Rationality and anxiety

This is something which regularly troubles my addled head. If one can qualify, understand and evaluate the problems anxiety cause; if we can explore why it happens and apply rational thinking in the middle of an attack; if we explore what the various lifestyle solutions are, how and why do you remain anxious?

I tell myself constantly that I am insignificant. That we all are. Our lives are mostly meaningless; we’re only here a short time, so let’s enjoy it. There are as many planets in the solar system as there are grains of sand on earth. Nothing really, truly matters. And while that works for a few seconds, sometimes a minute, it doesn’t help me when I’m in the middle of an attack, or have to talk to someone at work, or meet a client. No. Never.

It’s odd. It’s horrible.

The new rock bottom

I thought I’d visited the town of Rock Bottom before. But it turns out every rock bottom you reach is different, sometimes worse, sometimes more frightening, than the last. Regardless: the phrase “it’s never been this bad” is almost moot, because before you know it, you’re in a situation twice as terrifyingly awful as the last time.

And that’s where I’m at now. I’ve said here before that things have never been so bad, but unfortunately they (somehow) got worse. My anxiety is now almost unmanageable. I can’t go to the shops easily. I can’t go for a piss at work. I can’t look at people in the office when they talk to me, and I blush if I do. I blush anyway. Before, when I blushed, it would disappear within 20 minutes. Now I remained totally flushed and blushed throughout the day. I look ridiculous, people look at me as though I’m ill (or have a serious drinking problem), and the more I feel the heat on my cheeks, the worse my anxiety gets.

It’s a constant circle of fear and embarrassment and – this is new for me – I’ve begun thinking about killing myself. I’m not capable of doing it, but I no longer can see how I can find the energy to fix this. It’ll take another 12 months of regular, weekly therapy and more pills, and all the while I’ll have to live this hell every single day. Yes, it might (and hopefully will) get better gradually – but we’re talking about a tiny, almost insignificant amount, and that’s discounting the potential fallbacks which are inevitable. It must, so my brain says, be easier just to call it quits.

I’ve always had quite an open philosophy to suicide. I was fascinated by the concept when I lost my father, because as a depressed person, suicide is one of the solutions. But in my new-found bereavement, I could think of nothing worse: I’d lost someone, and knew how terrible I felt, and I didn’t want to cause more pain for the rest of my family. Now, however, I’m no longer grieving my father and although my anxiety, phobias and deep depression is all linked to that part of my life, suicide suddenly seems less ridiculous. It’s appealing. It’s the valve, letting out all the pain and ending it. Just like that.

It’s also a loser’s way out, and as much as I do think “Oh, god, wouldn’t it be great to just … switch off”, I could never do it for the guilt I would feel seconds before I nodded off for good. The shame would envelop and surround me before death finally swept me away, and the thought of ending an unfulfilled life is still too shameful for me to comprehend suicide as a viable option.

I don’t blame anyone who chooses it, though. I know how close I’ve come in the past, and if anyone’s reading this contemplating taking their own life – wait a while. Think about those things you haven’t yet done, those places you haven’t smelled with your nose and lungs. Whatever your problems – and I’m talking as someone who is incapable of doing anything at the moment – I sincerely believe the afflicted can fight mental illness.

I hope so, at any rate. Thoughts welcome in the comments, not that I’m expecting anyone to have read through this.

Mindfulness the key to happiness?

This article is engrossing and fascinating.

To draw us away from these negative thought cycles, positive psychologists emphasise the crucial role of focusing on the good aspects in our lives: recent research suggests that if we’re grateful for what we have, we’re likely to be happier, healthier and less vulnerable to depression.

As glib and contrived as it may sound, focusing on what is good about our lives is a tried and tested behavioural technique that appears to have long-term benefits. “Gratitude diaries can really work,” says DrIlona Boniwell, a senior lecturer in applied positive psychology at the University of East London. “In studies we’ve found that if you manage to write down three things each day that are going well, and do it for longer than a week, it will make a difference; levels of wellbeing rise even up to six months after completing written journals.”

The herculean challenge, of course, is to bear all these techniques in mind without reflecting too deeply on what we don’t have, and why we are not happier in the first place – as Williams says, this can be a fast track to brooding and yet more dissatisfaction. He suggests starting with the smaller details in life: training your poorly-disciplined mind not to wander away from the present moment. “If you’re drinking a cup of tea, are you really enjoying that tea or planning what you’ll be doing in half an hour? The problem is, we tend to plan, and to grade life: ‘When I get home from the supermarket, then I can relax’; ‘When I go on holiday, that’s when life is good’; ‘When I’m at work, that’s when life isn’t interesting.’ But these are all moments of your life you’re not living. It turns out that if we can be present right here and now, then happiness will follow.”

A lightless abyss

Since I began the occasional posting to this blog, I’ve hit highs and lows. More highs than lows. In the last six months, but especially in the last three, I’ve hit the absolute bottom.

