Dealing With Anxiety
Hello! I hope you've all enjoyed my last blog post on my favourite Fall music, but today I'd like to write about some a bit more serious, however, is something that we all deal with. Anxiety. I'm sure at some point in our lives, we've all dealt with anxiety. It's not a disease or disorder, as some may think of it, however, it is something that we feel can easily take over our lives. It makes you feel absolutely hopeless. I've only seen a few people address this before, so I feel it's important for me to do so, and not only for that reason, but for the reason that it happens to be affecting me right now. Let's start from the beginning. Before I start however, I'd like to say one thing. Not everything that I'm writing is extremely comfortable for me to put out there, and I'd like to ask you to be considerate to what I'm saying, and to what others may decide to comment.
I guess it sort of started when I was about 7 or 8 or even 9. I don't know if this is exactly what triggered it, but around that time, I'd just gotten my own email address. I was so excited to be able to communicate with my friends without having to call them up on my home phone, and I begin to send emails out immediately. It was around this time that a chain email started going around and as most chain mails do, it told a seemingly scary story at the time, and told me that if I did not forward it to my friends, I would receive a grim fate. It was complete nonsense, and I know that now, but I didn't know it at the time. It scared the living daylight out of me, and I felt so shaken.
A while later, I seemed to have gotten over it, and was back to my normal self, however a part of me felt completely different. I'd never been so utterly frightened in my life, and although I still appeared to be the same old me, I felt so weird inside. Nonetheless, I moved through the day without a worry and would come home happy as ever.
You may be thinking to yourself, where's the problem here? You see, the problem was tiny. Miniscule. The only fear that I had, and you're going to laugh, is that I was afraid of showering. The story had taken place while someone was in the shower, and I was scared that if something were to happen to me, it would be there.
As I grew up, I started to hang out with friends more. And part of hanging out with friends, as a girl at least, is having sleepovers. Now, up until the whole email thing, I was absolutely fine having sleepovers at friends houses. Then one night, while I was at one of my friends houses, lying there trying to sleep, I started to think about the story again. It was completely irrelevant, I know it was, but my mind switched onto that whole path, and my brain was caught up replaying everything, and it was just too much. I ended up calling my dad to come pick me up at something like 11 or 12 in the night.
From then onwards, sleep was a big problem for me, and honestly, occasionally, it still is. For years, and this is the embarrassing part, I could not go to my friends houses for sleepovers, and would wake up in the middle of the night to go to my parents bedroom. I still wake up in the night all the time, but that's not really the problem. The problem has always been when I can't fall asleep altogether. I have what I like to call an overactive mind. There are days when my mind cannot calm down, and cannot say "okay, time to go to sleep". Instead, my mind will replay the events of the whole day back in my mind. If I'm not having one of those days, however, I'm out like a bulb in a matter of 2 minutes or less. Because of this, whenever I can't go to sleep, my mind goes into this sort of paranoia. I start to freak out, for really no reason other that I can't fall asleep. I sometimes start to cry. I wonder what's wrong with me, when really nothing is.
The thing with this is that 1. It so unpredictable. This May, I went on a school trip for 3 nights. I was so scared that I would not be able to fall asleep, and then guess what? I was the first to fall asleep of all my friends, and I was also told that I snored. 2. There's not much that you can do about it. It's not insomnia, and I would never want to be taking medication for that sort of thing.
So how do I deal with it? Take a deep breath and relax. If you need to cry, do it. If it makes you feel better it's fine. Don't avoid the situations, because it's only going to make you feel like you've missed out on an experience you would've enjoyed.
That's not where the anxiety ends for me however. Zoom forward. Now, I don't know exactly when this first happened, but towards the end of this last school year, I started to feel extremely nervous. Why? One word. Hyperhidrosis. No, it's not a disease. All it really is, is extreme perspiration, or sweating. I've actually dealt with this for a while, probably for about 4 years now. Now, although I sweat excessively throughout the whole year, summer is the worst. Not only does the heat cause me to sweat more, but the clothes that I wear (T-shirts, etc.) reveal things like sweat marks that make it more visible to the public eye.
