Just after
Christmas this year I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The three
months prior to this had, without a shadow of a doubt, been the worst of my
life. During this period I got so miserable that I experienced what it was like
not to want to be alive anymore. This was something I never thought I would go
through. I’d always considered myself a happy person with a job I love, amazing
people around me and, in writing, something that I feel deeply passionate
about. So, to go from this to looking out of my window and genuinely believing
I could make the world a better place by jumping out of it was a pretty
horrible experience.
Thankfully I’m now
feeling much, much better and owe a huge debt to a combination of brilliant
friends, family, medication and most importantly meditation. But in the
early days of recovery – the time that was also closest to my darkest moments –
one of the things that perhaps made the most difference, and is in no small
part responsible for my ability to see that there was another path ahead of me
– one that didn’t involve bypassing the perfectly adequate elevator system in
my building – was reading about the experiences of other people who were going
through or had gone through similar things. The bravery of these individuals to
put their most horrible experiences into words allowed me to see that I wasn’t
crazy, I wasn’t the worst human being to have ever walked the earth and what I
was going through was actually something that huge amounts of people suffer with.
Looking back, the
first time I plucked up the courage to Google what I was experiencing (this
doesn’t sound like a hugely courageous act, I know, but later I’ll endeavor to
explain how the self sabotaging nature of chronic or acute anxiety attacks you
from the inside in every single way it can) and the material I then found, was
the wedge that drove just a tiny little way into the black, poisonous maelstrom
of my mind. It didn’t get that far in, and the condition did its absolute best
to drive it out again, but somehow that little glow within the darkness held
on.
Nine months later,
I find it hard to recognise my mind as it then was. Indeed, the further you go
into recovery, the more difficult it is to believe that you were ever in that
state in the first place. But it’s important never to forget, and more
important still to hold onto what helped you, especially in those make or break
early days. So, with that in mind, I feel like I should pass on the favour
given by these often-nameless individuals that made so much difference. I
suppose I believe that the more people share their experiences, then the less
the stigma around mental health will continue to drive us all into ourselves
and further away from those we need to pull us out. I should also say that I’m
about as far from a neuroscientist as it’s possible to be, and a lot of the
stuff I say may, scientifically speaking, be a complete misinterpretation – or
at the very least, a gross oversimplification – of the limited amount I’ve read
around the subject, but hopefully this won’t render it completely pointless.
The first thing to
say about anxiety is that it turns you into your own worst enemy. Not in the
sense of staying out for a few more drinks when you have to be up for work or
taking on a new project when you know that you don’t have enough time, but in
the sense that there’s a vicious, manipulative goblin-bastard living inside you
head (who is essentially also you, but imagine the worst you there could ever
possibly be). When my condition first hit it was due to a combination of
massive changes in my life. I moved cities, changed jobs, changed my living
situation and upended my daily routine beyond all recognition. What causes the
condition is different in every person, but mine is brought on by taking myself
out of my comfort zone and routine. The most primal part of your brain, your
fight or flight mechanism, the thing that keeps you alive but is also the cause
of all this, detects a threat that it doesn’t understand. The conscious side of
your brain (your frontal lobes, I think … again, apologies to anyone who
actually understands this stuff properly) can comprehend the idea that this
combination of factors can be an unsettling experience and may cause you some
discomfort, but the more primitive and old-fashioned area of the brain – the
home of anxiety, depression, jealousy and countless other treats – doesn’t work
like this. It goes more with something like: “SHIT! WHAT’S GOING ON? THERE’S
SOMETHING ATTACKING US BUT I DON’T GET IT. I CAN’T SEE A TIGER ANYWHERE … OR AN
ALPHA MALE HELL BENT ON DRIVING US OUT OF THE TRIBE OR BASHING OUR HEAD IN WITH
A ROCK … SO, WHY AM I THREATENED!!?”
