Living with anxiety disorders

Just after Christmas this year I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The three months prior to this had, without a shadow of a doubt, been the worst of my life. During this period I got so miserable that I experienced what it was like not to want to be alive anymore. This was something I never thought I would go through. I’d always considered myself a happy person with a job I love, amazing people around me and, in writing, something that I feel deeply passionate about. So, to go from this to looking out of my window and genuinely believing I could make the world a better place by jumping out of it was a pretty horrible experience.

    

Thankfully I’m now feeling much, much better and owe a huge debt to a combination of brilliant friends, family, medication and most importantly meditation. But in the early days of recovery – the time that was also closest to my darkest moments – one of the things that perhaps made the most difference, and is in no small part responsible for my ability to see that there was another path ahead of me – one that didn’t involve bypassing the perfectly adequate elevator system in my building – was reading about the experiences of other people who were going through or had gone through similar things. The bravery of these individuals to put their most horrible experiences into words allowed me to see that I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t the worst human being to have ever walked the earth and what I was going through was actually something that huge amounts of people suffer with.

    

Looking back, the first time I plucked up the courage to Google what I was experiencing (this doesn’t sound like a hugely courageous act, I know, but later I’ll endeavor to explain how the self sabotaging nature of chronic or acute anxiety attacks you from the inside in every single way it can) and the material I then found, was the wedge that drove just a tiny little way into the black, poisonous maelstrom of my mind. It didn’t get that far in, and the condition did its absolute best to drive it out again, but somehow that little glow within the darkness held on.

    

Nine months later, I find it hard to recognise my mind as it then was. Indeed, the further you go into recovery, the more difficult it is to believe that you were ever in that state in the first place. But it’s important never to forget, and more important still to hold onto what helped you, especially in those make or break early days. So, with that in mind, I feel like I should pass on the favour given by these often-nameless individuals that made so much difference. I suppose I believe that the more people share their experiences, then the less the stigma around mental health will continue to drive us all into ourselves and further away from those we need to pull us out. I should also say that I’m about as far from a neuroscientist as it’s possible to be, and a lot of the stuff I say may, scientifically speaking, be a complete misinterpretation – or at the very least, a gross oversimplification – of the limited amount I’ve read around the subject, but hopefully this won’t render it completely pointless.

    

The first thing to say about anxiety is that it turns you into your own worst enemy. Not in the sense of staying out for a few more drinks when you have to be up for work or taking on a new project when you know that you don’t have enough time, but in the sense that there’s a vicious, manipulative goblin-bastard living inside you head (who is essentially also you, but imagine the worst you there could ever possibly be). When my condition first hit it was due to a combination of massive changes in my life. I moved cities, changed jobs, changed my living situation and upended my daily routine beyond all recognition. What causes the condition is different in every person, but mine is brought on by taking myself out of my comfort zone and routine. The most primal part of your brain, your fight or flight mechanism, the thing that keeps you alive but is also the cause of all this, detects a threat that it doesn’t understand. The conscious side of your brain (your frontal lobes, I think … again, apologies to anyone who actually understands this stuff properly) can comprehend the idea that this combination of factors can be an unsettling experience and may cause you some discomfort, but the more primitive and old-fashioned area of the brain – the home of anxiety, depression, jealousy and countless other treats – doesn’t work like this. It goes more with something like: “SHIT! WHAT’S GOING ON? THERE’S SOMETHING ATTACKING US BUT I DON’T GET IT. I CAN’T SEE A TIGER ANYWHERE … OR AN ALPHA MALE HELL BENT ON DRIVING US OUT OF THE TRIBE OR BASHING OUR HEAD IN WITH A ROCK … SO, WHY AM I THREATENED!!?”

   

Faced with this incomprehensible situation, a product of trying to function with caveman biology in modern society, your brain does the only thing it can to ensure that it keeps you safe: it floods you with the kind of chemicals that only have a practical function when there’s a hungry predator bearing down on you. Were it indeed a lion that I had come up against back in November, these chemicals would have given me the ability to run as fast as I possibly could for longer than I’d ever normally be able to, and had that been the case, I’d have been wholly grateful for their contribution.  As it was, this redundant surplus in my brain spurred my primitive control centre into an even worse course of action. Unable to find a genuine threat in the outside world, my inner cave-Chris began looking internally for the problem. “IF WE CAN’T SEE A DANGER IN YOUR SMALL RENTED ROOM IN BRIXTON, THEN THE DANGER MUST BE WITHIN!” he roared. And so into your own mind you go. And as anyone who has ever experienced this will tell you, it’s no fun.

    

A great book I read on the subject, which I’ll reference at the end of this, describes the mind as a maze. And fuelled by a chemical imbalance that turns your inner narrator into the most hateful, spiteful individual you’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering, you venture into this spiralling endless set of pitch-black corridors, armed only with the sole objective of proving that you are somehow in mortal danger. Now all the while, the rational mind tries to fight your corner, but its voice is weak and its conviction soon lost and before you know it, you’re cooking up the most horrendous paranoid thoughts and fantasies. Within a few hours of first getting ill, you’ll probably have convinced yourself that everyone in your life that you care about actually hates you, any feelings of safety and security you have are built on the fact that there’s a danger lurking just out of sight that you’ve failed to spot, and all the memories you have that contradict these ideas are in some way flawed. And this is all before you’ve turned on yourself!

