Anxiety Girl!

I have anxiety.  I didn't have anxiety (or at least it didn't affect me in any real way) until I became a teacher.  During my second year of teaching, I would lie awake in bed at night (I shared a room with my best friend because we could afford a super cute condo with another friend that way) and my heart would race and race.  I was terrified that I was having a heart attack at 23 years old.  I went to my PCP at the time and was sent to a cardiologist, etc, etc.  I was fit as a fiddle (well, as fit as you can be toting around an extra 5th grader's worth of weight).  My heart was great.  Everything looked good.  We discussed my symptoms again and...he suggested it might be anxiety.

When my parents divorced when I was 17, I had gone to see a therapist a few times, mostly because my wonderfully caring mother wanted to make sure there was someone unbiased I could talk to about everything.  It was a positive experience, but I've never felt that I have a lot of lasting concerns/effects from their divorce.  If I'm being honest, I think it was the absolute best decision my mother has ever made, for herself and for my sister and I.  She removed the toxicity from our lives and God has since replaced it with so much positivism that there's no doubt in my mind all of His plans are for good.  But...I digress.  Through that time with the therapist (and I was honest with her) we never came to the conclusion that I had anxiety.  

In college, I was pretty at-ease with myself, as much as you can be when you've lived your life overweight.  Some people are loud, boisterous, and funny when they carry extra pounds.  Some are painfully shy.  I'm somewhere in the middle.  If anything, teaching has forced me to become more extroverted, even though at times it can be incredibly draining.  At other times, I can't stand to be alone.  I'm a walking contradiction.  A beautiful mess!

The PCP prescribed Zoloft at the lowest dose for me and I started seeing a therapist in St. Augustine.  I filled out the paperwork, none of the check boxes applying to me at all.  After two visits the therapist looked at me and said (I'm paraphrasing since it was 10+ years ago), "There's nothing wrong with you.  You have normal human worries.  I think you solely have a chemical imbalance, and therefore the Zoloft is going to be your best bet.  If you have concerns that you want to talk about, you're welcome to come back..."  I was surprised, but okay with that arrangement.  After all, this whole anxiety thing was new to me.

I tried again to go to therapy (two different therapists after that one) and only ever made it through one to two sessions before they were having a similar conversation with me.  Then my fabulous nurse practitioner obgyn increased my Zoloft dose.  The anxiety subsided. (WOOT!)

Now, I know that my case of anxiety is mild.  I'm not debilitated and even though it may delay me from certain activities, I still end up going/participating, because I've learned that if I can overcome that initial fear of what people think of me, I'll end up having a great time.  It has prevented me from going to a few events in my life, but nothing formal/really important, and nothing where I had already said I would go and then cancelled.  Mostly situations where the thought of attending gave me anxiety and so when asked, I said, "Maybe."  (I learned from my mother that maybe is a much nicer way of saying "probably not."  For example: "Can I have a sleepover with so and so next weekend?"  "Maybe.")

I did notice, however, that as more birthdays passed, my anxiety intensified.  The thing about anxiety is that you get ridonkulously frustrated with yourself because you know that the thoughts you're having are irrational but you cannot stop having them.  In fact, the more you try not to have them, the more you have them.  The inside of my brain, subconsciously, says things like, "She didn't respond to your text right away because you offended her and now she's mad." or "Those people whispering over there are talking about me.  I knew I shouldn't have worn this!"  or the dreaded response to, "We/I need to talk to you." "Oh no.  I'm fired/she hates me/I made a huge mistake/my life is over!"

Even just reading that is embarrassing because I consider myself a relatively intelligent person and it just sounds so...silly.  The aftermath of that is is that you beat yourself up because you can't believe you let your emotions get the best of you like that.  Because 9 times out of 10, all of those things that my mind perceives and convinces me of...they turn out not to be true.  But that 1 time out of 10, well it's worth more than all those other 9.  Because it feeds the anxiety monster.  It reminds me that 10% of the time, my fears are justified.  10% of the time, I hate being right.  

In this past year, my anxiety has had its ups and downs.  New situations sometimes make it worse, and I've had a bunch of those this year.  When I saw my obgyn* this year, she and I decided to go back up to the highest dose of Zoloft I had been on.  We had cut it down to half before because things were good.  But you know...wedding planning and all.  I thought I'd be more disappointed in myself for needing it, but I'm actually not, and that in itself is a miraculous gift.  I've also found a therapist I really like.  She gets that my anxieties are not just "normal" worries.  She challenges me to to stop the negative self-talk.  That, my friends, is a HUGE challenge for me.  Some other time I'll tell you about some other stuff she's taught me.  For now, I'll leave you with something that I found endlessly fascinating.  Emphasis in the article is mine.  The original article can be found here. 

An influential study conducted 100 years ago by two Harvard psychologists, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, laid the foundation for the idea that moderate levels of anxiety improve performance: too much anxiety, obviously, and performance is impaired, but too little anxiety also impairs performance. “Without anxiety, little would be accomplished,” David Barlow, the founder and director emeritus of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, has written.

The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.

So I'm going to take my moderate anxiety and keep using it to be a superhero...getting stuff done and done well, loving myself and sharing that love with others, even if I'm second guessing myself part of the time.  

I truly believe the second graph about myself.  Anxiety does NOT define me. 

*She's seriously one of the top 10 people I know...we hugged in Target once and she squealed and jumped up and down and was so excited about my engagement that the cashier asked if it was a close friend I hadn't seen for awhile.  Imagine that cashier's face when I told her it was my gynecologist!  I wish it wasn't so weird (for her AND I, we've discussed this) to hang out outside of the doctor's office.