Anxiety can be a silent struggle. When anxiety becomes so normalized in someone’s life it can get easier to hide it. If someone in your life is living with anxiety, they could be living with these experiences all the time.
- Anxiety has no answers: where anxiety comes from, how anxiety develops, and how to make it stop is a mystery. People can develop anxiety disorders at any stage in life. Mental illness can be inherited genetically, yet can also be developed as a way to cope with a particularly difficult experience in life.
- Staying Busy Isn’t About Being Productive: It’s about being distracted. Somewhere on the inside, the busy schedule, list of things to do, ongoing responsibilities, and more, are causing more anxiety. However, the focus on external circumstances is better than staying focused on what feels like an uncontrollable internal world.
- The Past Never Goes Away: Anxiety about something that happened ten years ago can still come up and haunt someone. Heart racing, stomach twisting, painful mental images searing, anxious memories from the past feel like they never die.
- It’s Hard To Be Content: If the anxiety doesn’t go away, almost nothing can feel good enough. Without the right coping techniques or daily state of mind, anxiety can be quite miserable. Many feel that life will only truly be better when the anxiety is gone.
- This Will Make Me Feel Better: Because of that unending hope, many feel that their sense of peace, their inner calm, the relief of their anxious symptoms, is always going to come with that next thing they do, buy, experience, or feel.
- Gratitude Helps Make Sense Of It All: Feeling grateful despite ongoing anxiety is a life saver. Though the anxiety can become overbearing, gratitude is a powerful tool to fight against it. Being able to recognize the good in life and connect to a true sense of gratefulness towards it is a temporary relief.
- Routine Is Everything; Sometimes Too Much: Anxiety can become somewhat obsessive compulsive when there is a routine involved. Routines can help create order and familiarity, which is helpful to calming some nerves of anxiety about change. However, becoming dependent upon a routing can be problematic. Instead of learning to embrace change, it can become more difficult to accept it. A fear of anxiety getting out of control leads to adverse reactions when a routine changes.
LEAD Recovery Center provides extended care treatment programs to men and women seeking ongoing transitional care for addiction and dual diagnosis mental health issues. For information on our residential and non-residential treatment programs, call 800-380-0012.
