Years of sporadic Anxiety - I hope someone can relate...

[Metal_Mountainbiker]

This might be a long story, but I feel I need to start at the beginning… I am currently 41 years old. In my 20’s I played guitar for a number of bands and was always an avid user of marijuana. I was always very level headed, controlled and prided myself as someone who was very much in control of his thoughts and emotions.

Somewhere around 10 years ago, I decided to take shrooms with my bandmates. What started out as a mostly pleasant experience ultimately ended with my first panic attack and loads of anxiety. It started as a result of us discussing whether or not we should take more. While I was keen to go for a second dose, everyone else decided against it, and in that moment, in my altered state of awareness, I started to convince myself that the reason I wanted more was because I was now somehow hooked and that this new addiction was going to be the end of my life as I knew it… I had 3 kids at that stage, and I started to imagine how I would have to be locked up in some asylum and that I would never see them again. It was terrifying and depressing at the same time. I started to feel really hot, my heart started to pound, my mouth got extremely dry and the pizza we had just started eating became impossible for me to swallow. I became very quiet and my mates started to notice… I told them I wasn’t feeling so good, but didn’t want to go into too much detail as I thought they might think I was losing my mind… which is exactly how I felt. After the worst of the panic attack was over, I managed to share a little more and my friends who had more experience with psychedelics suggested that I simply had a “bad trip” and that this sort of thing happens and that it was normal. While I felt slightly relieved, I was left with an overwhelming sense of anxiety for a number of days after the experience. After this experience I vowed to never take any psychedelics ever again, but I did however continue smoking weed… that is until…

A couple of years later I had myself another joint before going to be and out of nowhere I got hit by my second panic attack. While the attack itself was not as bad as the first, the resulting anxiety was way worse. I couldn’t understand how something I had been doing for more than 10 years could suddenly start to cause these kinds of problems. My mind started to follow really dark and negative thought patterns and the more I thought them the deeper down the rabbit hole I went, so much so that on occasion I even experienced some panic attacks completely sober and that really started to rock me. I started to feel like I was going crazy and that I was going to live out the rest of my life like this… a shell of my former self. At this point I stopped smoking weed, I mostly stopped going out and drinking… I became pretty quiet and reserved, I constantly felt like there was a weight hanging over me like a dark cloud and I thought I would never see light again.

I’ve never really been keen on therapy and the like, so I decided to start doing some research online, and see if I could find other people who’ve had similar experiences and try to figure out what was going on with me and this proved to be very helpful. Up until this point I’d heard of the term “panic attack” and “anxiety”, but I didn’t really know what they were. Now I was at least able to put a name to these feelings I’d been experiencing. This, along with realizing that there are millions of people around the world suffering the same symptoms, seemed to bring me a lot of comfort and help me see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Now that I knew what was happening to me, I started looking for solutions and treatments to help get me out of this hole. I consumed as much media concerning anxiety as I could in the form of videos, blogs, books and audiobooks… Slowly but surely I started to feel my overall mood and outlook on life start to improve. From that first panic attack up to this point was probably five years, which is a long time to live in the dark… Its is now around 5 years later still and while I generally feel better, I never really feel free of it. I have good days and bad days, good weeks, bad weeks… sometimes I’ll even have months that go by that I feel great, but these feelings of worry and anxiety that I might end up in a psych ward always seem to come back eventually. I always find myself having to “top up” every couple of months, do some more research, read or re-read some books that helped me in the past, just to help re-center myself. I have made a great deal of changes in my life to try and combat these feelings and make sure that I stay solid and healthy for my family “and now 4 kids”… I don’t take any substances, I pretty much don't drink at all anymore apart from the occasional beer, I do a ton of exercise (crossfit, mountain biking and I even started roller hockey). So, in closing… overall this entire experience over the last 10 years, while horrific at times, has ultimately caused me to make many positive changes in my life, but even after all that I still have to do the occasional “top ups”... I’ve tried over the years explaining all of this to my wife and eventually some of my kids as they’ve grown older, and while they try to support me as much as they can, ultimately, they still don't really understand what I’m going through.

So, here I am… the last 2 days have had my mind reeling again for no apparent reason, and I thought this time, instead of just doing some research or reading/listening to a book or watching a video… I’ll try to reach out and see if there are any others who can relate to my story, or perhaps there are others out there who can benefit from it

[designguy]

I never liked smoking weed because it always made my anxiety worse. I had high-functioning anxiety disorder for years and then started having panic attacks. I sought therapy and even medication but continued to have it. What really started helping me was learning what anxiety really is and how to constructively deal with it. We have been taught and conditioned to fear the anxious thoughts and feelings but all that does is perpetuate them. the reality is that anxiety is our body's built-in warning system malfunctioning and we need to learn how to reset it and desensitize ourself from it and noe longer fear the anxious thoughts and sensations.

Learning what it really is and how to constructively deal with it is the key to healing. I found the DARE Anxiety book and youtube videos to be very helpful and easy to understand. They also have a good facebook group.