What Is Anxiety?

Anxiety is a blood curling scream inside your brain that does not give up and does not quit when you are tired. Anxiety is a constant itch on the back of your brain you can never scratch. Anxiety is eyes darting back and forth assessing the situation, wondering when our darkest fears are going to be realized. Cowering in your mind because someone else is around or because of the .2% possibility that this or that could happen. Anxiety is what happens when you ask me how my day has been, and I take a split second to respond with “ok” but inside my mind is going a million miles an hour wondering why, just why you would want to know this information and why you are gathering it? Anxiety is feeling like you cannot breathe, and your eyes are going to pop out of your skull any second because the pressure in the room just went up to a million pounds per square inch. Anxiety is walking into a room full of people and feeling like suicide would be an appropriate response to other’s hello’s.

Social anxiety is something that effects millions of people in the world, and hardly any of the people affected know how to help it. For some, there will never be a cure for the “toe curling” and “eye popping” internal scream of death going on inside their brains constantly, whenever they see people. As Doctor Thomas A. Richards says in his brilliantly inciteful online piece, “What is social anxiety?”, “The physiological manifestations that accompany social anxiety may include intense fear, racing heart, turning red or blushing, excessive sweating, dry throat and mouth, trembling (fear of picking up a glass of water or using utensils to eat), swallowing with difficulty, and muscle twitches, particularly around the face and neck,” which is a more “psychologist” view point. In a more personal view point, I would say that it is similar to my own interpretation of anxiety. But more intense depending on whichever factors of the day are prevalent. The only thing some people can do is learn to quiet the scream to a point where its not completely taking over the senses. For some like myself it is not just people, but situations, potential situations, non-potential situations that would not happen in a million years that my brain has convinced me could possibly happen at this very second because of this or that. Sensory overload is something that happens on a day to day basis even when normal people are unaware of what is going on. What is sensory overload you ask? Sensory overload is when we cannot see clearly because our brains fear centers have been activated. When there are fireworks going on and all you can see is bright flashes of light, so your other senses go crazy in fear because you now cannot see. Your heart beat goes crazy and you start sweating because you can feel the attack coming. Someone, somewhere, is staring at you and they are going to attack you at any second because you have left yourself open for attack. Sensory overload is when someone brushes up against your arm to get past you and all that you can think about is seriously contemplating cutting off your arm because someone touched it, and all you can think about is living your life with one arm just because someone else touched you on accident. Not having a clear reason as to why cutting off the arm is the necessary step. Sensory overload is when you feel so compressed and squished that you feel the air coming out of your lungs and you feel like at any second could be your last. It can happen at any time and at any place and there is nothing no one can do to stop it except to put you out of your misery.

Sensory overload and anxiety are extremely similar because they go hand in hand. To some people, sensory overload and anxiety are the same exact thing because both experiences are the same thing. Think if it as a head rush in a bad way, where you can slowly feel yourself dying and that feeling never truly goes away. For many people in the world this not only happens daily but it is a constant ongoing thing. Joseph Goldberg, MD. Wrote in an extremely informative article on WebMD, named, “What is social anxiety disorder?” He states, "Some of these situations might not cause a problem for you. For example, giving a speech may be easy, but going to a party might be a nightmare. Or you could be great at one-on-one conversations but not at stepping into a crowded classroom." All socially anxious people have different reasons for dreading certain situations, which is as I was saying that each person has a different reaction to each day and each event.

Many times, I have been given this and that prescription for it. Sometimes it works but turns us into zombies. Yet sometimes it does nothing at all. It is the fear of being judged. People who have spent their whole lives being judged for this and that end up having social anxiety disorder. If you are wondering what it feels like imagine yourself wearing headphones and listening to a person screaming a terrified scream of agony while seeing bright flashing lights and feeling someone lightly stabbing you on every square inch of your body, smelling someone’s grungy body odor after spending all day working out, and tasting the disgusting putridness of rotten milk all at the same time. Then imagine that being a constant sensation never really going away but always kind of sort of being in the back of your head. Now imagine that it gets stronger any time you see someone you do not know. Or go somewhere new, or interact with someone you do not know, or see fireworks or must socialize with people you do know. This constant effort has caused a lot of people in this world to seek ways of comforting that are bad, drugs, alcohol, sex, suicide. Anxiety is a constant problem. It is something that will never go away. There are reasons it is there in the first place. There are days and times where it feels like you left the anxiety at home. Yet there are days you cannot catch your breath because its breathing down your neck asking what you are going to do about it.

Being plagued with something like this is difficult. It is not something a doctor can see on a microscope or MRI machine. It is not something that we can convey to people in a manner that they can understand properly. There are triggers that we didn’t even know we had. It is a constantly changing and adapting mental issue that is hard to put into words. So how do we fix this problem? The answer is that we do not. We do not focus on a cure, we focus on the cause. For everyone who is plagued by anxiety there is a different reason, and very few actually face the reason, but, if we can find the reason then we can find a solution. For every reason there is a way to get over. Some people have been hurt and being hurt in specific ways cause specific reactions. But if we can get over what happened to cause it then maybe there are ways to end the anxiety all together. Something like DBT therapy is out there to help people help themselves. Standing for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, it is a type of therapy that conditions the brain to help itself. And has helped many people who have been associated with both sensory overload and social anxiety disorder. It is something that is not only helpful for anxiety but also can be used to quit smoking, anger management, and other psychological problems.