When Anxiety Takes Over Your Life, You Are Not Yourself

When anxiety takes over your life, everything falls apart. Anxiety is like an annoying, uninvited guest who takes advantage of your hospitality. It refuses to go when you say it should, and without you realizing it, it will mess up all your thoughts.

When that happens, your personality may change. You will lose your potential, your balance, and your well-being.

From a psychological point of view, we humans are good at making “beauty” the “beast”. What do we mean by this? Well, anxiety in itself is not your real enemy. In reality, it is you who make it the terrible monster that takes away your peace of mind.

In a controlled and balanced way, anxiety can actually be a good ally. It is there to help you respond to threats. It gives you a push, as well as motivation and the ability to achieve things. The problem is that for many people, anxiety ends up being their worst enemy.

Modern society is the perfect breeding ground for anxiety. It thrives under uncertain, precarious conditions. These days, the world is filled with these potential threats. It’s full of things we can not control. But to make matters worse, society actually rewards anxious behavior.

Being busy all the time, having a full schedule, or doing five things at a time is “normal” and something we are meant to do. We mark everyone who is different as lazy or carefree. Giving anxiety these forces, however, can have some serious and unwanted consequences. To live life on autopilot is not to live, it is just to survive.

What happens when anxiety takes over your life?

Robert Edelmann, Professor of Clinical and Forensic Psychology at the University of Roehampton in London, had some interesting points in his book Anxiety: Theory, Research, and Intervention in Clinical and Health Psychology .

He believes that anxiety  in and of itself is not a psychological anomaly, and definitely not a disease. It is a common process. The problem arises when someone starts using it incorrectly.

People can go for months, years, or even decades to build up excitement, fear and worry. Unresolved experiences, constant stress and a negative internal dialogue can make the pressure in this thought even greater. However, the air can not get out anywhere, so it continues to build up to dangerous levels.

Instead of exploding, however, this energy finds a way to get inside you. It penetrates through the fiber of your being and changes you. This is what happens when anxiety takes over.

You want to stop trusting yourself and instead sabotage yourself

Anxiety makes you a different person – someone who goes against their own principles and expectations. As time goes on, your mental discourse will become more and more negative, until you simply sabotage yourself. The anxiety-controlled inner voice will cast a shadow of doubt over every single thing that comes to mind.

Your goals, desires and plans for the future will also  be studied carefully by this insidious anxiety. It will tell you that you will fail again and again. It does not matter how much you have invested in a given task or project. Ultimately, you will doubt so much in yourself that you end up giving up.

Your relationship will suffer

When anxiety takes over your brain and your life, it slowly but surely begins to destroy the relationships you have with other people. When your brain is focused on other things all the time, you will begin to neglect those around yourself without realizing it. It is difficult to understand what others need when you just feel anxious, pressured and uncomfortable.

It is difficult to stay intimate, optimistic and clear when there is an emotional whirlwind inside you. This will undoubtedly  strain your relationship with family members and cause constant problems. It also affects your social life because it is difficult to be a good friend and to make friends when anxiety is what controls you.

You lose interest in everything when anxiety takes over

If you live with this level of anxiety, inertia will take over. You simply want to go to work and come home again. You want conversations where you talk, answer, smile and listen. All in all, you want to do the things you used to enjoy, pretend to be well, and you can even seem happy. Eventually, however, you return home with a feeling of emptiness inside you.

Anxiety disorders flood the brain and body with norepinephrine and cortisol. What these hormones do is get you on guard 24/7, as if you always have to be in survival mode. This makes it completely  impossible to enjoy something or to relax. Your anxious brain will not make room for serotonin or endorphins.

This causes you to become a stranger to yourself. You can not feel good about anything, and nothing feels like it has a purpose or a meaning. All you can do is wander through the existential void. but you can not let it continue to control you, because it will wear you out both physically and psychologically.

Therefore, do not hesitate to ask for help. There are no easy cures for anxiety disorders. The only way to get through them is with specific strategies and mental techniques. But it is possible!