The Loop Of Peaking Anxiety

I sit here today laughing at the years I spent trapped in this loop of high anxiety and panic, but at the same time I know that I could have saved years of my life if I had been educated earlier. Fear was not going to dictate my life. Fear is an emotion, not a medical condition. This is where I feel a lot of the problems lie in terms of anxiety becoming out of hand for a lot of people. Many people feel that the common referral processes, combined with an overloaded demand for access to services, can often lead to misdiagnosis, mistreatment and a lack of time assessing the individual and their needs. We often spend a lot of time scanning ourselves to see if we’re ok, but with drugs altering our current state of mind they can often end up causing the opposite of the intended outcome. Ultimately, it heightens our sense of losing control. Anxiety is not depression. Anxiety can only lead to depression over time, or when someone has accepted that their future lies in the hands of solely feeling a certain way. The answer to conquering your anxiety is pretty simple but has overwhelming results. All I ask of you is to ask yourself Do I have all of these separate problems?’, or is it simply the question Do I have an anxiety problem? Why am I panicking and where did this come from? Constant overwhelming anxiety, quite unsurprisingly, is caused by the sufferer getting into a habit of too much worry. Over time excessive and continual worry creates a chemical imbalance within our bodies causing constant, unmeasured amounts of adrenaline and other chemicals to be released into our systems.

Believe Me

It’s important to explain that quite often our biggest worry during these times is the constant awareness of feeling different from our usual selves and in a lot of cases feeling a detachment from our surroundings. This is called entering states of depersonalisation and derealisation. These symptoms can be extremely discomforting and can often leave us feeling frightened. These chemicals are primarily responsible for leading us into episodes of extreme panic, hypersensitivity, lucid derealisation and triggering concern about other physical symptoms. Adrenaline isn’t a chemical to be feared however, it just needs to be understood. It’s easy to become overly aware of our anxiety, our panic and how different we currently feel from our usual selves. I realise that up to now there’s a lot to take in, so let’s break it down. Poor thought patterns and a bad behavioral routine cause the body to release excessive amounts of adrenaline. Adrenaline causes various changes within our bodies and eventually causes a chemical imbalance. Adrenaline and hypersensitivity can cause us to experience episodes of depersonalisation and derealisation. We begin to panic about why we feel the way we do. It may sound unmeasured, but all you need to know is that you have an anxiety problem.

Good Times Bad Times

Or to put it in other words, you’re failing to understand and accept what adrenaline is doing to your body. It is a normal bodily chemical that helps us function as human beings by triggering our ’fight or flight’ response. Instead of our days being normal they can turn into prolonged battles against our own mind and body which is nothing short of exhausting. This could have started by worrying about personal and subjective issues, or triggered by a life event causing a traumatic effect on the body. When these worries aren’t dealt with or solved, they then unknowingly accumulate on top of one another causing the sufferer to reach their peak in terms of being in an anxious state. The next section goes into this in more detail. A pretty grounded person would be intelligent enough to work out these feelings and emotions themselves, so why not do just that? No, this would be a colossal error. It’s a common trap for many people when acknowledging something is wrong to then attempt to use seemingly harmless logic to try to ’solve’ the anxiety problem. Another common trap is to simply wait for the feelings to go away. Except that ‘working it out’ is just another worry added onto a giant smorgasbord of worries that we previously had. Panic then sets in because we have waited more than enough time for these feelings to disappear, but alas they linger and appear to become stronger than ever! Then, to make things even more complicated, the physical symptoms that come hand in hand with worry start to appear. The headaches, stomach cramps, reality distortion, racing heart beats, shortness of breath, dizziness and sweating to name a mere few.

A Habit Of Leaving

What an even greater mess! To put it simply, our anxiety is caused by a simple imbalance in the body caused by continuous stress or trauma. Adrenaline and other chemicals are released in disproportionate amounts causing us to feel strange and hypersensitive to aches, pains, other bodily changes and what’s happening in our environment. However, as many of us are unaware of this, we are stuck worrying and questioning the way we feel and why we feel so scared. We become victims to our own hypersensitivity. It is a condition that reveals its true colours over time and is often only consciously identifiable at it’s high peak. This means that the working cogs of your anxiety condition were put into motion at some point in the past and it is only now that you are aware that something is wrong because your anxiety is peaking. These symptoms can be ever present, they can also come and go, or they can be completely new to the sufferer as a result of a stressful week. Note that even a high level of anxiety is normal, but when our anxiety exceeds this we are at risk of being struck with panic. Unfortunately, it is common for many anxiety victims to be stuck fluctuating between high anxiety and panic, with the result being a traumatic loop effect.