Anxiety
Anxiety.
Honestly I sometimes forget not everyone experiences mind crippling anxiety daily. Like you can just go about your day without some tiny, mundane, everyday experience making you feel like the world is caving in on you? Crazy. But I love that for those people.
In reality, though, we all experience some degree of anxiety at some points of our lives, and it manifests differently for everyone.
Some days anxiety is waking up with your heart beating out of your chest. Feeling like you want to crawl out of your skin. Paralyzed by fear. Knowing with absolute certainty that something is wrong, you did something wrong - you just can’t figure out what. You would do absolutely anything to make it stop.
Other days it’s numbness. Feeling completely detached, disconnected.
Anxiety for me is often internal. I can think I’m fine and appear fine on the outside only to realize I have been going over the same thought in my head for at least twenty minutes. Over and over and over. Obsessing. That’s anxiety. Believing that if I don’t do this exact thing, at this exact time, in this exact way, something will go wrong. Even if consciously I am able to comprehend that this is a cognitive distortion, a lie my brain is telling me, it still doesn’t stop my body from truly feeling this as fact.
One of the greatest tools I practice every day is sitting in discomfort. It might sound rudimentary, but try it and you will find it is absolutely not. Sitting amidst your discomfort when your entire being is screaming at you to act, fix, change, do, is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Without this skill, recovery, or any behavior change, is pretty much impossible. Without this tool, you will turn to your unhealthy coping mechanism every time, desperate for that quick fix, to numb, distract. Being able to sit in your discomfort is a super power. In time, when you allow yourself to co-exist with that discomfort, that is when true change and healing can begin. In time, you may find some sort of way to ease into it, to exist in the dichotomy of peace and pain. It is then that you can begin to regulate your nervous system and ground down into the present moment. Breathing may start to become easier, your thoughts may begin to settle … but this takes time and practice and patience. And a desire to change. At first in recovery I was simply not able to do this on my own. That is one reason why treatment or having supportive people around you can be so helpful in those darkest times. But as your strength and desire for recovery and change grow, so does your ability to sit with it all. I don’t know if it ever gets easy, though it does feel less frightening.
