Have you been able to be open and honest about your anxiety to your friends and family? Or are you in the “putting on a brave face” mode?
There are some very strong motivations for not acknowledging your anxiety to others. Firstly, you are Continue reading “Acknowledging Your Anxiety to Others”
A common struggle for anxiety sufferers during recovery is the seemingly constant cycle between what are felt as good and bad days. To add to the bewilderment, there is Continue reading “Good Days and Bad Days”
Anxiety causes extreme tiredness or exhaustion. It is a fatigue that can almost completely immobilize us, and has been described as “a tiredness beyond tiredness”. It seems to weigh heavily on us, and we may feel like we’ve been drugged.
So why is this extreme tiredness or exhaustion so Continue reading “Extreme Tiredness or Exhaustion”
The anxiety experience is very much like going through repeated grieving cycles. I remember noticing the familiar patterns with my anxiety. I would experience a significant “episode” and over the next few days go through a very predictable sequence of emotions – an anxiety grief cycle. Naturally I hated each of these emotions, and just wanted to get back to “normal”.
The first of these emotions was Continue reading “The Anxiety Grief Cycle”
I noticed during my recovery that whenever I had some peace I seemed to almost sabotage it at some point with my thinking. It was almost as if I preferred to be anxious than at peace, and created my own anxiety.
This made no sense to me, and it took me a while to come to grips with it. I did this by Continue reading “Creating Your Own Anxiety”
Could our suffering be the result of how we react to our pain/discomfort rather than the pain itself? I believe so.
And if that is the case, then even when the symptoms are horrendous, our actual suffering would remain bearable if we surrendered instead of resisting. Continue reading “When We Stop Struggling, We Stop Suffering”
It is never the case that we are either fully accepting, or not accepting at all. There are degrees of acceptance.
Initially in the anxiety state, we are pretty close to zero on the acceptance scale. We refuse to accept our symptoms and fight them with all our might. We just want them to leave right away and never come back. We don’t want to experience them for another second, and cannot imagine ever developing acceptance for them. Continue reading “Acceptance vs. Putting Up With (Resignation)”
Here is a piece I wrote a few years ago during my recovery journey on “facing” the anxiety. It was a situation where I gained a deep, deep insight into what the act of facing was all about. Hopefully, it helps to illustrate what “facing” looks like from the inside. Continue reading “Facing Anxiety”
Indecision is a symptom of the anxiety state. It can have a major impact on our life. We may struggle with whether to go to a party, or go on a trip. We may wonder whether Continue reading “Indecision”
There are many layers to acceptance, and we won’t master it in a day or a week. But we can get better at it quite quickly. The very first thing to know about the art of accepting is that we must give up our perfectionism. Continue reading “The Art of Accepting”