When I first started to sweat this much, it wasn't that big of a deal. No one really seemed to notice. Around the sixth grade however, during the winter, I believe, was when I really started to become concerned. I was doing a group project with a few friends, and a girl in my group took a look at me and pointed out that I had huge sweat stains under my armpits, which meant the sweat had soaked through my sweater. I could not see them from the position that I was sitting in, so I got up and went to the washroom, and sure enough there were two huge sweat stains under my armpits. It was so embarrassing, so I quickly took off my sweater and threw it in my bag.
I guess that ever since then, I've been extra careful about what I wear. I only wear certain materials, things that fit me a certain way, and certain colours. But it isn't really my sweaty armpits that bother me, it's my sweaty hands. It's true, I do sweat excessively under my armpits, but a lot of people sweat under their armpits. Nobody that I know, at the moment at least, have sweaty hands, constantly. I can't help it either. It's not triggered by certain activities, or by me "thinking about it", but only randomly. This really had started to affect me, so I decided I had to change it. I went out and bought this product called Drysol. It had this chemical, called aluminum chloride, that worked (over three days for me) to get rid of it. However, it's a thing that you've got to apply every night. It's temporary, not a thing that after used for a certain time will stop it all together. Evetually, although it was helping me, I stopped using it. It was getting a bit too much, especially during the winter time where I found my hands were much too dry, and sometimes even would start bleeding (on the inside).
Once summer came around, I started to use the Drysol again, but this time, it worked differently. The Drysol would instantly dry me out, leaving me with chalky white hands, so I stopped using it altogether. Now, I honestly don't know if this triggered it, or if this was anxiety related, but around the last couple of months of school, I started to get sick a lot. Sometimes colds, sometimes stomach related pain, most of the time the latter. When I received my report card, I saw that I'd missed a total of 17 days of school during the year, and let's just say I was not proud of myself. More importantly, I was hoping my parents wouldn't be mad.
Thank goodness I've had understanding parents, or the past month would have been devastating. On the first day of school, I went, happy, confident, feeling great. And I came home sad, feeling a bit downtrodden, yet for no apparent reason. It was later that night, as I was sitting in my family room, watching TV, alone, since my parents had gone out for a bit, that I experienced my first minor "panic attack". I say minor because I did not feel like I was about to have a heart attack as many people say they do, rather I felt extremely dizzy, my head started to hurt, and I felt my vision sharpen a bit, as it does when I'm sick. I took deep breaths and tried to calm down myself and eventually it worked. I tried to treat it as if nothing had happened but I knew inside me that something truly had.
The next morning I wanted to tell my mom that I thought that I had anxiety problems. That's definitely not something a mother wants to hear, nor is it something she will believe without seeing. That's kind of when I started to freak out. I wanted to go to school, but there was this part of me telling me, you can't do it. You won't do it. It was the negative that I was hearing, and the positive that I wanted to hear was nowhere to be found. I broke down into tears, and I called up my dad and began talking to him. I'm not exaggerating here, all the words that I could get out were "I can't go dad. Please, I can't go." Sure enough, I didn't go.
I'm lucky enough that my own godmother is a doctor, so that night we went to pay her a visit. My mind was still a bit shaken from the morning, but I spoke to her and told her about how I felt. She told me that it was okay, and that it was hormone related. I didn't believe it at first, but then she'd told me that her own daughter, when she was around my age, had gone through the same thing. One morning, she'd just woken up and while sitting in her bedroom, started crying and saying similar things to what I'd said.
The next day, I'd woken up with my mind set on going to school. I was determined on it, but I failed. I let it get to me again.
