed to me what I had already known. I had anxiety. I was given Xanax and told to use it as a last resort. I took that too seriously and decided I was going to fight this battle without the use of any medication.

Then came a series of sad days because I couldn't get over the fact that I had anxiety. I didn't understand how I got it. I was a happy girl enjoying my life. At 20 what stress could I possibly have? I was on vacation and everything was perfect. Long story short, this is not something that came out of the blue. It was something I was leading my mind and body up to. With schoolwork and all my commitments, I wasn't living a balanced life. I was always under stress and my body wasn't going to take it anymore and it finally broke down. I took my body for granted and my body was going to put up with that anymore so it gave to me anxiety.

I went to a psychologist and a doctor who were helpful, yet, I was not getting any better. My questions were not getting answered. I still did not know what anxiety was. Why my body was acting the way it was and so on and so forth. Because anxiety was so mysterious to me it created a sense of fear. Fear of the unknown.

I started to search for articles to see how others have dealt with their anxiety and came across a blog post that talks about a person's journey with anxiety and how he cured himself. He recommended a book by Claire Weekes titled "Hope and Help for Your Nerves." At this point, I was desperate for help and decided I was going to order the book as well. By reading that book I was able to understand why my body was reacting the way it was. What anxiety was and what my symptoms meant. My anxiety and my symptoms were merely my bodies reaction to constant stress and an unbalanced life.

As I was able to learn more about the symptoms and become more familiar with anxiety, I was slowly able to lose fear of my anxiety, which then cured my anxiety attacks. I am not saying that you should go out and buy this book, what I am trying to say is that this book helped me and it helped me because it educated me on anxiety. So the first step in overcoming anxiety is to educate yourself on the subject of anxiety. I would definitely recommend this book if you would like to educate yourself, but at the end of the day, you should choose a book or article or anything really that you feel will help you.

I see that this blog posts has gotten too long and I know no one wants to read an essay so I will continue the rest of my journey in the next blog post. My hope for you for now is to educate yourself because the fear of the unknown is what keeps you in your position.

-Abigail Monroe