REAL TALK, ANXIETY
The one thing that most people don’t know about me, and the thing I hide relentlessly, is my anxiety. I never experienced the feeling of anxiety until about Junior year of college when the projects and homework started to creep up on me and my social life. It was extremely mild at this point, came and went. Senior year it progressed with my fashion show collection and graduation approaching, but again this was manageable. By far the worst my anxiety has ever been was when I first moved to New York City, the combination of leaving home, making new friends, finding a job, money, and looking for housing all seeped into my brain daily. I began to think I was dying every. single. day. For those of you who haven’t experienced anxiety, lucky you, but I promise you will at some point in you life. For me, I figured out my anxiety took the forms of both reactive and traumatic anxiety. Reactive is when you have a constant amount of stress and after a certain point, you brain doesn’t understand how to turn it off or stop these anxious thoughts, it becomes muscle memory to feel this way. The second form, traumatic anxiety, is when an event has occurred and your anxiety acts likes a coping mechanism to protect one’s self. For me this event was when a doctor has misdiagnosed me, and thus from there the anxiety started with physical effects. Anxiety can be felt differently to everyone, it’s either psychological or physiological. Due to this event, for me my anxiety is felt in body pains, its extremely hard to breath, and I literally feel like I’m dying, it’s THE actual worst. For a while, in order to feel better I sought out reassurance that I wasn’t actually dying, for this I began going to the doctor constantly on my lunch breaks at work. Though, this cycle of reassurance was never enough for me. I would feel better temporarily, but it always left me feel empty, as if it would never be enough. Over time you learn what will and won’t work for you, today I turn to various copying methods, for one, training my brain to think differently the moment I feel anxiety coming on. For example, lets say you see a dog, but force yourself into thinking that its not a dog, its actually a cat. Your brain is a muscle, and like the rest of the muscles in your body, you have to train them (muscle memory), this is a slow process, but it does work! I’ve also tried living a healthier life overall, and eliminating the things in my life that may trigger my anxiety. So for me, it’s important that I eat healthy, go easy on the caffeine, work out regularly, get fresh air, meditate, pray daily and talk about how I’m feeling. All of these things, help, but DO take time. Your anxiety will never completely go away, but if you can learn how to keep it to a minimum and cope with it when it comes, that is what’s important. Recently, I’ve began leaning on the Lord to be most efficient for myself, and remembering that anxiety comes from worrying, which comes from fear. We were never created to fear, this simply takes away all the good parts about living. I have learned to try and turn that fear into faith or hope, turning to prayer and leaning on the Lord when I feel anxious, and praise for all the positives in my life. I realize that I am completley a work in progress, but that’s okay. We’re all going to have triggers, and ups and downs in our life, but it’s important to keep in mind all the positives in our lives, what triggers YOUR anxiety, and learning how to turn to help when it’s needed. These are all bigs steps forward towards a life with less fear.
“What time I am afraid, I will put my trust in thee.” Psalms 56
