When anxiety strikes first time it leaves us bewildered. We suspect it's our nerves but what about all these physical symptoms? Our stomach starts playing up, our heart beats irregular, strange visual symptoms occur, death feels imminant, all sorts of aches and pains appear from nowhere - and maybeworst of all we experience attacks of panic. Surely this is more than anxiety, we reason, it must be something serious: heart disease and cancer soon come to mind.
So we go see our doctor, always a good thing to do, and he sends us for some tests or to see a specialist, and back comes the verdict: everything's fine. Of course it does, there's no blood test for anxiety, stress doesn't show up on scans and nervous tension can't be seen on an x-ray. What would be good news for most people only causes more bewilderment to us. We think the doctor's have got it wrong and we know better, so the search goes on usually resulting in a disturbing appointment with Doctor Google.
We're in unknown territory and before long we're frightening ourself half to death: the search goes on for a cure to an illness we don't have. I've been on this forum for a good 6 months now and of all the hundreds of people who have passed our way I can only think of 2 whose symptoms turned out to be from physical illness.
So for the possible benefit of newcomers and with apologies to anyone who has read one of my posts before I'll repeat how anxiety comes to pass. The knowledge won't provide an instant cure but it can provide reassurance and understanding and can help point us in the direction of recovery. Because make no mistake, there is a cure for anxiety disorder as thousands can testify.
You first experience anxiety after a period of stress, disappoitment, overwork and worry that becomes overwhelming. So our nervous system, that transmits messages from the brain to every part of out bodies, becomes over sensitised. In this state it starts to misfire sending out strange messages that we then equate with genuine physical illness. Only these symptoms aren't genuine illness, they are blips from our over sensitised nerves and they trick us into believing we have some serious organic problem. Anxiety is a real shape shifter: it can imitate almost any ailment you care to mention. But unlike the real thing, the symptoms of anxiety can't kill you, disable you or send you mad. They can only frighten the life out of us, make us miserable and make us feel depressed. Life as we knew it appears to be over. Then the fear starts to take control, it causes more symptoms which cause more fear which cause more symptoms etc etc. We become caught up in a vicious circle from which there appears to be no escape.
Only there is an escape. If we can break the fear-symptoms-fear vicious circle which fuels our over sensitised nervous systems then eventually our nerves become pacified and we recover our peace of mind and good mental health.
The key to recovery is to turn down the volume on the fear we generate that perpetuates all those symptoms and bad feelings we hate. Nobody free from fear suffers from anxiety disorder for long. So how do we control those fearful feelings that are the root of our misery? That's another story but you'll find the answers on this forum. So if you didn't know it before you know it now, there is light at the end of the tunnel even though sometimes it feels like a b***dy long tunnel and you can recover no matter how bad or how long you have suffered.Of this I assure you.