Faced with this
incomprehensible situation, a product of trying to function with caveman biology
in modern society, your brain does the only thing it can to ensure that it
keeps you safe: it floods you with the kind of chemicals that only have a
practical function when there’s a hungry predator bearing down on you. Were it
indeed a lion that I had come up against back in November, these chemicals
would have given me the ability to run as fast as I possibly could for longer
than I’d ever normally be able to, and had that been the case, I’d have been
wholly grateful for their contribution.
As it was, this redundant surplus in my brain spurred my primitive
control centre into an even worse course of action. Unable to find a genuine
threat in the outside world, my inner cave-Chris began looking internally for
the problem. “IF WE CAN’T SEE A DANGER IN YOUR SMALL RENTED ROOM IN BRIXTON,
THEN THE DANGER MUST BE WITHIN!” he roared. And so into your own mind you go.
And as anyone who has ever experienced this will tell you, it’s no fun.
A great book I
read on the subject, which I’ll reference at the end of this, describes the
mind as a maze. And fuelled by a chemical imbalance that turns your inner
narrator into the most hateful, spiteful individual you’ve ever had the
misfortune of encountering, you venture into this spiralling endless set of
pitch-black corridors, armed only with the sole objective of proving that you
are somehow in mortal danger. Now all the while, the rational mind tries to
fight your corner, but its voice is weak and its conviction soon lost and
before you know it, you’re cooking up the most horrendous paranoid thoughts and
fantasies. Within a few hours of first getting ill, you’ll probably have
convinced yourself that everyone in your life that you care about actually
hates you, any feelings of safety and security you have are built on the fact
that there’s a danger lurking just out of sight that you’ve failed to spot, and
all the memories you have that contradict these ideas are in some way flawed.
And this is all before you’ve turned on yourself!
This is when
things get truly fun and a malevolent creativity, the likes of which you couldn't have ever previously imagined, begins to grow within your mind; slowly killing you like those vines that choke the life out of the trees they climb. Life becomes a daily nightmare in which you grind each
and every one of the most insidious beliefs you can imagine deeper and deeper
into your psyche. An important thing to understand about the brain at this
juncture is that due to the varying speeds of the different parts, feelings
happen before thoughts. It doesn’t
feel like they do, but they do. And in this tiny little difference in timing
lies a huge part of the power of anxiety.
The actual process
goes like this …
1) Brain floods
itself with horrible fight or flight chemicals
2) Human brain
can’t understand how it could feel so, so horrendous without a discernable
reason
3) Human brain
looks into memories/fantasies to cook up some justification for the feeling.
However, because
all this happens so fast, what it feels
like to you is this …
1) I
remember/think of something
2) this thing
makes me worse than I’ve ever felt … little voice* “But…it doesn’t seem that
bad”
3) more chemicals
pumped in … right, look deeper. There must be something you’ve missed
4) more chemicals,
more chemicals, more chemicals* explore deeper into memory/fantasy, begin to
become obsessed – feel that just beyond your view is the reason for this
terrible feeling (something you’ve done or something you are… it must be out
there somewhere, just keep digging, keep looking, keep imagining)
5) stop eating;
it’s not helping
6) stop sleeping;
no need of that either
7)…
8)…
9)… etc. etc.
This eternal
impossible quest to find explanation and justification for these incomprehensible
feelings drives people to convince themselves that they are the worst things
imaginable – even if there’s no evidence to support it, that doesn’t matter.
You long ago stopped trusting your own memories and ability to read what’s
going on around you. You can’t turn to your friends or family either. Those
idiots have let you walk around for twenty-eight years without realising the
evil that resides in you; what use can they possibly be!?
This is the point
where I must passionately appeal to people who don’t suffer from these
conditions to keep a very, very close eye on your loved ones and the people
around you, because let me tell you, they will not be sharing any of this stuff
with you themselves.
I only told one
person at the time a small part of what I was going through and really only
because it was completely unavoidable. Luckily for me, this person was amazing,
but for so many others this might not be the situation and this is why we all
have to keep an eye on one another. I remember holding my phone in my hand
looking at the number of one of my best and oldest friends, trying to make
myself push the button to call.
