Anxiety Central

Anxiety, in my case, is a 24-hour affair.   I start the day with an ever so slight discomfort in my body.  Fifteen minutes into the day, a non-specific fear begins to work its magic throughout my body, increasing the discomfort.  I then take a mental anxiety reading by assigning myself a number on a scale of one to ten, one being calm and ten being very serious painful discomfort.  If my score is a three or four, I know that what I am feeling in my body is non-specific anxiety.  Five through ten usually involves some outside event.  It does not take much to elevate the score.

In my case, physical discomfort from chronic, non-specific anxiety is not unlike chronic pain.  The difference between non-specific anxiety-related pain and other types of pain is that anxiety pain involves constantly questioning myself about why I am so anxious, what am I doing wrong.  It dovetails very nicely into depressive negative thoughts, the blame game or “it is my fault that I feel this way, there must be something I can do to make the anxiety go away.”

In contrast, event-related anxiety, which most people feel to some degree, can lessen once the event is resolved.  But when your baseline is three on the anxiety scale, outside events can get you high up the scale fairly quickly.  To be at seven or above translates into severe mental distress.

For generalized anxiety, I take medicine and meditate to even out my discomfort.  However, I have found no way to lessen more severe, generalized anxiety.  I just tough my way through it.

When anxious events actually occur, like a medical problem or even something as mundane as giving away clothes, the only helpful thing I can do is to try to resolve the event that is specifically triggering my anxiety as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, that is not always possible.  So once again, toughing it out with the help of anti-anxiety medicine and meditation is the only course of action.

My art piece for today is what I think anxiety looks like.  Having a visual view of the condition reminds me that “severe generalized anxiety,” enhanced by event-related anxiety, is a serious medical problem that currently has no cure.