Within three seconds of waking, my stomach is in knots. I shake uncontrollably at the prospect of getting on a bus, let alone stepping foot in the office. I am terrified of talking to people, which is part of my job (isn’t it everyone’s?). Each day that goes by, I am so wound up by constant, unabating nerves that by the time I get home, I am too tired to sleep. Too exhausted in the head. My body never relaxes, my muscles are tense and knotted and my back stiff. My brain aches with fear at the smallest thing.

And I write this in a pool of tears, listening to Elgar’s Enigma Variations (op 36 – Youtube), wondering how I ended up like this. I’ve been depressed for almost exactly a decade now. All the potential I once showed has not born fruit. A gifted musician, surely destined for the world stage, one teacher told me when I was 13 and had completed another solo in front of a large audience of crying mothers. I excelled at most subjects at school, until I reached my teens. I learned foreign languages with ease. I was a great communicator, a doctor in the making – or so my parents believed. Well, I believed too – I wanted that. I comforted people, I made them laugh. I still do. I am a visionary and a believer in mankind’s good. I often can’t sleep but for the torrent of stimulation in my head: ideas, plans, projects. The need to do good. The need to help people. I am unsatisfied with my lot, passionate for change, passionate that I can make a difference.

And yet, instead, I’m wallowing in my own self-inflicted grief, and that of mourning my father. I’m still 17, forever stuck at the funeral, forever wondering why – why him, why me, why us.

And it doesn’t seem likely it will change. Perhaps I too, like him, will have my hopes and aspirations buried with my bones, unless I can somehow rid myself of this sickness of the mind.

Listen to the Elgar piece with headphones on and allow yourself to be moved.

Anxiety returns

It’s like a prickly, woollen blanket. Familiar, cosy yet it’s uncomfortable. I have had low periods of depression in the past, some documented here, but I’ve never written about the deeply unsettling anxiety which has suddenly and miraculously reappeared in recent weeks. I am terrified. I am terrified of working, I’m terrified of walking home. I can’t answer the phone. I can’t even dip into voicemails. I am in a constant state of blushed redness in the face – almost puce – and I’m terrified about being terrified. I’m exhausted. I’m also recently in love, and adore her more than anyone I’ve ever met. She doesn’t terrify me, though I’m beginning to feel terrified where it might be leading and whether she will ever be able to understand me if I tell her my deepest darkest secrets (anxiety, panic, depression).

I wake up each morning and the same thing happens. The moment I’m conscious, within 3 or 4 seconds when my brain has surfaced for sufficient air to work out what day of the week it is and where I am, my stomach flips. Now, for you reading this blog, you’ve probably only had that a dozen times in your life. Like when you went for a job interview. Or had to do a speech at school. Or your wedding. Or when you abseiled. Or when you last went on a date. A big occasion. Imagine having that every single day; imagine sweating uncontrollably from your palms, and your heart racing as fast as if you had just been jogging. Imagine sitting in an office while everyone else is calmly checking their Facebook and generally avoiding work – but no. I can’t do that. I sit there in my own self-contained atmosphere where the temperature is always too hot; where the eyes always feel they’re on me; where the pressure is so intense that I feel my heart’s about to stop.

And sometimes, like now, I wish it would.

Next time I write here, hopefully my new anti-depressants might have kicked in. For now, I am filled with and fuelled by adrenaline – a drug so powerful that by the end of a normal office day, I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open and my muscles ache with the tension of flight-or-fight readiness that my brain has prepared them for.

There is only one life, and at the moment it is simply too hard, too exhausting, too painful.  I cannot wait for it to end and I don’t know when it will, or how I will be able to find a solution to it all – it feels too medical, though I know it’s all in my head. I feel in prison, my own handmade little prison – the bars constricting my body and crushing my hopes and dreams.

I just wish I could be normal, relaxed and happy – and how laughably pathetic it is that me, a middle-class westerner, should be so self-loathing and introspective while the majority of mankind still don’t have a safe habitat or enough water to sustain themselves. Sometimes I wonder whether we, in the west, have progressed beyond our capabilities; whether our primal monkey habits, so ingrained inside our psyche, will ever be truly dampened or satisfied. Right now, with me being so pent up, I could fight my own war with my two bare hands and come out smelling of roses.

I hope nobody ever suffers from what I do. It is a sickness too black to describe even to the one you love.

How bad is your anxiety?

I had to fill out a form asking me this today. So…I thought I’d ask you the same.

Time to stop worrying: the start of my new life

I haven’t written here for so long, such is the hectic nature of my job. Yet things have spiralled downwards uncontrollably. In fact, the past six months have been as painful and impossible as I can remember. Worse still, for no apparent reason.

Well, I say that. There are countless reasons for the misery I have been in. Top of the list is the job, though that in itself is showing signs of improving, but mostly it is my social phobia. If someone came up to me and said: “I have an idea. Why don’t we go paragliding off a cliff next weekend?” I would jump at the chance, if you’ll excuse the pun. I’d be nervous, certainly. I’d shake like a leaf. But the thrill of doing it, and the fact it’s a lifelong dream, would far outway the nerves.