“Just fucking
call. This person will listen, this person will help you.”
The only reason this person will help is because they don’t know you
really. They’ve only ever seen the false front you put on for the world. If you
really want to make this person’s life better, you should kill yourself.
This sounds so
ridiculous to me now, but believe me, when you’re in the thick of it, nothing
could seem more real; and just as you’re having these thoughts a brilliant HD
Technicolour reel of every time you’ve not been a good friend to this person
appears in your mind’s eye – some of it true, some of it not. Indeed, part of
what makes you believe the impossible to be true is the brain’s terrifying
ability to create these images in a nanosecond. If none of this is real, you
ask yourself, then why is it all here before I’ve even had a chance to process
it and why does my mind’s eye feel like it’s sitting in the front row of the Imax?
You won’t get an answer to that though,
as your internal goblin-bastard will have already chimed back in:
Look, you worthless c*nt. Look at all the times you’ve let this
person down. How dare you think to call them for help? How dare you trouble any of the good
people around you?
This kind of thing
became my life. I developed a mask that meant I could scrape my way through
work, I hid from social engagements and friends and generally drove my self
into abject misery. But no one knew. Not really. Some people had an idea that
something was up and that I wasn’t particularly well, but no one apart from the
one aforementioned person really had any idea – figures of people who suffer
from anxiety disorders, particularly pure OCD, are not believed to be that
accurate for this very reason; so many people probably never ever speak about
it, and some of these end up taking their own lives.
Genuinely, that
could have been it for me too. I was thinking long, hard and very seriously about
killing myself. Ultimately I got lucky, I guess. I remember thinking clear as
day with no real emotion attached to the situation (I had basically nothing
left by this point) well, you could kill yourself or you could go to the doctor. Both seemed like perfectly feasible options.
I may as well have tossed a coin, really. That’s how removed from yourself,
everyone and everything around you you become. Sure your friends and family
will be sad for a bit, but then they’ll come to realise that you’ve actually
done them and the world at large a massive favour.
I’m lucky to have
amazing friends and family, but as I said before, they didn’t know this was
going on. I hid it and I hid it pretty well, as countless other people do and
are doing right now. And it is this that brings me back to the reason for writing this.
People suffering, you’re not alone. There’s so much help out there and so many
people going through what you’re going through. It feels like the most
difficult thing you’ve ever done and your condition will rile against it with
all its fury but you have to just open your mouth and tell someone – at first a
friend and then a professional, or at the very least click on the links at the
end of this blog. There will come a time where you’ve learned techniques that
render all this a memory; for me half an hour of mindfulness of breathing a day
is worth a thousand hours in therapy and so much more powerful than medication.
This may work for you as well, or perhaps another path will help, but there
will be something.
To people who
don’t suffer with these kind of things, just be that little bit extra aware of
the people around you. The statistics show that many, many people suffer in this
way and they also show that the likelihood of them sharing it with you is very,
very slim. Keep your eyes open and if people seem a bit different, don’t assume
it’s something minor. Your small effort to find out what’s really going on with
someone might define whether you get to keep that person or not.
People much better at writing and infinitely more
learned than me on the subject can be found below:
http://ocdla.com/ocd-mental-checking-1947
http://www.ocduk.org/sites/default/files/understand-pure-o.pdf.pdf
http://www.steveseay.com/unwanted-thoughts-sensations-ocd-treatment/
http://www.ocdonline.com/#!thinking-the-unthinkable/c1arh
http://www.ocduk.org/sites/default/files/understand-pure-o.pdf.pdf
http://www.steveseay.com/unwanted-thoughts-sensations-ocd-treatment/
http://www.ocdonline.com/#!thinking-the-unthinkable/c1arh
Amazing books on the subject:
The
Mindful Path Through Worry and Rumination, Sameet M Kumar
The Chimp Complex, Professor Steven Peters
The Worry Cure, Dr. Robert L. Leahy