Here’s How It Feels to Have an Anxiety Disorder

Here’s How It Feels to have Anxiety Disorder

In the second in my series of personal reflections on my various mental health challenges, I’d like to write frankly about my anxiety. I would like to, but I’m too nervous to attempt it.

Kidding, kidding.

Lame attempts at humor aside, having an anxiety disorder is no small issue. These types of disorders can be as debilitating as a swift punch to the gut, and sometimes just as painful. While my own experience is with more social and generalized anxiety, there are many other variants of anxiety disorder out there, from frequent panic attacks to irrational phobias. Please see the links below for more information on anxiety problems outside the scope of my own.

To help the reader understand the way that anxiety can paralyze its victims, I’m going to try to provide an example of my thought processes during a typical anxiety attack, drawing from one of my experiences working at the used book store. Bear in mind, this may became fragmented and hard to read.

The situation: a customer checking out with an armload of books has just discovered that she has a store credit slip, when I’m already partway through ringing her up. My boss is out of the store running an errand, so being the store’s only other employee at the time, I take it upon myself to fix the problem. I cancel the transaction, void the sale, and begin ringing the customer’s order up again… but something goes wrong. The register starts making a beep noise whenever I press a key, and refuses to operate correctly. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, but obviously I can’t ring up the sale when the register’s not functioning properly… My palms start to sweat. I ask the customer if she would please be patient. I try again and again to run the purchase through the register with the normal process, beep beep beep beep. Nothing. Meanwhile, the customer is becoming impatient, rapidly approaching angry. Don’t have time to try to fix the register even if I did know what was wrong, and other customers lining up behind the impatient one. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I’m going to be sick, as I ask if she has another method of payment… she doesn’t, now she’s really angry, asks me where my boss is, I tell her she’s out on an errand, offer to call her, my boss won’t answer her phone, and oh no now she’s angry enough that she wants to cancel her purchase and leave, she was about to buy fifty dollars worth of books and she’s going to walk out the door mad at me, and my boss is going to be mad at me for losing a sale, and my hands start shaking, and I stammer, and my voice gets high and I’m making a fool of myself and there’s a half-dozen people still in line and the register still isn’t working and if they all want to pay in cash instead of credit I’ll lose their sales too and the store won’t make any money today and it’s all my fault and I’m going to make my boss mad and she’s going to fire me and soon I’ll be broke and living on the street and I’ll die in a gutter and it’s ALL MY FAULT…

That’s just one particularly extreme example of a panic attack. Little problems, quirks, and irritations stack up on top of one another and swell up, my rational thinking goes out the window, and I’m paralyzed by a simultaneous need to do something about the situation and being too scared to take action. It’s never pretty.

The escalation in the above paragraph is typical of an anxiety or panic attack. Notice how quickly it goes from one impatient customer to the end of both my job and my life in short order. Sadly, that’s not an exaggeration. When you’re in the midst of one of these episodes, you can feel the world pressing down on you, all of your present problems joining together into one giant Voltron of fear, indecision, and self-loathing. It’s like staring up from the foot of a mountain: you’ve never seen anything so big, and you can’t imagine how anyone could even begin to climb it. And there’s a sense that if you don’t tackle this huge thing now, you never will, and you just sort of crumble before it.

This happens to me most often in high-stress situations over which I have little control… the impatient customer and the technical issues with the register were both things I couldn’t do much of anything about, but I feel like I should be able to do something, which triggers the helplessness, which triggers the self-loathing, which triggers the breakdown. It was the same way taking tests in school… too many times, I would just stare at the blank test paper in front of me, completely overwhelmed, feeling close to tears.

My medication helps, of course, but it has never been able to completely stop the panic attacks. For that I rely on my support group of family and friends, the people around me who can be rational and talk me down while I’m flying off the handle. It’s not a perfect solution by any means, but most of the time it works. I’m unbelievably lucky in that way, that the members of my support group can recognize the warning signs and have a general idea of how to defuse these situations when they happen.

For more information on anxiety disorders, please visit the following links:

Anxiety Disorders – National Institute of Mental Health:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-disorders/index.shtml

Anxiety Disorders and Anxiety Attacks: A Guide to the Signs, Symptoms, and Treatment Options – HelpGuide.org

http://www.helpguide.org/articles/anxiety/anxiety-attacks-and-anxiety-disorders.htm

Anxiety Disorders – Psychiatry.org

http://www.psychiatry.org/anxiety-disorders