Today I’m going to talk about what anxiety feels like to me and how it manifests. For me anxiety feels like it’s a rope that’s tied around my waist and holds me back. There are many things I’d love to experience, but fear often stops me from actually doing them.
Physical Anxiety:
For me I can physically feel the anxiety coming and my hands start to shake. That’s usually the first indication that I’m anxious about something or that I’m about to have an anxiety attack. There are other physical symptoms I have had in the past as well. I’ve had a faster heart rate on multiple occasions. There have been times that I’ve felt light headed like I was going to pass out. Have I had other symptoms yes, but the 3 listed are usually the more prominent ones. Something that I’ve found that works to help alleviate the anxiety and bring my body back to feeling normal is box breathing.
Box Breathing:
Box breathing is a deep breathing exercise where you breath in for 4 seconds, hold for 4, breathe out 4 seconds and hold for 4 again. While doing it, close your eyes and as you are counting imagine yourself travelling across the sides of the box. I usually do this for about 3 to 5 minutes and my anxiety lowers significantly. Don’t worry if you can’t do 4 seconds, work your way up first, try 2 or 3 seconds and eventually you’ll be able to do it! It’s a simple exercise but I find it works wonders when I’m really anxious. I do this every night before bed now as well. At first, I was skeptical of box breathing and that it wouldn’t work. The first time I did it I noticed that I slept really good for once and I only woke up once in the middle of the night instead of the 3 to 4 times I normally do. I didn’t think it was the breathing at first so I had told myself, I’ll try it again tonight and see what happens. To my amazement my sleep was again really good and I had only woken up once and I’m pretty sure I fell back asleep immediately. Thinking that I was just less stressed than usual I opted to not do the breathing the third night and I noticed that overnight I was once again waking up multiple times and, in the morning, I was feeling really tired. Having a good night sleep wasn’t just good because I was waking up feeling refreshed but sleeping well also helps reduce anxiety. I was finding that I had more time to be myself and less time feeling anxious about every little thing. This is the Youtube video I watch every night right before bed.
Emotional Anxiety:
Anxiety isn’t just physical for me; I’ve found that it also emotionally drains me. By the end of the day, I’m so tired yet I don’t sleep well. My brain feels like its mush by the time I get into bed. I think a big part of it is because I spend all day worrying and when I go to bed and its just me and my thoughts, I do the exact same thing and start worrying about new things or if something is coming up in the following days, I’ll feel anxious about that.
Living with Anxiety:
Personally, I didn’t really open up about how bad my anxiety really was. I think I was in denial that it was affecting my life and that I could just ignore it and it would go away. I tried a couple times to tell friends and family about my anxiety but like most people, I couldn’t find the words to actually explain what it was that I was feeling. I was usually met with similar responses of “Its just anxiety everyone has it” or “Its just in your head you’ll be fine”. There’s nothing more hurtful for me than opening up to someone for them to disregard how I’m feeling and tell me that its nothing to worry about. Maybe the reason for my anxiety was small or not important but for me that wasn’t the point. I was anxious, I couldn’t think clearly and honestly It felt like I couldn’t breathe.
Journaling:
I’ve recently taken up journaling, if you don’t write I highly recommend it especially if your anxiety is really bad. I’m not the best at explaining how I feel or even just explaining things in general. Since I’ve taken up writing a journal, I’ve noticed that everything I’m feeling its so much easier to put those feelings into words on a piece of paper than to say it. Journaling is sort of a two-step healing process and what I mean by this is, getting my thoughts and emotions onto paper make it very easy to reread and think about what it is that I’m going through. I’ve found that after reading some of the things I’m writing down that the things I’m anxious about really aren’t that big a deal. Getting the thoughts out of my head and seeing them in front of me really puts in perspective what it is that I’m freaking out about. For example, the other day I was stressing out that a friend told me he was going to come pick me up in the afternoon on the weekend and take me out. He didn’t tell me where we were going or what we were going to do. Obviously, I was anxious since he had given me a few days’ notice. But after writing down that it was making me anxious, I thought to myself. This friend has picked me up many times before, he’s never once put me in a position where we went somewhere I would be uncomfortable with or somewhere that he knows I wouldn’t want to go to. It gave me a new perspective, odds that where ever we were going to go it was going to be something I was familiar with or that I would be fine with. We ended up going to get coffee from a new coffee place nearby and then headed out for a late lunch at a new spot that he had wanted to try. Looking back at it, I worked myself up thinking it was going to be terrible and he was going to bring me somewhere that I would have freaked out about but in reality, there was no real reason to believe that would have been the case. This friend has never done that to me and if we do go somewhere where he is unsure, he always asks first.
The two coping strategies I use I highly recommend if you aren’t doing these, please at least try. Even if it’s not box breathing, you can always try any other breathing technique. I find that actually writing in a journal using pen and paper helps me. I know some people who use the notes app to just write out their thoughts. I used to use the journal app on my phone at the end of the day just before bed. For me typing it helped a bit but compared to pen and paper it’s a night and day difference.
Thank you for reading and if you have any other coping strategies please leave a comment below. I’ll give it a go and let you know what I think.