Anxiety is your Friend

Anxiety my friend?  How on earth can something so dreadful be your friend?

You can recover from anxiety with medicine, with understanding (see Paul David's book), with either or both.  Medicine certainly has its place and is there to help you, so if you are prescribed medicine then don't worry about it - just take it, its there for a reason.  Some people feel ashamed they've resorted to anti-depressants, or feel they're weak.  You're not.  If you had a broken leg you wouldn't be expected to suffer without taking painkillers, or if you had high blood pressure, again you wouldn't be expected to fix this yourself without medicine.  So anti-depressants are there to help you just the same as any other medicine will help any other ailment.  There is nothing wrong with taking them - I certainly did, and for 16 years too.  They were an absolutely godsend for me.

I would absolutely recommend you equip yourself with understanding anxiety - knowledge is power. If you don't know what's happening to you then it will frighten you, will add to your worries and add anxiety onto the anxiety you already have.  When I began to understand anxiety it took away a huge amount of confusion and fear, and enabled me to just follow one path.

Admittedly I wasn't able to put into place exactly what I'd learnt, as 16 years of anxiety is a hard habit to break, but as I started to recover on SSRI's I began to see it even clearer and was able to look down on anxiety rather than through it.

One thing to know is that when you recover you don't just leave anxiety behind, but you take it with you on your journey towards recovering, and along that route you'll go through a mix of hellish days, ok days, bad days, good days, rock bottom days, flat days, ok days, bad days, really good days ........ so when you have a good days followed by bad ones, don't despair, just understand that this is all part of recovery.  Let anxiety walk beside you as you recover, because it will anyway even if you don't want it to.

The key to recovery is changing our attitude towards anxiety.  Fearing it spikes more anxiety, this anxiety creates side effects, racing mind, intrusive thoughts all which cause more anxiety - yet allowing anxiety to be there, relax towards it, letting rage about you like a hurricane overhead, paying no attention to it whilst you carry on, is facing it.  By doing this you re-educate your brain to not fear it, and the fear will slowly die.  Yes its uncomfortable, you won't feel it working and you certainly won't feel better overnight, but it works in time.

You can't do this without the anxiety being present - how can you practice riding a bike if you don't have a bike?  So welcome anxiety, because you need it to be present in order to practice riding it through.  Let it be your friend.

Believe me - I've been there

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