A friend of mine messaged me the other day to ask for my advice. This blog post is based off of my response to her.
"I have been struggling with anxiety for a long time. I feel like I work a lot and it's like, where's my credit?" she wrote to me.
For those of you who are not familiar with this blog, I write a lot about how I overcame anxiety. Topics I cover include how to de-stress, socializing checklist, getting yourself motivated and dealing with stress, dealing with stress in school, quick fixes to anxiety, dealing with negative emotions, and enjoying it all.
I also have a step-by-step anxiety workshop.
If you want to read about my background with overcoming anxiety, you can find it here.
I felt very passionate about responding to her, because I know exactly how she feels.
Side note- I interchangeably use anxiety and stress because I feel that both words can be used in this context, which is ultimately describing an idea that bot stress and anxiety are found.
First, I explained to her the difference between healthy and unhealthy anxiety. Anxiety is a form of stress, which has positive and negative effects on us. Healthy anxiety is the anxiety we experience when studying for an exam, stopping ourselves from doing something dangerous, and feel overwhelmed about balancing our hectic lives. It helps us to focus, stay motivated, and thoroughly think through major decisions that we have to make. Unhealthy anxiety is when our healthy anxiety gets out of bounds. It may take the form of procrastination, an abnormal amount of fear experienced on a regular basis (it becomes the norm to feel fear, even when there is nothing specific inducing it- like an exam or presentation), or the feeling of being "paralyzed" (in the sense of not being able to make a decision, or feeling like you can't dig yourself out of a pit).
So before you start diagnosing yourself, make sure you have something to be worried about. Don't try to fight off the healthy anxiety- this is your body telling you that it's supporting you through stressful times and it's helping you muster up the strength to succeed.
This also leads me to my second point. A lot of times when someone is trying to explain to me how his/her anxiety makes him/her feel, s/he will tell me that s/he often feels depressed.
Let us make a distinction between being depressed and being sad/unhappy.
Depression is when someone feels consistently sad, even when there is no trigger for feeling sad. On the other hand, sadness is felt in response to a trigger- not doing well on an exam, losing somebody you love, or simply having a bad day. Feeling sad may go hand-in-hand with anxiety for some people. In my friends case, she starts to feel a deep unhappiness when she experiences a great amount of anxiety. However, this does not make her depressed. She is a happy, social person who (understandably) feels sad when she feels anxious.
So . . .
Point 1: Treat stress like your friend. Understand that it is helping you, not trying to overcome you. Side note- Studies actually show that people who think of stress as negative, ar more likely to die earlier. Those who think of stress as positive and understand that it is their body helping them succeed, live longer, healthier, and happier lives.
Point 2: Nothing is worth your health. NOTHING.
Believe it or not, stress directly affects our health. Like I wrote above, stress has the ability to shorten lives. It was actually while writing this blog post the other day (I am finishing it now) while sitting in my public health course, that my professor told the class about how several years ago he had been diagnosed with cancer and with only 6 months left to live. By changing his lifestyle, he was able to defy the expected. He wrote the word "stress" in big letter on the board. "Don't let it get out of hand." A girl then raised her hand and said that through changing her lifestyle she was able to get rid of hyperthyroidism that she was diagnosed with several years earlier. These are only two instances and there were definitely other factors that played into their outcomes, but science shows that stress can have extremely negative effects, and that learning to control it can change your future for the better.
Point 3: It takes time.
Now I am really responding to her initial message. She was upset that the techniques I told her to use a few weeks ago, were not helping. My advice to her was to give it time. I didn't wake up one morning and notice that I didn't feel the usual anxiety I felt for no real reason. There were so many experiences I had to live through in order to overcome it. Looking back, it did sometimes feel like it was taking forever to start leading a happier life, but I now know that if not for all that time it took, I wouldn't be as strong as I am now. There were techniques and lessons that I could only learn in the time to come. If my change was drastic, I probably would've bounced back to my anxiety-stricken life because I didn't really have the skills and experience to cope with situations that brought me anxiety, and to thoroughly get rid of the chronic anxiety that had been interfering wth my life. So if anything, be happy that you have the time to deal with it. I know this sounds stupid, but seriously (and really, I mean seriously) overcoming it and watching yourself grow is one of the best parts of it all. And then when you have experiences in the future that remind you of just how much you were able to work on yourself, you will feel a unique happiness that many other people wouldn't understand. Now that I am in this stage of my life, I realize that I feel happy about small things and appreciate friends and life more, because I know what its like to not be able to make friends or enjoy life fully because of the constant anxiety that was penetrating my life.
Thanks for reading. I hope this helps.