This past week and the week before that, I experienced non-stop, high anxiety. I couldn't identify a cause in my environment or my thought pattern. It was just there for no real reason, which happens with anxiety disorders. I hadn't had anxiety like that for an extended period of time in (I'd guess) around a year or so. I did all the things: movement, meditation, distraction, supplements. The anxiety was still there. I couldn't get it down.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm distress intolerant, which means that I have a really hard time dealing with negative emotions (like sadness, anger, anxiety...). My distress intolerance may even play a part in why I developed an anxiety disorder because of my need to control my emotions and my refusal to really feel the feelings I didn't like. My therapist likes to tell me that emotions we don't acknowledge and deal with often manifest as, you guessed it, anxiety. (I've gotten better at feeling all my feelings, I promise.)
Another thing distress intolerance does in my brain is go, "Oh no! These negative feelings are the new normal. I'm going to feel like this forever." In other words, my mind views the negative emotion (like my anxiety) as a permanent state of feeling. So, there I was this past week, feeling anxiety about my already-high anxiety. What if I spiral? Why isn't it going down? What if all my coping strategies never work again? What if it's like this FOREVER? You can see how that's not helpful when I'm trying to bring my anxiety down to a less consuming level.
Then, I remembered something. A quote came to me out of the blue. I'd watched a Vlogbrothers video on YouTube a few years ago, and it was one of those rare videos in which John Green, (author of The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, and other books), talks about his mental health. He had been struggling a bit with his OCD, possibly similar to how I was struggling at that moment. He said, "How you feel when you are at your sickest is not how you will always feel."
Over the next week or so, I found myself thinking of that John Green quote when I would have an anxiety spike. It helped me get back to a more hopeful place. I was then able to say to myself, "Okay, anxiety, I don't like what you're doing right now, but I just have to wait you out." I didn't get lost in worrying about the possibility of feeling anxious forever because John Green reminded me that the state of feeling as unwell as I currently felt was temporary. I already knew that, logically, my anxiety wouldn't feel like that forever, but it's so easy to get lost in the feeling of anxiety. Sometimes, it just takes a person living with a similar condition to remind me that it really does get better again.
I'll end with this: It's so easy to get lost in our emotions, especially the ones we don't like. It's even easier to get lost in the hopelessness, frustration, and fear we might feel as we try to manage a chronic condition like a mental health condition. I know it might not be easy, but we all just have to remember that the emotions, bad days, and spirals are temporary.
Source:
The video is titled: On Mental Illness (and the end of Pizzamas)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_y4CACK-9g
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