Nervous in quiet spaces

[SassyNugg3ts]

I am not on antidepressants first and foremost, or any medication for my mental health. I have not considered taking any after experiencing constant panic attacks and being unable to contact my doctor during this time.

I can be working a normal day shift, busy busy, but as soon as I have my lunch in the silence I can feel my anxiety peak. "I could scream right now? What if I screamed right now? It's going to happen you're going to do it", just a horrible obsessive thought I'll shake loose before it'll creep up minutes later. I can be going into the cinema with my boyfriend, but as soon as the lights go down the same thoughts arise "What if I vomit? What if I make a random noise? What if I should and I can't help it?". I feel like I'm always on edge of my body acting involuntarily.

I'm type one diabetic so I'm not sure if constantly being attuned to my body affects how I anticipate what's going to happen, for example low or high blood sugar. Maybe I'm just feeling out for symptoms constantly, and the cold sweats I get I'm seeing as a panic attack?

In any situation where I can't run from easily, I get obsessive intrusive thoughts and I hate it.

Any pointers?

Thanks,

Holly

[bbanxiety]

Ah the obsessions! Yes, they're ridiculous in their nature and seem even more ridiculous when you try to pull them apart.

Something I've read up a lot on as well as found true in myself is what I'm actually worried or afraid of happening. As you said in your post, whilst you're running around working and keeping busy, these intrusive thoughts don't happen as much. That's a very telling thing about your obsessions.

Obsessions aren't inherently tied into fears about your surroundings, like you said about thinking "what if I vomit at the cinema!". Anxiety and obsessions actually have their root in you. What I mean by this is that you're not fearful of the environment, but rather what the environment represents. To you the environment represents a platform for you to maybe embarrass yourself or to look stupid in front of others. That's a really key thing to understand.

A personal example I can give you is a friend of mine. As soon as her family leave for the day she will clean the house from top to bottom and won't stop until they return. But something she never noticed whilst we were talking this through is that she will immediately stop when they return. After discussing it further she slowly came to the realisation that she wasn't concerned with the tidiness of the house, she was worried about being alone as to her it represented the "what if's" of something happening to her whilst she was alone, so that was the obsession and the compulsion was the cleaning.

So how do you go about fixing this. Well for one, understanding of the nature of intrusive thoughts is deeply powerful. There was a study conducted in 1978 by S Rachman and P De Silva called 'Normal and Abnormal Obsessions'. They took two groups of people, the one group had been diagnosed with OCD and the second group did not have OCD/anxiety/depression. When they asked the individuals in both groups about their intrusive thoughts and compiled the data, they showed various groupings of lists to their colleagues who were doctors, psychiatrists, therapists and other mental health professionals. Not one of them could pick apart the lists and separate from who had OCD and who didn't. So that brings comfort in knowing that every human being on the planet, whether they like it or not experience obsessions and intrusive thoughts.

The second would be understanding what your OCD represents to you and working through that process. There are many books that help with this that allow you to structure your approach to your obsessions.

My main way of dealing with this is acceptance. I know, it sounds so easy and also ineffective but hear me out. You've spent a lot of time wondering about "what if's" and it hasn't brought you to an answer and it's not likely to, because OCD will then try to throw another curve ball at you.

Accept your thoughts as unreasonable and allow them to float in and out, the difference between OCD sufferers and people who don't suffer with OCD is that meaning we apply to these thoughts, we give them so much weight and power that they become perfectly reasonable concerns in our head, but they are not.

Let them float in and out, the more effort to try to work them out and to resolve the thought, the further you're getting away from being free from the thought.