Anxiety isn’t just feeling nervous. Like before or during a test. Going for an audition, attending a new school.
It is a disorder. Something much more complicated than nerves. It is the thoughts, the physical symptoms, the emotional draining, the feeling of your heart rate increasing by the second, the gradual feeling of your legs giving up on you and the constant worries consuming you in your head to the extent you feel as if you’re going insane.
I often get told things like:
1.“You’ll be okay.”
In the moment i’m having an anxiety attack and someone tells me that, not only does it give me no reassurance at all, but I will not believe you. Because in the moment I am not okay and know it will happen again.
2.“You’re just nervous”
i’m not ‘just nervous.’ I’m fidgeting, I’m breathing irregularly, I’m crying, shaking, my heart rate is increasing, I’m feeling lightheaded etc, and completely clueless and with no control over what to do about it.
3.“This isn’t normal, you need to get over it”
Not only is it a common disorder in adolescents, making the ‘not normal’ statement completely incorrect, but I can’t just ‘get over it.’ This is a disorder, not a high school break up. It’s like telling a smoker to stop smoking. It’s not easy and won’t just ‘happen.’
4.“Stop worrying.”
Believe me, if i could stop worrying i would in a heartbeat. But lets not forget the fact that anxiety isn’t something you can control. So no matter how hard I attempt to terminate the worrying, it won’t happen in the moment you tell me to ‘stop worrying.’
The list goes on, but my point is that unless you’re encountering this experience yourself, you won’t understand how it feels like to be in such a position. I just wish people were to have more empathy with this. I don’t want to have to say “i’m okay” when i’m clearly not for the sake of not being told those things I’ve listed and that I'm crazy
Written by
miasouth4
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As I've said here before, anxiety takes many forms but it ia always still anxiety. We on this forum know exactly what you're saying, people who have never experienced anxiety disorder don't know what to say so they come out with the usual platitudes. Forgive them, they're just trying to be helpful within the limits of their ignorance on this subject.
But you know, miasouth4, without them knowing it they're right in a way. Whatever the symptoms, and the ones you mention are all classic anxiety symptoms, whatever they are they are NOT going to kill you, you are NOT going crazy, you WILL get over it. Because jangled nerves do not have the power to do those things to you. Jangled nerves are very good at mimicing the symptoms of heart disease, cancer, stroke, you name it. But they cannot damage your body and your organs.
So what's the best way to find your way out of the maze of anxiety disorder? The answer is through understanding what's happening to you and then taking remedial action that has worked for so many others. Although we can't switch the worry and fear off like a tap we have to find away to stop frightening ourselves half to death every five minutes. Because by constantly bombarding our over sensitised nervous system with fear a dozen times a day we're providing it with the fuel that maintains that sensitivity. Symptoms bring fear which brings more symptoms which brings more fear which brings...you get the idea, we're in a vicious circle and until we break it our over sensitised nerves will never recover and neither will we.
The way out is to do the opposite of what we've been doing so far. Stop fighting the bad feelings, fighting only causes more tension. Practice accepting them for the time being, we still feel bad but we now know what has happened to us and we know the limitations of anxiety, it's not life threatening, the symptoms are fraudulent because they're not real in the physical sense, the understanding of what's happened to us ends our bewilderment. If we can learn to accept the bad feelings without adding more fear, by accepting the bad feelings for the moment, then eventually our stressed nervous system will lose its sensitivity and when that happens we will begin to feel normal again.
But it's not a quick fix, learning to accept all the symptoms our frazzled nerves throw at us takes a lot of practice and much perseverance. To begin with maybe we can only manage Acceptance for a minute or so or maybe just five minutes. This is called glimpsing, holding in our mind for a moment what we will eventually build up into a permanant state of mind based on Acceptance.
I know of no other method for recovery that has healed so many thousands during the ladt 40 years including so many on this forum. So I commend Acceptance to you as the way out of the labyrinth you find yourself in and like those other well meaning souls who have told you "You'll be o.k." I too tell you "You'll be o.k." but unlike them I have indicated how.
miasouth4, I understand what you mean when hearing advice from people who don't have a clue as to what anxiety disorder feels like. It always made me feel very uncomfortable as well as embarrassed over the fact that I had a chronic disorder that others couldn't see and so to them it didn't exist.
With Jeff1943, you know what he is saying has come from the experience he had over the years and how he came to overcome it through knowledge and acceptance.
Stay with the forum and take all the positive advice with you. One day you will be standing on the other side of the fence supporting others. We all care. x
My biggest gripe is when a friend relates some awkward situation she's been through & says in a jolly voice "and then I had a panic attack"! Well, no, you didn't------
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Anyone else? 
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