    

This is when things get truly fun and a malevolent creativity, the likes of which you couldn't have ever previously imagined, begins to grow within your mind; slowly killing you like those vines that choke the life out of the trees they climb. Life becomes a daily nightmare in which you grind each and every one of the most insidious beliefs you can imagine deeper and deeper into your psyche. An important thing to understand about the brain at this juncture is that due to the varying speeds of the different parts, feelings happen before thoughts. It doesn’t feel like they do, but they do. And in this tiny little difference in timing lies a huge part of the power of anxiety.

The actual process goes like this …

1) Brain floods itself with horrible fight or flight chemicals

2) Human brain can’t understand how it could feel so, so horrendous without a discernable reason

3) Human brain looks into memories/fantasies to cook up some justification for the feeling.

However, because all this happens so fast, what it feels like to you is this …

1) I remember/think of something

2) this thing makes me worse than I’ve ever felt … little voice* “But…it doesn’t seem that bad”

3) more chemicals pumped in … right, look deeper. There must be something you’ve missed

4) more chemicals, more chemicals, more chemicals* explore deeper into memory/fantasy, begin to become obsessed – feel that just beyond your view is the reason for this terrible feeling (something you’ve done or something you are… it must be out there somewhere, just keep digging, keep looking, keep imagining)

5) stop eating; it’s not helping

6) stop sleeping; no need of that either

7)…

8)…

9)… etc. etc.

This eternal impossible quest to find explanation and justification for these incomprehensible feelings drives people to convince themselves that they are the worst things imaginable – even if there’s no evidence to support it, that doesn’t matter. You long ago stopped trusting your own memories and ability to read what’s going on around you. You can’t turn to your friends or family either. Those idiots have let you walk around for twenty-eight years without realising the evil that resides in you; what use can they possibly be!?

This is the point where I must passionately appeal to people who don’t suffer from these conditions to keep a very, very close eye on your loved ones and the people around you, because let me tell you, they will not be sharing any of this stuff with you themselves.

I only told one person at the time a small part of what I was going through and really only because it was completely unavoidable. Luckily for me, this person was amazing, but for so many others this might not be the situation and this is why we all have to keep an eye on one another. I remember holding my phone in my hand looking at the number of one of my best and oldest friends, trying to make myself push the button to call.

“Just fucking call. This person will listen, this person will help you.”

The only reason this person will help is because they don’t know you really. They’ve only ever seen the false front you put on for the world. If you really want to make this person’s life better, you should kill yourself.

This sounds so ridiculous to me now, but believe me, when you’re in the thick of it, nothing could seem more real; and just as you’re having these thoughts a brilliant HD Technicolour reel of every time you’ve not been a good friend to this person appears in your mind’s eye – some of it true, some of it not. Indeed, part of what makes you believe the impossible to be true is the brain’s terrifying ability to create these images in a nanosecond. If none of this is real, you ask yourself, then why is it all here before I’ve even had a chance to process it and why does my mind’s eye feel like it’s sitting in the front row of the Imax?  You won’t get an answer to that though, as your internal goblin-bastard will have already chimed back in:

Look, you worthless c*nt. Look at all the times you’ve let this person down. How dare you think to call them for help? How dare you trouble any of the good people around you?

This kind of thing became my life. I developed a mask that meant I could scrape my way through work, I hid from social engagements and friends and generally drove my self into abject misery. But no one knew. Not really. Some people had an idea that something was up and that I wasn’t particularly well, but no one apart from the one aforementioned person really had any idea – figures of people who suffer from anxiety disorders, particularly pure OCD, are not believed to be that accurate for this very reason; so many people probably never ever speak about it, and some of these end up taking their own lives.

Genuinely, that could have been it for me too. I was thinking long, hard and very seriously about killing myself. Ultimately I got lucky, I guess. I remember thinking clear as day with no real emotion attached to the situation (I had basically nothing left by this point) well, you could kill yourself or you could go to the doctor.  Both seemed like perfectly feasible options. I may as well have tossed a coin, really. That’s how removed from yourself, everyone and everything around you you become. Sure your friends and family will be sad for a bit, but then they’ll come to realise that you’ve actually done them and the world at large a massive favour.

I’m lucky to have amazing friends and family, but as I said before, they didn’t know this was going on. I hid it and I hid it pretty well, as countless other people do and are doing right now. And it is this that brings me back to the reason for writing this. People suffering, you’re not alone. There’s so much help out there and so many people going through what you’re going through. It feels like the most difficult thing you’ve ever done and your condition will rile against it with all its fury but you have to just open your mouth and tell someone – at first a friend and then a professional, or at the very least click on the links at the end of this blog. There will come a time where you’ve learned techniques that render all this a memory; for me half an hour of mindfulness of breathing a day is worth a thousand hours in therapy and so much more powerful than medication. This may work for you as well, or perhaps another path will help, but there will be something.

To people who don’t suffer with these kind of things, just be that little bit extra aware of the people around you. The statistics show that many, many people suffer in this way and they also show that the likelihood of them sharing it with you is very, very slim. Keep your eyes open and if people seem a bit different, don’t assume it’s something minor. Your small effort to find out what’s really going on with someone might define whether you get to keep that person or not.

People much better at writing and infinitely more learned than me on the subject can be found below:

http://ocdla.com/ocd-mental-checking-1947

http://www.ocduk.org/sites/default/files/understand-pure-o.pdf.pdf

http://www.steveseay.com/unwanted-thoughts-sensations-ocd-treatment/

http://www.ocdonline.com/#!thinking-the-unthinkable/c1arh

Amazing books on the subject:

The Mindful Path Through Worry and Rumination, Sameet M Kumar

The Chimp Complex, Professor Steven Peters

The Worry Cure, Dr. Robert L. Leahy