Free Yourself From Anxiety
The Black Hole of Anxiety
For most people, anxiety seems to come from nowhere and hit them like a sledgehammer. One minute, more or less happily living your life, the next, terrified and distraught, struggling to breathe perhaps, convinced you are dying, or that someone else will die and it will all be your fault.
Maybe you visit your doctor straight away, maybe you struggle on alone for as long as you can, but sooner or later you will be told that it’s Anxiety. Just anxiety.
This doesn’t make any sense. You know what anxiety is. It’s glancing at the clock and wondering uneasily why someone is late. It’s double checking that you put the handbrake on when parking on a hill. It’s not this living nightmare that turns every minute of every day into a torment of worrying.
Except that it is. Your normal anxiety has got out of control and turned into an Anxiety Disorder. In other words, everybody has some anxiety, but not everybody has Anxiety. In this book, when we give anxiety a capital ‘A’ we are talking about an illness, and you can recover from it. There is good help available on the NHS, but it can mean a long wait as your name works its way up the list. If you are housebound, the wait for a visiting therapist is likely to be even longer. Why not try to help yourself in the meantime?
Some people are able to stage a full recovery through self-help. Others may still need help from a professional to finish their work, but they will go into the sessions armed with self-knowledge and an improved understanding of their illness.
Anxiety is a black hole. It sucks in your hopes, your pleasures, your plans for the future and above all your energy. It’s picky though. It leaves behind fears, worries, and exhaustion. No wonder it’s hard to pick yourself up and find the energy for a recovery programme. No wonder you feel like staying in your safe place and doing as little as possible.
It is possible to turn this round. It is possible to come back from the black hole of Anxiety. The aim of this book is to help you set up and follow a self-help recovery programme. Working at your own pace, in small steps, you can learn to let go of Anxiety and reclaim your life.
Getting equipped
There are two basic things that you need.
A notebook– you will need to write things down as you work through this book. A notebook is better than a collection of scraps of paper, because sometimes you’ll want to look back and see how far you’ve progressed.
A relaxation tape or CD– organize this now, before you start work, so that you have it to hand when you need it. You can buy them in any music store, and often in health food shops and chemists. If you are housebound you could ask someone to get it for you, or use the mail order service provided by the charities in this field (see Appendix 2 for their contact details).
Deep relaxation is an important part of recovery from Anxiety. This is not the same as relaxing in front of the TV, or with a book, or anything else you may choose. These are all good for you, but you will also need to learn to do full relaxation. There is more about this in Chapter 6.
You should aim for a recording with a voice on it, rather than just music, and there are two main types:
Progressive muscle relaxation: the voice talks you through the process of clenching and relaxing every muscle in your body.
Visualisation: the voice describes a relaxing scene, such as a beautiful garden or a deserted tropical beach.
Choose whichever type appeals to you most. It is okay to buy one of each and decide which you prefer after playing them. If you don’t like the idea of listening to a strange voice, then you can record your own voice, or ask a trusted person to record it for you. See Extra Information 1. I for a script that you can record.
Group members talk
All of the examples in this book are taken from real life, from the stories of people with Anxiety who either told us about their experiences or wrote them down for us. We haven’t changed their words. They all understand the suffering that Anxiety causes. Let’s meet the group:
‘I was on tranquillisers for 36 years and your body becomes tolerant and you start to feel anxiety symptoms which get worse when you stop taking them.’
ANDREA
‘I had an older brother who was cleverer than me, and I developed a stammer when I was 8 years old which made me very self-conscious.’
ANDREW
‘I was on the bus going to visit my mother and I started to feel floaty and scared and out-of-sorts. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I wasn’t able to breathe, I felt I was losing my breath.’
BRIDGET
‘. . .my mother has told me I was an unsettled baby and I think I was quite an anxious child. I never felt safe, perhaps because of a traumatic experience when I was 4 years old.’
JULIE
‘to my horror [I] overheard someone say that. . . my dad had died. . . I don’t remember questioning my mother as to the truth. . .my mother seemed distant from me. . . unfortunately, her inability to alleviate my sorrow had a profound effect on me.’
MARGARET HAWKINS, CHAIRPERSON OF NO PANIC
‘I hear people say they feel as if some power from somewhere has cursed them with this strange madness for life, and that no one else in the world has this problem.’
NORMAN
‘I had two upsetting events as a young child, when an older boy exposed himself to me and I ran all the way home and then when I was 6, I had my tonsils out in hospital. They gave you a ride on a rocking horse and when you turned round your mum had gone . . . just like that! In those days parents weren’t allowed to visit, a whole week with no contact!’
