"I've learned to live with anxiety, but now I'm in charge."
When someone with anxiety explains their symptoms, you understand what they're saying, strange as it may seem, but you can't truly grasp the magnitude of it unless you've experienced it yourself. Now I know that the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes a lot of sense, even though the journey is very painful and you don't feel like you'll emerge stronger, but rather the opposite.
The stress we live with today makes us believe we're Marvel superheroes, able to handle any adversity without breaking a sweat. There's hardly any time for anything, much less for ourselves. Our bodies and minds constantly warn us of being overwhelmed, but there's no time, we can't stop, and we keep spinning on this hamster wheel that is our lives, at high speed, until we encounter a truly massive obstacle. Our wheel derails, and everything explodes, including ourselves. If you don't stop, if you ignore the warning signs, nothing happens in the short term, but eventually, life will stop you, your body will stop you. It will do so with a physical illness, a weakened immune system, a panic or anxiety attack, or sleep problems, among many other things. It depends on the person, their circumstances, their body, and how long that mental and physical overload has lasted, but without a doubt, it will stop you.
Ten minutes of daily meditation to reduce stress and anxiety
There's usually not just one reason that causes you to collapse, but rather a combination of several, an accumulation of stressful situations. In my case, there was one that acted as a trigger: my eldest son's Crohn's disease diagnosis when he was nine. Let's just say that was the final straw, until my body finally gave out and cried for help in the shower, in the form of a panic attack.
I always explain how surreal anxiety is. Suddenly, your mind goes into overdrive, trying to protect you from all dangers , real or imagined, and you live in a constant state of alert; it's exhausting. What's more, anxiety takes advantage of your initial vulnerability to escalate rapidly, spreading that fear to other areas of your life and making you increasingly less independent. I wouldn't wish the feeling of having a panic attack in the middle of the street on anyone. It's unlike anything I'd ever experienced. It lasts just a few minutes, but it's a truly awful time.
If you don't accept that you have anxiety, you will live with it from a place of conflict and confrontation, and that's like adding fuel to a fire.
I descended, I don't know if to hell, but certainly to the depths below, because there was darkness, fear, sadness, and the thought that I would never be able to surface again. And now, looking back with the perspective of time, I tell you: you can get out. But to emerge you must take all the right steps, without skipping any, and for that you need: a lot of patience , large doses of courage, perseverance, help, and motivation.
Learning to live with anxiety
In my case, I started by understanding how anxiety works , because that's key. It's a learning process you have to revisit and digest over time, but when you truly decipher and assimilate it, it's the driving force that propels you forward.
The second basic lesson, which took me a while to internalize, was that haste and anxiety can never go together. Naturally, you want to get out of that phase as soon as possible, to have something as bad as anxiety leave you once and for all, but until you understand that it doesn't work that way, you keep doing the exact opposite and feeding it, more and more.
Learning to live with anxiety takes time , because understanding how it works is not easy.
I did a long process of acceptance and daily coping , which allowed me to move forward, slowly but surely. If you don't accept that you have anxiety, you'll live with it in conflict, in confrontation, and that's like adding fuel to a fire.
7 tips for managing anxiety
Having an anxiety disorder is unfortunately more common than we think, and it's perfectly normal. It simply frightens us more because our minds are so complex and we struggle to know how to manage them, but it's a condition like any other we might have, and we shouldn't be ashamed. We should treat something that is completely normal as something normal.
My mind tricked me into believing something was real. So I had to question the fears my mind created, fears that weren't real, so the alarm would stop going off unnecessarily. At first, anxiety took away a lot of my independence , to the point where I couldn't walk alone, but I never stopped doing anything I had to do or wanted to do. I kept facing my fears, every day, every chance I got. Without dwelling on negative thoughts, I approached them calmly, knowing that even if I had a panic attack, I could control it, because now I had more tools and because they always pass. They last a few minutes, but then they're always over.
Overcoming that fear of fear is the hardest thing, but once you break that vicious cycle, your mind begins to create new neural pathways, which will make you increasingly calm and confident , and you can gradually recover your life.
I've learned to live with anxiety. By my rules, not hers. I'm in charge, and she comes with me, quietly and without bothering me.
Emerging stronger from adversity
My personal trainer encouraged me to write a book about my experience. And after some time, after initially dismissing the idea, I did it. The process of writing down everything we had been through and being able to look at it from the outside and with perspective made me realize how hard it had all been, but also how healing it turned out to be.
These traumatic experiences, my son's illness, the anxiety disorder, and the agoraphobia, transformed me from within. I am no longer the same person I was four years ago, when all this began. It's impossible to be.
Now I know my body and I listen to it more. I've understood that stress is a bad travel companion and that living life more calmly allows you to see things in the landscape, in your surroundings, that you didn't see before. I prioritize myself. Me before work, before my family, before my friends... now I'm not last, I'm first on my list. Because I'm a mother and caregiver to two children, one with an illness that makes you feel like you're on a rollercoaster ride and who will need me when he has another flare-up, but to be able to take care of him, I have to take care of myself first.
Now I am the master of my own time , because I know how to set boundaries and I do so without remorse. I live in the present, the now, because I know it's the only thing we can be sure of. The past is gone and the future hasn't arrived, nor is there any certainty that it ever will, so I live for today, and tomorrow…we'll see what dawn brings.
And if you ask me if I still have anxiety, I'll tell you yes, I still do, but I've come to understand that it might never completely go away, or maybe it will, we don't know, but for now, I've learned to live with it . By my rules, not its own. I'm in charge, and it comes with me, quietly and without bothering me. I'm stronger now than when all this started, for sure, because I've learned so much, and that's made me live differently.
Anabel Rodríguez had her first anxiety attack one ordinary day while she was in the shower, coinciding with a stressful period in her life and the diagnosis of a chronic illness in her nine-year-old son. Since then, this teacher has lived with this disorder, trying to understand it and learning to manage it every day.
Now, she has decided to share her experience through the book When the Storm Passes. Proven: You Can Overcome Anxiety and Learn from It. A very explicit title regarding her intentions: "To help other nomads who find themselves in the desert of a chronic illness and who have fallen into the dark pit of anxiety."