And yet, if I have to walk through an office full of people, a pub full of people, or board a bus full of people, I feel as though I’m about to die. Or rather, I wish I could die; I wish the floor would open up and let me (and only me) take sanctuary in its dark belly, hiding my face from the onlookers. I blush uncontrollably. My heartrate, even sitting at a desk, is equivalent to that of someone lightly jogging up a gentle incline. I’m lost, confused and frightened beyond all belief when I’m enclosed in the office, and it’s something that has not simply become part of my life: the feeling owns it completely.

I’ve had some time to reassess things, and now is the time to act. If I don’t, I might as well not bother doing anything with my life, let alone fulfil it. So I’ve bought, and have begun to read, Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I’ve only read a few pages so far, but already feel a little more free and hopeful. In it, Carnegie suggests keeping a diary about how the book has influenced me, which sentences or paragraphs I think most apply, and – most importantly of all – to note down when I stray from my new regime of not worrying. And so, dear reader – I’m talking to myself when I say that – that is what I shall endeavour to do.

One day, in a time far in the future, people won’t worry. They won’t panic. They won’t have to, or need to, so long as they have a family and a roof over their heads. After all, what more do we need?

Why is it so hard?

You’d imagine in our modern society that it would be able to support every type of condition or ailment. It seems to, but still there are corners of society who inhabit meeker souls like me who don’t fit in. We’re not loud, we’re happy alone in our own thoughts. Why should we have to conform to the 9-5 drudgery and meaningless graces of correctness the western world forces on us? There is so little individuality any more.

This was written months ago but I never finished it. And I still can’t. So I might as well just push publish

Certain swagger

I heard a wonderful line from someone on TV yesterday: why do people have so much certainty and swagger nowadays? More to the point, how do they achieve it? Is there no room for the dreamers, the wistful, the grey people at the back of the class who don’t always put their hands up but are always listening?

Them and us

I always find it shocking hearing about the numbers of people who suffer from depression and anxiety. It’s much greater than any of us realise, and although it’s mildly comforting that there are so many, it’s a hidden disease; a silent affliction sometimes masked by facades or medication. If you believe the statistics, a significant number of people that you walk past on the street have some form of depression.

But it doesn’t make us feel much better, does it? Everywhere you look, society seems to race on by cheerily. Women swoon in and out of shops, bags and scarves flying behind them. Men lope after them like dozy spaniels, desperate to honour their need to shop and eager to appear supportive. Let no man get in the shopping couple’s way for they will be hit with bags or, worse, suffer ankle damage from the fashionable three-wheeled pushchair.

All around me people are smiling, laughing, sometimes staring. Or are they staring? It’s a common affliction of mine when I’m in one of my holes that I feel the whole world is not only staring, but judging and laughing at me. I often find a window or mirror on the street just to check that I haven’t got a leek sticking out of both ears, but moreover to adjust the smile on my face and make sure it’s a smile and not a “if you look at me like that one more time, I’m going to rip your neck off” grimace.

I venture into a clothes shop. Inevitably the ladies section is immediately on the same floor as the door and the men’s are found lurking in the basement, reached by an escalator which someone fatter than me might find mildly claustraphobic. It’s a small selection and I’m one of two shoppers, with no less than five employees floating around aimlessly. They’re re-fluffing the jumpers on the glass table by the escalator, they’re straightening the tie on the African manican, they’re justifying their jobs. I leave within a couple of minutes, satisfied that – being broad in shoulder and with a waist of 34in – I will burst most of their clothes as though someone has sat on water balloon. One of the employees, American, smiles and thanks me. I feel strangely attractive, for once, even though the greeting was vacuously and robotically delivered. The vanity of man; the sexy smile of women.

Out of the shop the hurtle of the high street hits me. People in threes take up an inordinate amount of the pavement and refuse to give way, giving me a surprised stare when they bump into my shoulder. Smiles. But not everyone is smiling – there are some grizzly grimaces etching their way onto some of the elder, male shoppers and briefly I feel at one with some of them. Ironically, my acknowledgment of another shopper-hater causes me to smile and I no longer hate the smiley brigade because I am, temporarily, one of them. Until a pack of three daunting women hammer their bags into my legs, one of which catches on my right knee and the bag swings wildly behind the girl’s bum. I look around to apologise on her behalf, as is my wont. She doesn’t. Apologising on others’ behalves is another affliction.

Seven shops, no clothes bought. Each venue is an insult on the senses; a scream of noise, smells, constant chatter, noise, chatter, people. Oh the people. Just so many. “How you going, alright?” flits one of the staff members no sooner have I entered. “Just looking, but thanks” I smile back. Was that too curt, I wonder? The words were polite but my delivery suggested I didn’t want to be troubled again. She doesn’t seem too offended, not that I care – or do I? I’d rather not be troubled, thanks, but I certainly don’t want to upset anyone. Just…fuck off. No, don’t think that – it’ll affect your face, it’ll make you look angry. She’s gone now, as have you, out of the shop without the clothes which you need and back into the humdrum of the high street, onto the next cacophonous store, the next disaster, the next fleeting but ultimately meaningless moment with another human being…