Anxiety

What if the hardest thing you do everyday is get out bed.  Regardless of any challenge you may face. The difficulty of your work task, traffic being a nightmare. Nothing in this world is more treacherous that the seemingly simple act of getting out of bed.  Why, you ask. Because getting out of bed means interacting… with people. 

Its called social anxiety and in most cases its routed in conscious or even subconscious trauma experienced somewhere in your life.  There are thousands and thousands of articles and books written on the subject and its remarkable still how ignorant we are.  Yes we are becoming globally more conscious of mental heath issues and the struggles people face. But this is not an awareness campaign it’s an acknowledgement.

Fear is a natural defence, part of our instinctive response system to danger.  It always has a reason but it can border on irrational 

Anxiety on the other hand is never rational.  It the fear response in overdrive, an overreaction to a past event. Your body can’t tell time therefor it can not discern if something happened in the past or is happening in the present.  If there is a trigger and there is an emotional response there will be a physical one. 

The closest thing I can relate it to is an allergic reaction.  Anyone suffering from an allergy will know this but an allergic reaction is your body over reacting to a harmless substance for instance a peanut.    The first time you came in contact with the allergen probably not much happened. But over time the reaction gets worse until even the smallest amount of contact with the allergen can kill you.  In the end you avoid it. If its severe enough you have counter measures ie an EPI pen. You don’t eat food you didn’t prepare yourself.  There are ways for you to live with this.

The way I see it anxiety is similar in the way that, depending on the trauma, the body learned to react.  If you were made fun of as a kid by just one person just one time the body might not as severe a reaction as someone that was assaulted multiple times by multiple people.

Now there are multiple types of anxiety: social, situational, PTSD, panic disorders, separation anxiety the list is endless.  The good news is all are treatable and all are manageable but none of them are curable. 

I said they are treatable but heres the worse news: it takes time, energy, dedication and patience.  Lots and lost of patience. With yourself and with others.  One day you wake up you think you all better and under control. Things are good for a while and then one small things acts as a trigger and you are right back where you started. 

What it is not is an excuse. And believe me I have met people in my life that use their anxiety as a crutch.  How do determine this. Someone that constantly goes off the medications, doesn’t follow up on appointment and plain simply doesn’t do the work. It’s hard. You have to face your trauma over and over again until you can remove the emotional trigger. 

It takes dedication and sometimes you feel like reliving something one more time will break you so they quit on the process. But it’s the seeking empathy and making excuses for why they quit that drove the believe that they just use it as an excuse.   Quit on the process if you want but then you don’t going harping on your trauma and your anxiety every time you mess up in life. 

The even sadder truth is the amount of people that disparately is asking for help in the way they act.  The people that due social and cultural stigma has not even admitted to themselves that they may suffer from an anxiety disorder.  The undiagnosed and unrecognised anxiety disorders.  

But this is about social anxiety.

Social anxiety is defined as an intense, persistent fear of being watched and judged by others.  But it also more than that.  It’s about more than fear of judgement.  There is also a strong fear of not being accepted.  Of encountering conflict that cant be mitigated.   People are unpredictable and sometimes if you are a sensitive type of person someone else’s mood can negatively affect you. 

Any kind of uncertainty in an interaction sometimes even with  sending something as simple as a text message can cause anxiety.  Some days are better, easier than others.  Sometimes you have to force yourself to go to work because yeah you have bills to pay.  And sometimes you might even have to force yourself just to see a friend.  

For some reason unbeknownst to me it is associated with someone being an introvert.  Which happens to be a gross missed perception of the definition of an introvert.  An introvert is someone that need alone time to recharge.  They are more focused on their inner thoughts and ideas, then whats happening externally.  They tend to be quiet in larger groups and prefer one on one conversations.  

Where as someone with social anxiety can even be an extrovert.