My first week was a four day week anyways, so I went to school on Friday, and came home for the weekend feeling a bit better. The next week was honestly not much better. I did go to school on Monday, and came home happy again. However, I awoke on Tuesday feeling crappy as ever. Tuesday was possibly one of the worst days of my life. It started off as a bit of a fight. My mom was trying to get me to go, but I was trying to get myself to stay. She made a call to my aunt, who began suggesting maybe I could go to a councillor, which made me feel even more angry, as it made me feel like I had a serious mental problem. It wasn't until my dad came home from work that I started to feel better. He told me something that's really helped me get through the past few weeks, at least until today. He told me to use my mind as a switch. Whenever it starts to wander to something that stresses me out, flick the switch (not literally) and think about something else. Stop thinking about the anger or sadness inside of you and think of all the goods in your life.
Believe it or not, that's worked. Today, once again, however, I started to stress out this morning. You see, I go to a Catholic school, and we do the "peace be with you" thing where we shake each other's hand. For anyone else, it's just a normal thing, but for me it's stressful. The last thing I want is for someone to make a rude remark in front of the whole school about my sweaty hands, and trust me, people have pointed it out before. For me, being at home today was just a way to relax my mind. I'm started up again, like any engine ready to go for tomorrow. I'm a little worried right now, mostly because I don't know how to explain myself to my friends. I'm not ready to tell them about what's been going on, nor do I know how I would explain it. I don't want people to think that the reason I'm not at school is because I don't want to be there or because I just don't feel like going. I want to feel better about myself, and I want to be happy all the time. I'm still not completely back to my old happy self, but I'm working on it.
After reading this extremely long post, you probably want me to get to the point. How do you deal with it?
First of all, don't let it get to you. By that, I mean don't let it get in the way of what you want, or what you love to do.
Second of all, whenever you feel like panic is striking, flick that little switch in your mind. I know it doesn't sound convincing, but it works.
Next, never say no. Use your positives. Instead of saying "no, I can't do it" say "yes, I can do it" or "I'm not sure, but I'm going to try".
Finally, don't let anyone get to you. If you're absent from school or activities, and you don't feel comfortable telling your friends about your situation, say "it's a personal thing" or simply "I didn't feel good". If they ask for more information, tell them that it's something you don't want to talk about right now. Good friends should respect your boundaries.
Okay, well I hope you enjoyed that ever so long post. See you next time,
BlogsWithSarah xx
I guess it sort of started when I was about 7 or 8 or even 9. I don't know if this is exactly what triggered it, but around that time, I'd just gotten my own email address. I was so excited to be able to communicate with my friends without having to call them up on my home phone, and I begin to send emails out immediately. It was around this time that a chain email started going around and as most chain mails do, it told a seemingly scary story at the time, and told me that if I did not forward it to my friends, I would receive a grim fate. It was complete nonsense, and I know that now, but I didn't know it at the time. It scared the living daylight out of me, and I felt so shaken.
A while later, I seemed to have gotten over it, and was back to my normal self, however a part of me felt completely different. I'd never been so utterly frightened in my life, and although I still appeared to be the same old me, I felt so weird inside. Nonetheless, I moved through the day without a worry and would come home happy as ever.
You may be thinking to yourself, where's the problem here? You see, the problem was tiny. Miniscule. The only fear that I had, and you're going to laugh, is that I was afraid of showering. The story had taken place while someone was in the shower, and I was scared that if something were to happen to me, it would be there.
As I grew up, I started to hang out with friends more. And part of hanging out with friends, as a girl at least, is having sleepovers. Now, up until the whole email thing, I was absolutely fine having sleepovers at friends houses. Then one night, while I was at one of my friends houses, lying there trying to sleep, I started to think about the story again. It was completely irrelevant, I know it was, but my mind switched onto that whole path, and my brain was caught up replaying everything, and it was just too much. I ended up calling my dad to come pick me up at something like 11 or 12 in the night.
