I always find traditional descriptions of anxiety as dissatisfying. Despite this, I do feel that I have a genuine disorder. I remember clearly not having. I remember the painful slip into disorder. It is a weird thing to watch your thoughts degrade into fears repeating themselves over and over again. It is because of this very clear memory of the falling into anxiety that I have, that I feel so certain that anxiety is a real disorder. Based on my experience, it is quite clearly thought based, but chemically and neurally sustained. The process of climbing out is an odd one. It is the process of modifying thoughts with intentionality so as to reverse the chemical changes that have occurred. It almost feels as if you are lying to yourself at times. Fortunately, you have the memory of 24 years of clear thinking to help you recall what truth actually is, and the thing that is lying or dishonest, is your fear-based calculations. Unfortunately, it is a slow process, but headway is made, bit by bit. Little bit at a time.
But I wanted to write today not about my progress but instead about the phenomenology of anxiety, what it feels like to have anxiety. Most people don't know, except for those who have it. I am unsure how general this experience is, so I will disclaim this by stating that this is what I feel, and it how anxiety appears to me. It might have a different appearance and modality in others' minds.
For me, I experience anxiety as a disruption. It is like sitting at dinner with your wife at your favorite restaurant, but having a nagging ringing in your ear that prevents you from focusing on her. Most often when I catch myself in anxiety, I find myself with my eyes focused on nothing in particular, adrift among the scenery as my mind turns inward. Questioning some aspect of itself mostly. It is weird to have your eyes not focus on anything. I sort of clench my teeth too at the same time. It is a weird feeling. Generally accompanied by this feeling of crawling emptiness in my stomach. Usually I sort of find stumble upon myself in this state..... The self analyzing part of my brain catches itself analyzing itself doing it and says, this is anxiety.... then the rational part says, "stop!". Then the moral part usually feels slightly guilty for having indulged in this. This guilt is unnecessary, but it is there. It is a frustration, or a disappointment, that things aren't all the way better yet, even though I want them to be. I know the key to making them better is discipline, and to be even more in the moment.
Which brings us to what I, and what many others, think the core of anxiety is. Anxiety IS that time spent drifting off. It is the time spent out of the moment. It was hard at first to catch the beginnings of this. I found myself just there, with no clue of how the thought got started. With discipline and training, I began to see what the beginnings of this were. I began to catch it earlier and earlier. It is almost always a dark, self-doubting thought that begins it. Though this is actually the easiest type of beginning for me to deal with. It is much scarier when the mind begins from a question which to me seems reasonable..... Like will I find a job that satisfies my needs and fulfills me? Why should I enjoy this? What do I like about my family? It is these reasonable questions which prompt the gnarliest twists of my stomach, that sick hunger for an answer that won't come. Usually, these deep sorts of questions don't have answers anyway, but the mind, prompted by the feeling of the body prompted by the mind, plunges into the dark answers that fear submits as truth. From there the mind drifts into the dark sea of self-diagnosis and self-prognosing. A dark sea it is indeed. This darkness catches the focus of the mind and pulls it away from others, from the present moment. Into this analysis of what is and what isn't rather than just looking at what simply is right in front of you. You think to yourself, when the hell did life get so complicated. (Aside, this lends these thoughts a bit of credibility in the world of complicatedness we live in. I feel like nowadays, the more complicated something is, the more likely it is to be true). But in that very thinking is the problem itself, for you are almost definitionally not living in the moment. What is so special about the moment? I'm not sure, but it seems that for me anxiety is a separation from it. I guess the specialness lies not so much in the moment in itself, but in the joy that it has to offer. It might not seem like all that much, but in comparison to the dark seas of the mind, it has ALOT to offer, lol.
So for me, this is why I say anxiety is disruption. It is that questions which caused you to leave the moment. It is that question that is so scary that you feel as if you MUST turn your focus from how good your coffee tastes, or how soft your dog feels, to some irrelevant, probably unanswerable question. This is what anxiety is to me. I hope that it helps someone that I shared it. I really love most of the people I know, and I hope that it might help them figure something out about themselves.
