For Anxiety, Just Do This!
When I look back on the years I spent trapped by intrusive, looping thoughts, my skin still prickles. I can almost feel the weight of all that worry again. I had wrestled with nervousness and dread since I was a kid, but my life now looks nothing like that. I have a wife, a daughter I adore, and a quiet kind of comfort that makes the old struggles easy to forget.
So where did it start? The anxiety in my family really took root the day we lost my father to lung cancer. By the time he was diagnosed, the disease had already reached its final stages, so there was no cure left to try. My mother did everything she could before that. She kept my schooling going and made sure he never ran short of medication, all while scrambling to pay the bills after he could no longer work.
After he died, she started having panic attacks that seemed to come from nowhere. I was a watchful child, closely bonded to her, and watching her come apart like that frightened me. That is part of why I think anxiety is learned as much as it is inherited. I don't recall a single panic attack of my own until hers began. My own strange habits did show up earlier, though. Some nights I would lie there staring at the ceiling, convinced that if I let myself drift off, I might not wake up.
The first time it fully hit me was at my college graduation. I was with friends, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky, nothing out of the ordinary for me back then, so I never saw it coming. A sudden wave of dizziness took over. My balance disappeared. The last thing I can remember is a car striking me, and then waking up in a hospital bed. They kept me there two weeks while the fractures and bruises mended.
That accident changed something. A fear of being out among people started growing in me, a creeping agoraphobia that pushed me indoors more and more. My mind raced with thoughts I couldn't switch off, yet I kept trying to seem fine in front of everyone. It wasn't working. My girlfriend drifted away because I had gone quiet and unresponsive. My friends teased me for being jumpy and lost in my own head. This was my last year of coursework, and it fell apart: I couldn't finish my research for finals, and the people closest to me started to doubt me. Worst of all, my mother began to believe she had failed me somehow. Nothing cut deeper than that.
Clawing your way back from feelings that feel completely outside your control is brutal, but I will say this plainly: so much of it lives in your head. During that final year the fear had its hands all over me, and I decided I was done letting it win. I went to a psychiatrist friend, and he walked me through something called Thought-Error-Analysis, or TEA, a method laid out by Sam Obitz in Been There, Done That? Do This! Obitz used it with every patient he treated. I borrowed the book and followed the steps, which were refreshingly plain.
The setup is just three columns drawn with vertical lines. The first I labeled THOUGHTS, the second ERRORS, the third ANALYSIS/ANSWER. Whenever a thought surfaced, I jotted it in the first column, then picked apart the faulty logic hiding inside it. The last column held whatever conclusion I reached once I had reasoned it through, little corrections like: I am not a bad person, I am actually a good one. Day by day I felt lighter, and my attention started landing on my coursework instead of my obsessions.
Meditation turned out to be a strong partner to the TEA work, and I ran the two side by side. No medication, no pills. What pulled me out was stubborn determination and a genuine change in how I thought.
Note: This piece was written as a first-person account of someone else's real experience, as told in India Today Magazine. -Anonymous Contributor