From then onwards, sleep was a big problem for me, and honestly, occasionally, it still is. For years, and this is the embarrassing part, I could not go to my friends houses for sleepovers, and would wake up in the middle of the night to go to my parents bedroom. I still wake up in the night all the time, but that's not really the problem. The problem has always been when I can't fall asleep altogether. I have what I like to call an overactive mind. There are days when my mind cannot calm down, and cannot say "okay, time to go to sleep". Instead, my mind will replay the events of the whole day back in my mind. If I'm not having one of those days, however, I'm out like a bulb in a matter of 2 minutes or less. Because of this, whenever I can't go to sleep, my mind goes into this sort of paranoia. I start to freak out, for really no reason other that I can't fall asleep. I sometimes start to cry. I wonder what's wrong with me, when really nothing is.
The thing with this is that 1. It so unpredictable. This May, I went on a school trip for 3 nights. I was so scared that I would not be able to fall asleep, and then guess what? I was the first to fall asleep of all my friends, and I was also told that I snored. 2. There's not much that you can do about it. It's not insomnia, and I would never want to be taking medication for that sort of thing.
So how do I deal with it? Take a deep breath and relax. If you need to cry, do it. If it makes you feel better it's fine. Don't avoid the situations, because it's only going to make you feel like you've missed out on an experience you would've enjoyed.
That's not where the anxiety ends for me however. Zoom forward. Now, I don't know exactly when this first happened, but towards the end of this last school year, I started to feel extremely nervous. Why? One word. Hyperhidrosis. No, it's not a disease. All it really is, is extreme perspiration, or sweating. I've actually dealt with this for a while, probably for about 4 years now. Now, although I sweat excessively throughout the whole year, summer is the worst. Not only does the heat cause me to sweat more, but the clothes that I wear (T-shirts, etc.) reveal things like sweat marks that make it more visible to the public eye.
When I first started to sweat this much, it wasn't that big of a deal. No one really seemed to notice. Around the sixth grade however, during the winter, I believe, was when I really started to become concerned. I was doing a group project with a few friends, and a girl in my group took a look at me and pointed out that I had huge sweat stains under my armpits, which meant the sweat had soaked through my sweater. I could not see them from the position that I was sitting in, so I got up and went to the washroom, and sure enough there were two huge sweat stains under my armpits. It was so embarrassing, so I quickly took off my sweater and threw it in my bag.
I guess that ever since then, I've been extra careful about what I wear. I only wear certain materials, things that fit me a certain way, and certain colours. But it isn't really my sweaty armpits that bother me, it's my sweaty hands. It's true, I do sweat excessively under my armpits, but a lot of people sweat under their armpits. Nobody that I know, at the moment at least, have sweaty hands, constantly. I can't help it either. It's not triggered by certain activities, or by me "thinking about it", but only randomly. This really had started to affect me, so I decided I had to change it. I went out and bought this product called Drysol. It had this chemical, called aluminum chloride, that worked (over three days for me) to get rid of it. However, it's a thing that you've got to apply every night. It's temporary, not a thing that after used for a certain time will stop it all together. Evetually, although it was helping me, I stopped using it. It was getting a bit too much, especially during the winter time where I found my hands were much too dry, and sometimes even would start bleeding (on the inside).
Once summer came around, I started to use the Drysol again, but this time, it worked differently. The Drysol would instantly dry me out, leaving me with chalky white hands, so I stopped using it altogether. Now, I honestly don't know if this triggered it, or if this was anxiety related, but around the last couple of months of school, I started to get sick a lot. Sometimes colds, sometimes stomach related pain, most of the time the latter. When I received my report card, I saw that I'd missed a total of 17 days of school during the year, and let's just say I was not proud of myself. More importantly, I was hoping my parents wouldn't be mad.
