Everyone experiences anxiety – it is a natural emotion. In most cases it serves a valuable purpose in preparing us to respond to a threat. But it can also get significantly “out of whack”. This happens when the levels of our anxiety become excessive, when we react to anxiety with fear, or when the anxiety doesn’t fade when the anxiety-provoking situation is over. In this case we can enter the anxiety state, where we become highly sensitized, bewildered and fearful.
The Anxiety State
The anxiety state is when we have become so sensitized to any thoughts or feelings of anxiety that we react with fear. This causes more anxiety, and things ramp up and can spiral completely out of control. Our experiences can be so unpleasant that we become fearful of anxiety symptoms returning. As a result of this, we become constantly vigilant and on guard for them, ready in an instant to try to fight them off or suppress them the moment they appear.
If you are in the anxiety state, you are likely experiencing some of the following things:
- Frequent or perhaps almost constant anxiousness;
- Fear of your anxiety, its symptoms, and circumstances that might trigger it;
- Distress about the state you are in;
- Hopelessness about what to do about it;
- A desperate desire to find an end to your suffering;
- A wish to return to who you were and how your life was before anxiety;
- Bewilderment, with lots and lots of questions about anxiety and how & why you got into this state;
- A belief that no-one else has had it this bad, and that you are in serious trouble;
- Shame and embarrassment that you entered this state, and that you can’t get out of it;
- Worry that you will never get better;
- Fear that you may be going crazy;
- Feeling that your life is completely falling apart.
Anxiety Takes Over Our Lives
All of this causes us to get locked in the anxiety state, suffering highly unpleasant even horrible symptoms. Anything we really dislike or fear tends to become the focus of our anxiety, and our thought and fears revolve around one or maybe a few key symptoms. These vary widely from person to person, but the effect is the same, and the thinking is the same.
Anxiety becomes the central focus of almost everything we do. It takes over our lives, and makes us thoroughly miserable and depressed. We desperately want to get out of the anxiety state, but nothing seems to work. So, we do the only thing we can think of which is to fight harder, but this only drags us down deeper. We are stuck!
We wonder why we ended up in this state, and try to work out how we got here, with the hope that maybe we can figure out how to get out. But our thoughts just seem to go round and round in circles. We don’t find any answers, and we ultimately end up back where we started.
You Are NOT Alone
Anxiety is a health issue for about 18% or 1 person in 6 in the United States and the UK in any given year, and I am sure similar levels occur worldwide. We tend not to realize how common it is, since most of us tend to hide it because of our shame. We become very good at looking like we have it all together, even when we are suffering at our worst.
Anxiety may be continuous, or occur in episodes. Some people have experienced anxiety for their whole lives, while others were apparently anxiety free until they had an onset of severe anxiety out of the blue, or that was triggered by a stressful life event.
The truth is, it really doesn’t matter how or why anxiety became an issue, the thought patterns are the same, and the way to recover is the same.
The first thing is to understand How Anxiety Works.