The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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It’s a bitch having a mild mental disorder.
I sit here remarkably sane by all outward appearances. I have a family that I take good care of and have good relationships with. I do well at my job. I am smart with my money and make good, responsible decisions. I get along with pretty much everybody. But inside I am constantly struggling with anxiety, and the fear that the anxiety will get so bad that all of this will fall apart. I am consumed by a fear of fear.
In the past, my main problem was panic attacks. I always had a fear in the back of my head that I might have another and it was quite distracting. But it didn’t really affect the course of my life. I would hear about people who become agoraphobic, or who do all kinds of OCD rituals, and I just couldn’t relate. I’ve never experienced anything like depression. I just walk around scared most of the time.
Getting on medication pretty much cured my panic disorder, and when I had my child I went off meds and a round of CBT kept me from relapsing. I’ve always had health anxiety, but that also fades into the background as long as nothing weird is going on with my body. I have been back on medication for the past couple of years, but it doesn’t seem to be helping nearly as much as it used to.
I always have the thought in the back of my head that my anxiety might get so bad that it will ruin my life. If I read about somebody with intense OCD or who develops DP/DR, I think “Why couldn’t that happen to me?” If these are just disorders of thinking, why wouldn’t my own brain go down that path? It causes a huge spike of anxiety, which eventually goes away and I return to my baseline. I basically live in a world of potential triggers.
My latest therapist was big into ACT, which stresses the importance of continuing to do the things that you really want to do, and just letting the anxiety come along for the ride. I already do that, but the anxiety prevents me from getting the most emotionally and mentally out of those things that I am doing.
One of the things that helps me most is to just understand that my brain is broken. I can’t trust the things it is telling me. That’s very difficult when in so many other places my brain has served me very well. In some sense, my fear of fear is entirely logical. It’s quite clear that anxiety can make you miserable so why shouldn’t I be afraid of it? It’s just an unfortunate reality that it causes this terrible cycle:
I know being anxious is bad.
I know anxiety is something that my own brain produces.
I am afraid I won’t be able to stop my brain from producing more anxiety.
Hence I am more anxious.
The weak spot in this seems to be point 3 - that actually there are ways to stop my brain from causing more anxiety. I’m just having a hard time developing trust in those. An added wrinkle is that I am afraid to examine my brain too much. The concept of consciousness is really scary to me. I am afraid there is a fundamental truth about reality out there that I don’t want to encounter.
I guess it just feels like I’ve hit the wall on what I can get out of therapy, and I’m going to have to always deal with an elevated, sub-clinical level of anxiety that bugs the hell out of me. Thanks, brain!
For what it's worth, I grew up with serious anxiety and Zen Buddhism helped me seriously negate it. Seems silly to some Westerners but the Buddha was surprisingly insightful on what we nowadays call depression and anxiety.
I think our modern framing of the problem is a big problem in itself. Alan Watts audio is a great, relaxing way to learn if you're curious.
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I mean, like I say, I'm a pretty high-functioning anxious person. My guiding principle has always been to not let my anxiety dictate my behavior. I don't even mention my anxiety to my husband because he's already given me any advice he can.
This is a purely internal experience I'm dealing with, and I'm probably making it sound much worse than it actually is. It's just exhausting to have it there with me every day.
Edit: I do recall seeing a comment you made about your wife (your username always stood out to me for some reason!), and it sounds like she's really struggling. Has she ever gotten any professional help? It seems like CBT would be quite helpful, since she has external behavioral patterns that need to change. I guess the problem would be if she doesn't internally have the motivation to do that work.
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If your problem is anxiety, I think that dwelling on the notion that your brain or mind are broken is only going to make your anxiety worse. I find thoughts like that to be very distressing and create a lot of anxiety for myself.
Why? If it's not affecting your work and your life, then what makes it bad? The rendered opinion of therapy cultists that Mental Health is Important? There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
I think I explained this better in a follow-up comment, but it's really about accepting that my brain's danger alert system is broken. It's on a very high sensitivity setting and gives me too many false alarms. Understanding that I don't have to pay attention to every alarm has been very helpful.
It's actually the therapists who are telling me that I should accept living with anxiety and it's not necessarily a bad thing. However, I find the visceral experience extremely unpleasant, and I don't understand how to come to peace with that. It's like trying to convince myself that a headache doesn't hurt. That's the big stumbling block I have hit.
Don't give up on changing the way your brain works. It is possible even if it takes a long time and hard work. Most therapists see anxiety as an unchangeable condition of the brain, and if you accept that premise it basically makes it impossible to change.
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A lot of this sounds very familiar, especially this:
Which I've literally said to myself, word for word (didn't help my anxiety in my case though).
I wish I had some advice or encouragement. I was holding out (faint) hope that I'd eventually get financially stable enough to work through it with a psychiatrist, but white-knuckling is the status quo for now.
Yeah, the full story there is that my brain is always sending me warnings that something is dangerous and I need to protect myself. My previous response was to buckle in and try to figure out more about the danger and what I needed to do, and only then decide if it was a real danger. I've come to realize that that's like taking a danger warning from a 2-year-old seriously. I'm just kind of an idiot in that regard, and it's helpful to recognize that.
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