How My Anxiety Manifests Itself

Part of the reason I started this blog in the first place was for me to use it as an outlet and cope with my anxiety. So far, along with other things, its been working pretty well, but I want to create this post to give a little more insight on exactly what I experience.

When I feel something coming on, it starts as just tiny butterflies in my chest or stomach—I simply feel a little uneasy initially. This makes it a little hard, because its almost impossible to tell the difference at this point of whether it actually is just nervousness, or if it’s actually anxiety. I can usually stop myself enough to at least be able to recognize if my nervousness is rational or not. When it’s irrational, it's always anxiety, when it’s rational, it’s impossible to tell if it’ll escalate or not.

Not long after, the butterflies turn into a tightness in my chest that limits my breathing. Focusing on my breathing has helped me with this quite a bit, but my anxiety has gotten to the point that even when I calm my breathing my panic continues. This point is the real sign of whether I’m going to panic or not, because if things continue from here, I’ll panic. However, if the tightness subsides I know I’ll be fine.

When the tightness in my chest gets worse, regardless of how my breathing is, I’ll start to shake. This is where the flight response seems to really kick in, which I can tell because I’ll suddenly have more energy than I know what to do with. Usually I’ll shake my leg intentionally to use up some of that, and it sometimes keeps other parts of my body from shaking. Then it’ll progress to my hands, where I’ll begin fidgeting, tapping, or scribbling if I have a pen and paper. The last place my shaking typically progresses to is my jaw. This is a fairly recent addition to things, which only started within about the past year.

The shaking and chattering sometimes progresses differently, depending on what I’m doing, but it almost always starts in my legs. Like I said, sometimes it’s intentional, because I can usually tell when my jaw will start chattering or some other part of me will start convulsing if I don’t move my legs.

Sometime after I start shaking, but before it’s reached my whole body, I just kind of lose all thought processes. I basically feel my brain revert to a more animalistic stage where I can no longer thing rationally or process what’s going on around me. Everything feels too overwhelming. My vision feels like a blur, and it’s impossible to focus on anything, let alone process what shapes mean. Everything sounds twice as loud, which makes difficult to calm my thoughts enough to understand what’s going on anymore.

My skin will begin to feel like I have bugs frantically crawling under my skin. I’ve gotten better at keeping myself from scratching, but it’s really difficult since it feels like I shouldn’t have skin on my body in the first place. When my skin feels like this, my hands finally start to sweat, and I feel like I need to skin them off with sandpaper to get rid of the feeling. Even the slightest outside touch is irritating and overwhelming.

When I get like this, my whole body will be shaking, and every muscle in my body will be tense. It hurts. It really, really hurts. It’s exhausting, but I don’t realize that until I’m able to calm down. This physical reaction comes in waves where I mostly tense and shake but will calm down some if there aren’t any stimuli for my anxiety. It comes back in waves though, because people will try to check in on me (reasonably so) before I’m fully ready.

When my body calms down like that, I’m still sensitive and unable to think. My brain still isn’t processing things, but it’s starting to realize I’m safe and okay. But, since people don’t see the physical signs anymore, they’ll start to see if I’m good, or try to interact with me in some way. They can’t see that I am still panicking, so the interaction sets me off again. I can’t think when it’s happening, but it feels like something bad will happen when they do that. Since it’s difficult to process things, essentially what I see is a huge shape that’s bigger than me approaching, and like I said, my head has reverted to that of a scared animal, so I tense and shake all over again.

Even minor lights look blinding, any motion feels like it’s moving at a hundred miles an hour, touch feels uncomfortable, voices sound like loud gibberish, and all I can make out are shapes. When it gets to this point, I’m lucky if I can calm down in under an hour. It’s so exhausting, that even after I’ve calmed down, I’ll be out of energy for quite a while.

I don’t feel like I’ve done my panics justice here, I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few points, but I hope this gives you some insight on how bad it can get and how it feels. I’ve never really been around anyone else with anxiety beyond being nervous around people, so I don’t really know how this compares to most people with more than just mild anxiety. I do want you to know though, that from what I understand from Cass, this isn’t how most people with anxiety are.

I know this is a little more serious than most of my other posts, but it really does help me to get this out. If you’ve stuck around this long, thank you, it means a lot to me that you care enough to read the whole thing. I hope this helps you understand how difficult anxiety can get, and I hope you can understand that this is very different from overreacting or throwing a tantrum or something.