HOW DOES ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION FEEL?

When under the onslaught of anxious thoughts, almost everyone feels small, under attack, and as if they are all alone, and out of control.

Are you feeling like you have been struggling all week like Jarod above? You feel disoriented, sleeping is getting hard, and now, getting out of bed is starting to feel like climbing out of a cave? Afraid of messing up with things during the day, you feel as if everywhere you go you need to be aware of highly critical audiences all around you? To compensate for this you have begun working hard until late, maybe even using drugs or alcohol to avoid feeling the omnipresent anxiety that makes you out of focus.

Or maybe you are feeling like Maria, who has separation anxiety, and feels very upset when she’s separated even for a few hours from someone she is close to, like a parent, a close friend, or someone she is dating? “I feel as if the person may die, or leave for good, and I know I would just fall apart if that happened" she says. So to compensate for this ever present sense of catastrophe, she over-plans, and is extremely careful about what those  around her say or don’t say, believing that being careful in this way will prevent bad things from happening.  To make things just a little harder, persons who suffer from anxiety or depression often see themselves in a negative light: "Why am I such a burden? When did it begin? Why am I so incapable? Why can’t I be in control?". Tess, for instance, who has generalised anxiety, and constantly worries about school, work, family, and health, feels a great sense of responsibility for the way things are, and the way things should be: "I have a constant feeling that things are about to get worse, and I feel unable to do anything about it. I am so afraid of causing pain to anyone".

Still, maybe it’s night time, which, like for Robert, can be a challenging time for anxious or depressed persons. It’s the time of day when there are no distractions, nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, and for Robert, who has just moved out of town and lives alone now, it’s the worst part of the day. In fact, one little part of Robert keeps burning the midnight oil to think of ways to not disappoint his parents and his new employer: “if only everyone really knew, they’d all give up on me, how can I possibly make up for this?”Historically there’s a good reason for all our friends up here to be on the alert or sensitive to how others see them, because from the dawn of time humans have been most vulnerable to predatory attacks, and the group, and their close rapports, meant everything to them. However, a hyperactive mind can’t stop listening or watching for potential dangers even if none of these ancestral threats are present. In fact, when under the onslaught of anxious thoughts, almost everyone feels small, under attack, and often as if we are all alone in this. But as a professional I can assure you that this way of seeing things is skewed on the negative side. That out there, many people are feeling highly worried, and are kinder than we perceive them to be.

Studies show that anxiety and depression are the most common mental health problems in materially rich countries, for instance, affecting nearly one in five people. If you were sitting in a room of thirty students or colleagues, this means that at least a row of you would be suffering from one of the many flavours of anxiety and depression: social anxiety, separation anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic attacks, dysthymia, seasonal affective disorder, post-partum depression and so on. In fact, depending on the situation, almost everyone can feel overwhelmed with anxiety sometimes, some feeling it in a crowded cafeteria, others in an empty hall.

If you feel too anxious, tired, or unmotivated, you are missing out on doing the things that would help you feel better, though, which makes you even more anxious, tired, and unmotivated! For example, if you avoid going to parties or other social events due to your social anxiety, you may be thinking: “I’ll never make friends or have a partner, what’s the point of going?”. A vicious cycle of avoidance is at work, and it is the behavior of choice for all the types of anxiety that we saw in Jarod, Maria, Robert, and Tess. It is the unconscious default choice because it lowers anxiety quickly, but because not conscious, it is also the most difficult behaviour to spot for anyone untrained, and sets us on a down spiral.

Carrying out avoidance behaviours, reinforces our perceptions of danger, so it always gets worse. It’s like feeding a monster that abuses us from within.

Levels of anxiety or sadness that interfere with the very possibility of feeling joy, connection, and a sense of self-worth are the only levels that require professional attention, and your own commitment to care. For instance, Seth, the star quarterback who shouts louder than the crowd above him is doing just fine on the rugby field, but when he is in front of the girl he is attracted to, his anxiety makes him unable to string two words together. Seth would benefit from professional attention because a major part of his life, joy and connection with an intimate partner, is slipping out of his hands, and, no pun intended, this is likely to play heavily on him one day.

Monica is cutting and vomiting in order to appease her internal blame, for instance, which is an example of experiential avoidance, but in doing so she never addresses the irrational sense that she is inadequate, and the blame she puts on herself for events that were completely out of her control in her childhood. And it always gets worse, because carrying out avoidance behaviours, reinforces our perceptions of danger. It’s like feeding a monster that abuses us from within.

These misguided behaviours drive us further and further away from a shared sense of reality, overestimating danger on the one hand, and underestimating our capacity to deal with it on the other. For example Maria, who always fears losing people who she cares about if she said the wrong thing, will end up reinforcing the idea that it is because she thinks hard and long about what to say each time that things are fine. The truth, of course, is that Maria has absolutely no fault of her own for feeling separation anxiety,  and that saying the right thing all the time will only have a minimal impact on the well-being of her relationships. Yet, her misguided perceptions are likely to suffocate her spontaneity and joy of living before giving her the chance to really understand what is going on.

Working with a therapist like myself helps you spot these vicious cycles of avoidance and learn where and how to intervene. Neither friends, nor loved ones, nor yourself can do this easily for various different reasons, but the short reason for this is that our life-styles have become incredibly complex, so complex in fact that it now requires specialist understanding. This was obviously not always the case. For hundreds of thousands of years, a very long time indeed, people lived in bands no larger than a 150 people, surrounded by wilderness most of us find hard to even imagine, so one’s problems were always inevitably the problems of an entire band, and often mostly about gathering food, producing shelter, making fire, birth-giving, and solving sub-tribal politics.

Today, the ways in which our lives develop seem to mirror more the erratic nature of stock-exchanges than the laws of nature that made us in the first place. Our auto-biographies are incredibly complex. And even if you now know what is going on with you, and manage to gather self-help advice and act on it, digesting a disorder emotionally and physically remains a very hard thing to do, something the counselling room is more suited for because built to generate the deeper understanding you need to regain control. Learning how to manage your condition is possible, and we can try to tailor new behaviours, and work together to upgrade them into new skills and positive habits.  

Now one last thing before I go. When reading about the generalised difficulties of Jarod, Robert, Maria, Tess and the others, it’s easy to conclude that their symptoms apply to you. When we are suffering we find it easy to reflect all the negative in the world on ourselves. However, the examples above are only meant to be illustrative, and so if you feel what is going on within you is limiting you, the best way to go about this is to talk with a professional like myself. If you think I could help, then know that I offer a 15 Minutes FREE call you can extend to 30 minutes by simply finding out a bit more about me on my website. This could be a start, or a step in the right direction.

Wishing you well,

Your Shrink in Bansko