The 6 Steps I Took To Heal My Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Seven years ago I took the GAD-7 anxiety screening questionnaire and scored a 20 out of 21 on the anxiety scale. This score placed me into the “severe anxiety” category.
I now take the GAD-7 anxiety screening test monthly and consistently score between 3–5 points. This places me in the “low anxiety” category.
Below are the 6 steps I’ve taken to successfully manage my generalized anxiety disorder.
The steps below are simple, but that does not mean they are easy.
1. Go To Therapy
I fought going to therapy for years. I felt like I already knew what I needed to do and there wasn’t anything a therapist could tell me that would help.
In the end, therapy helped me in two fundamental ways.
First, it allowed me to process unprocessed emotions from my past.
Unprocessed emotions stay stored in the body and can be triggered by events that are happening in the current moment. Mildly contentious discussions would mentally take me back to traumatic childhood events. My heart rate would pick up and an overwhelming sense of fear would kick in for seemingly mundane events like “giving a presentation”, or “talking to a stranger”.
As I attended therapy and unpacked my feelings around past traumas the range of events that triggered me massively reduced. A growing body of research suggests that certain forms of therapy work by strengthening the connection of the “cognitive control network” portions of the mind with the amygdala, the fear center. It’s not that nothing scares me, it’s that I feel more in control when I am triggered by an event and can logically talk myself through it.
Regular therapy also holds me accountable when my mental health starts to slip. It’s easy not to notice that I’m feeling slightly more stressed, more disconnected from my social circle, or burnt out.
When I’m not attending therapy, small problems spiral into big problems without my noticing. Therapy allows me to keep my eyes wide open on the current state of my mental health.
2. Add Stillness
When I started introducing stillness practices into my life, my life was highly stimulated.
My work calendar was constantly packed with meetings. My social calendar was packed with events. Even when I was “relaxing” watching Netflix I was often consuming content from multiple sources at the same time. I’d be watching Netflix, on Reddit on my laptop, and playing a game on my phone.
There were zero moments where I was either doing just one thing, or doing nothing.
I now intentionally make room for stillness practices in my days. Some of these are:
- Mindfulness meditation
- Writing
- Reading
- Cooking
- Long, zone 2 exercise
- Playing golf
- Blocking my work calendar off in advance to allow room for deep work
While mindfulness is the popular way to incorporate stillness into life, there are lots of other non-meditation-based activities that can slow down life’s pace. Just do one thing without doing something else.
There is growing research that adding stillness to life can reduce the activity of the amygdala, help deepen sleep, and even lower blood pressure.
3. Being Kind to Myself
Through therapy, I realized my self-talk created a lot of anxiety. It wasn’t that others were constantly berating me; it was that I would constantly berate myself for pretty much any reason.
I introduced “self-love time” into my life. “Self-love time” is where I talk to myself out loud and state all the things that I’m proud of myself for executing on, big and small.
Good job exercising today! You folded laundry! You’ve been flossing consistently! There is no task that is too small for self-love time.
In the beginning, this process felt emotionally uncomfortable. The feeling of being kind to myself was completely foreign and thus just felt fundamentally off. As I engaged in the practice more consistently my inner dialogue started to shift from overly negative to kind and loving. I’ve reached the point where sometimes I’ll say the words “I love you” to myself and will feel goosebumps run up my back like I’m getting a hug!
4. Set boundaries
Individuals with GAD tend to be people pleasers who struggle to set boundaries. I was no exception to this rule. My inability to tell others a polite “no” meant my calendar was constantly oversubscribed with an enormous amount of work, chores, social commitments, and favors.
I started leaving myself reminders in various places (post it notes on my desk, notes on my phone) to say “no” or at least consider whether I was capable of taking on more work before stating “yes” to something.
“No” took on many forms, including “not now”, “I’ll have to get back to you”, “that’s not something I’m comfortable doing” and even the simple “I don’t know yet.”.
As I said “no” more often, multiple things happened. I became more comfortable setting boundaries and the act felt less scary. My relationships improved because I wasn’t feeling resentful toward individuals who had overloaded my calendar (which was my fault for not setting the boundary!). I had additional time to focus on deeper work and hobbies that actually brought a degree of stillness and fulfillment to my life. This deeper work actually made me more productive.
5. Check in emotionally
One of the consequences of my childhood trauma was being chronically disconnected from how I was feeling. I only had one emotion, fear, and anxiety, that was happening all the time.
As I healed and became less anxious, I introduced a practice of deliberately checking in with myself to think about and voice what I was feeling at various moments throughout my day. Forcing myself to put my emotions into words granted me a larger degree of self-awareness and helped me understand where my fears stemmed from, why I was feeling what I was feeling, and what patterns of triggers typically resulted in anxious feelings.
It also helped me understand what parts of my life I was most attached to and where I drew my identity from.
6. Being vulnerable
My anxiety pushed me to solve all my problems alone. I was scared to socialize with others so I would tackle every challenge in my life through the lens of “I have to solve this alone, don’t bother anyone else.” While this had the benefit of making me highly independent, I never picked up the skill of actually relying on others and asking for help when I needed it.
I began asking for more help by severely lowering my standards of when I would ask for help. I moved from only asking for help when I was in dire straits to asking for help in matters of convenience. “Hey, could you pick me up something from the grocery store?”, “Hey, would you mind taking this work task off my plate?”, and many other sentences became newly explored portions of my vocabulary.
As I asked for more help, two things happened. First, my relationships got deeper. I realized that the people closest to me in my life actually wanted to help me, and by never engaging them in that way I was actually depriving them of something they found meaningful. Asking the people closest to me for help was not burdening them at all.
Secondly, I felt more seen and heard by those closest to me because they actually knew about all parts of life, not just the parts that were going well.
The biggest thing I learned through my journey to better mental health was that it was possible to better my mental health with a set of tactical interventions.
Improving my mental health went from something that felt highly nebulous and “woo woo” to something that felt manageable and grounded. I hope this article gives you some ideas on how to manage your own mental health as well.
Hi, if you’ve made it here thank you for reading this thing I wrote! I’m Arjun Arun. I work as a Senior Director of Analytics in healthcare technology and am passionate about writing about, talking about, and figuring out ways to improve society’s (and my) mental health.
As an individual who’s made a full recovery from overwhelming, clinically diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder I recognize how much improved my life is because of my focus on my mental health. My articles on Medium aim to help individuals understand strategies and tactics they can use to navigate the (overly complicated) healthcare system in the United States and improve their own mental health, #powertothepatient.
I’m always down to chat so don’t hesitate to leave a message.
Much love, Arjun