Thank goodness I've had understanding parents, or the past month would have been devastating. On the first day of school, I went, happy, confident, feeling great. And I came home sad, feeling a bit downtrodden, yet for no apparent reason. It was later that night, as I was sitting in my family room, watching TV, alone, since my parents had gone out for a bit, that I experienced my first minor "panic attack". I say minor because I did not feel like I was about to have a heart attack as many people say they do, rather I felt extremely dizzy, my head started to hurt, and I felt my vision sharpen a bit, as it does when I'm sick. I took deep breaths and tried to calm down myself and eventually it worked. I tried to treat it as if nothing had happened but I knew inside me that something truly had.
The next morning I wanted to tell my mom that I thought that I had anxiety problems. That's definitely not something a mother wants to hear, nor is it something she will believe without seeing. That's kind of when I started to freak out. I wanted to go to school, but there was this part of me telling me, you can't do it. You won't do it. It was the negative that I was hearing, and the positive that I wanted to hear was nowhere to be found. I broke down into tears, and I called up my dad and began talking to him. I'm not exaggerating here, all the words that I could get out were "I can't go dad. Please, I can't go." Sure enough, I didn't go.
I'm lucky enough that my own godmother is a doctor, so that night we went to pay her a visit. My mind was still a bit shaken from the morning, but I spoke to her and told her about how I felt. She told me that it was okay, and that it was hormone related. I didn't believe it at first, but then she'd told me that her own daughter, when she was around my age, had gone through the same thing. One morning, she'd just woken up and while sitting in her bedroom, started crying and saying similar things to what I'd said.
The next day, I'd woken up with my mind set on going to school. I was determined on it, but I failed. I let it get to me again.
My first week was a four day week anyways, so I went to school on Friday, and came home for the weekend feeling a bit better. The next week was honestly not much better. I did go to school on Monday, and came home happy again. However, I awoke on Tuesday feeling crappy as ever. Tuesday was possibly one of the worst days of my life. It started off as a bit of a fight. My mom was trying to get me to go, but I was trying to get myself to stay. She made a call to my aunt, who began suggesting maybe I could go to a councillor, which made me feel even more angry, as it made me feel like I had a serious mental problem. It wasn't until my dad came home from work that I started to feel better. He told me something that's really helped me get through the past few weeks, at least until today. He told me to use my mind as a switch. Whenever it starts to wander to something that stresses me out, flick the switch (not literally) and think about something else. Stop thinking about the anger or sadness inside of you and think of all the goods in your life.
Believe it or not, that's worked. Today, once again, however, I started to stress out this morning. You see, I go to a Catholic school, and we do the "peace be with you" thing where we shake each other's hand. For anyone else, it's just a normal thing, but for me it's stressful. The last thing I want is for someone to make a rude remark in front of the whole school about my sweaty hands, and trust me, people have pointed it out before. For me, being at home today was just a way to relax my mind. I'm started up again, like any engine ready to go for tomorrow. I'm a little worried right now, mostly because I don't know how to explain myself to my friends. I'm not ready to tell them about what's been going on, nor do I know how I would explain it. I don't want people to think that the reason I'm not at school is because I don't want to be there or because I just don't feel like going. I want to feel better about myself, and I want to be happy all the time. I'm still not completely back to my old happy self, but I'm working on it.
After reading this extremely long post, you probably want me to get to the point. How do you deal with it?
First of all, don't let it get to you. By that, I mean don't let it get in the way of what you want, or what you love to do.
Second of all, whenever you feel like panic is striking, flick that little switch in your mind. I know it doesn't sound convincing, but it works.
Next, never say no. Use your positives. Instead of saying "no, I can't do it" say "yes, I can do it" or "I'm not sure, but I'm going to try".
Finally, don't let anyone get to you. If you're absent from school or activities, and you don't feel comfortable telling your friends about your situation, say "it's a personal thing" or simply "I didn't feel good". If they ask for more information, tell them that it's something you don't want to talk about right now. Good friends should respect your boundaries.
Okay, well I hope you enjoyed that ever so long post. See you next time,
BlogsWithSarah xx