PEN
‘I had a traumatic experience when I was about 13 – I was raped . . . Now, I have flashbacks, like a video in my head. Feel anxious all the time. I am still extremely scared to go to places associated with where it happened.’
SARAH
‘School was terrifying, I was so self-conscious. I took a lot of time off. I thought I was weird, not normal.’
THERESA
‘My first experience of anxiety was when I was 13, in the 1950s. I was going into school assembly and I just wanted to come out, I felt I’d pass out any minute. I was very hot and we were stood there for 20 minutes or more.’
WENDY
We are very grateful to them all for being willing to share their stories. You will learn that they’re in various stages of recovery. Several of them are volunteers with charities such as No Panic and First Steps to Freedom. The full version of Margaret’s story is available from No Panic, see Appendix 2 for contact details.
Ways of using this book
You may feel ready to undertake the challenge of working towards a full recovery. You may feel interested in the idea, but nervous about it. Or you may feel a deep resistance to it. Whatever your current feeling is about recovery, whether you feel optimistic, pessimistic or somewhere in between, you can use this book to make a start.
You can use the ideas and exercises in whatever way suits you best at the present time, and you can come back to them at a later date when you are ready for more progress. There are four particular ways in which this book can help:
1. Relief from the worst aspects of Anxiety and managing your present life better.
You’ll acquire a set of simple tools that will help you to feel better, more in control of your life and more confident. By learning to relax, taking more exercise, eating and drinking more sensibly, learning not to fear panic attacks, practising self-exposure and turning negative thoughts to positive, you’ll feel more able to cope with your life as it is now.
2. Recovering from your current bout of Anxiety
There are a lot of different techniques explained in this book. As you work through them you’ll build a complete portfolio for Anxiety management. Not all of them will work for everybody, but the only way to find out is to try each one. You’ll then be able to create your own individual recovery programme.
3. Dealing with problems in the future
Even when you are over the worst, setbacks can occur. Life will continue to present challenges. If you are prepared for them, they won’t overwhelm you or send you hurrying back to your safe retreat. Once you have worked through this book you will have the skills you need to prevent relapses. You’ll be able to recognise the early warning signs of Anxiety, and you’ll know which techniques work best for you so that you deal with it before it takes hold. And if you do experience a setback, you can review the situation and ask yourself what you can learn from it and how you could have done things differently. This is more than first aid – these are tools for life, and a life which is less Anxiety-prone.
4. Growing as a person and developing unused potential
As you look deeper into the causes of your Anxiety you may feel the need to make changes in your life. You can choose how far down the road you travel. If you are satisfied with levels 1, 2 or 3 then that’s fine. The important thing is that you can make your own choices about important areas in your life – this is a truly healthy state. When Anxiety rules your life, you feel trapped or bullied by it, but when you work through this book you’ll start to take back control.
Exercise
In your notebook, make two lists, headed ‘things I have to do’ and ‘things I can’t do.’ Include the things that Anxiety makes you do, or stops you doing, and anything else that you feel you must do or can’t do. Here’s a brief example:
I have to stay at home
I have to cook for the family
I can’t go in the garden
I can’t control my dog
Now rewrite each list. Instead of ‘have to’ write ‘choose to’. Instead of ‘can’t’ write ‘choose not to’.
I choose to stay at home
I choose to cook for the family
I choose not to go in the garden
I choose not to control my dog
Suddenly you can see that you have more choice than you thought. This can be a powerful turning point – and remember, it includes the choice not to change. If you have truly weighed up the pros and cons, the gains and losses, you may decide it’s okay to settle for level one, or two, or three.
GROUP MEMBERS TALK
‘I have general anxiety due to withdrawal from tranquillisers.’
ANDREA
‘I have suffered from OCD most of my life.’
ANDREW
‘In the end my diagnosis was panic attack.’
BRIDGET
‘I’ve had panic, agoraphobia, death phobia, social phobia, illness phobia and claustrophobia.’
JULIE
‘[I] could not shake off the feelings of dread . . . I was constantly in a state of fear.’
MARGARET
‘My very first recollection of any symptoms resembling that of obsessive-compulsive disorder began to reveal themselves to me as a child.’
NORMAN
‘I have agoraphobia and GAD.’
PEN
‘I have Borderline Personality Disorder and chronic Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.’
SARAH
‘From what I know today I reckon I had social phobia.’
THERESA
‘I’m a recovering agoraphobic.’
WENDY
