Constant State of Anxiety

[ns3005]

Hi there,

I’ve been struggling with sever anxiety since March this year. It literally happened one day, had such a bad panic attack, ended up calling an ambulance. Since then I’ve not been myself... I’m constantly measuring my heart rate and what not else and even though 4 ecg’s, MRI and blood tests came out clean it still dreading that I’m going to collapse at anytime!

I feel lightheaded, chest pain, tightness in throat, left arm and leg numbness, fatigue and palpitations!

Been going to acupuncture for the last 2 months which has helped, but still not over it... reading all of the posts has made me feel reassured that I’m not going mad!

What are your best ways of dealing with this dreaded issue? Can’t seem to focus on anything at the moment...

[Anthonysnervous7]

I have this same issue when my anxiety gets real bad I’ve been a wreck message me sometime

[Jeff1943]

ns3005, all the symptoms you describe are familiar symptoms of anxiety and as you've had a number of medical tests which found nothing physically wrong you can be certain this is indeed anxiety disorder.

For some reason your nerves have become highly sensitive: this may be due to stress, worry, over work or disappointment. If you can identify the cause then you should do everything possible to protect yourself, you must put yourself first and be ruthless in doing so.

First stop worrying that you're going to collapse, although anxiety is very good a playing tricks on you and imitating real physical illness its power is limited. You aren't going to die or become disabled or lose your mind: this is just anxiety exaggerating your fears and making you expect the worst of everything.

Anxiety disorder does not go away on its own, you must take control of your road to recovery and this can include medication, talking therapy and self-help methods.

If at any time your anxiety appears overwhelming then the right thing to do is to ask for a limited course of medications from your doctor to give yourself respite. But meds of course can't bring you recovery, only temporary relief.

What's happening is that when you get these upsetting feelings you react with a flash of fear and you start fighting it. This flash of fear floods your nervous system with fear hormones which trigger more symptoms causing more fear causing more symptoms causing more fear in a vicious circle. Recovery depends on breaking this vicious circle and the best way of doing this is to do the oposite to what you're doing now.

That means stop fighting your anxiety which only causes more strain and stress, your nerves need less not more of those.

Instead of fighting it, accept it instead: surrender to it, run up the white flag and frame your mind to co-exist with the symptoms of your anxiety. Do this calmly and with the minimum of second fear. After all, what good has fighting done you?

So I repeat: accept all your symptoms for the time being, when they come feel every muscle in your body go limp, you see you cannot both accept and fear them at the same time. These symptoms are fake hiccups in your overtaxed and over sensitive nervous system, why frighten yourself half to death over over a hiccup or glitch in your nervous circuitry.

Stop testing your pulse every few minutes, pay less importance and attention to your symptoms: too much introspection is bad.

And do you know what happens then, after an undefined period of time your nerves become sensitive no longer, you have stopped threshing them with fear, the symptoms disperse and you recover your quiet mind.

As someone said here recently: everything will be alright in the end, and if it isn't then it isn't the end.