Mental Health | Advice | Anxiety

How I’ve Dealt with My Anxiety

Two things that gave me some peace

A few years ago, I started having anxiety attacks.

I was in law school, already a difficult experience, but in my personal life, things weren’t any better either. It was a less than perfect match for a new reality that I had never lived with before: anxiety.

Initially, I didn’t know what it was all about. For me, it was just moments of more stress, with one or two quick breaths. However, as the frequency of these situations increased, I realized that something was going on.

And it was as if the awareness of the situation made it even more difficult to deal with. This is one of the big problems with anxiety: being aware of it increases its dimension.

I couldn’t sit still. My breathing was irregular and often wheezed. My mind was racing with all the possible and imaginary scenarios, especially the negative ones. And any control I might have had disappeared.

All around me, incomprehension. Having anxiety for no specific reason runs into people’s incomprehension. It doesn’t enter into our logic that someone could feel that way without having had a source.

But it is possible. And it is one of the most frightening facts of anxiety: it appears at any moment and without warning.

To this day, I feel the effects of anxiety. And I think this happens to the vast majority of people. These are the effects of the world we live in. The good news is that while I haven’t had specific medical monitoring, and what I’m about to say here is not official advice or exempt from consulting professional help, they are two things that have worked for me and hopefully can work for you as well.

Writing in silence

My almost immediate reaction, as I felt the anxiety growing inside me, was to seek out the calmest, quietest, loneliest place possible. I needed to be alone to deal with my emotions.

Anxiety attacks are moments when we lose control of our emotions and the way our body reacts to stimuli.

That’s why it’s so important to be alone so that we can, through a calm and conscious process, regain that control. It doesn’t help if we are surrounded by people and constantly living with a variety of stimuli.

Besides silence, what helped me was writing. Writing is my great passion, so this may not work for everyone.

But I believe it does.

Because as we write, as we try to put into words what we are feeling, we are starting a much slower process than the thinking process.

Thoughts fly around inside our minds, but there is a speed limit that our hands, when writing, can reach. This helps us to calm down.

But also the fact that we see the words, and look at our feelings, helps us to be able to center ourselves, rationalizing a process that has everything but rationality. There is no rationality in anxiety.

Because of that, writing in silence is something that has always helped me overcome anxiety attacks.

Realizing that anxiety comes from the context and not from us

I don’t know if this could apply to all cases. But it will certainly apply to some. The anxiety, at least the one I felt, was coming from the outside. And it was very hard for me to realize that the source of all those feelings was a context outside me.

Whether it was the place where I was, the places I went, or problems I had at that moment for which I couldn’t see any kind of solution.

No matter how many solutions I could look for and find, the truth was only one: until I changed the source of all this anxiety, the attacks, and the effects, would keep on coming.

It wasn’t that there couldn’t be a predisposition to anxiety in me, that I could generate attacks for other reasons. But it was an objective thing to be able to find its source and, after that, try to eliminate it.

Where I am today

Today I have a mastery of anxiety that I never had before. When I start to feel any of the symptoms from the other time, I stop. I ask myself why, I try to understand where and when it started, what was the point of origin. I write, of course.

But most of all, I have started to look at anxiety as something that happens to me and not something that is part of me. This gives me the distance I need to be able to control it.

What about you? How do you deal with or have dealt with your anxiety attacks? Do you agree with mine or do you have other suggestions? Leave them in the comments, I look forward to hearing them.

Did you enjoy reading my story? How about becoming a member here on Medium? Your membership fee, only 5$/month, will give you the opportunity to read all the stories you want, while supporting me and other writers to continue to bring you insights every day. Click here to become a member.