I have experienced more panic attacks than I can count. On average, I have one panic attack per week, and that is after panic attack treatment. Before I knew what was happening to me, I was experiencing panic attacks multiple times per week. Because I am a social person, I often experience these attacks around other people. This has made me very good at explaining, in layman’s terms, exactly what a panic attack is.

Anxiety can be incredibly exhausting. Anxiety can us down physically and emotionally. One reason anxiety is so taxing is that, once in our mind, it takes almost complete control. Fears and worries grow and they stick. It’s a vicious cycle: anxiety makes us worry, and the more we worry, the bigger anxiety grows, and the bigger it grows, the more we worry. However, even when anxiety grows so large it threatens to consume us, there is a way to shrink it back.

A diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or having panic attacks doesn’t automatically mean there will be a co-occurring diagnosis of depression. However, many people with an anxiety diagnosis do suffer from clinical depression, even if only from time-to-time. In my case, I have both bipolar and anxiety disorders. Like many others, I have found that serious anxiety can lead to depression.

I hear an anxious voice in my head. The voice I hear is not related to psychosis, but speaks to me loudly and clearly nevertheless. The anxious voice in my head belongs to anxiety, and its running commentary on what I'm doing wrong never seems to shut up.

My name is Gabe Howard and I have bipolar and anxiety disorders. As a public speaker and writer using my lived experience with mental illness, I say that sentence often. Some version of that is on my business card and website and it is how I start most of my speeches. But, is that my identity? Is a set of diagnoses really who I am?

Last weekend, I had a conversation with a good friend. The conversation involved a disagreement, and I honestly thought I might have a heart attack. I don’t disagree well. Doing so increases my anxiety, sometimes to panic attack proportions. Typically, I change the subject or, better yet, excuse myself and run. This time, though, I stuck it out. One, the woman is a good friend who is used to me, and two, the subject was anxiety. I wanted to stick around for that discussion. The essence of the debate was this: can anxiety be accepted as part of who one is and thus shoved to the background of existence and be practically ignored, or is anxiety bigger than that, something that cannot, will not, be accepted and ignored?

As one of the resident anxiety bloggers here at HealthyPlace, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about anxiety disorders. Between living with anxiety, talking to others who live with anxiety, writing about anxiety, and reading about anxiety, I have amassed quite a bit of knowledge. This is good, because I get a lot of questions. Among them: What is an anxiety trigger? What causes triggers? How can anxiety triggers be avoided? Unfortunately, there is no real, concrete “answer” to any of those questions, save for the first one. We can define what an anxiety trigger is.

Mental Illness Awareness Week 2014 continues. The week means slightly different things to different people (as in specific awareness, the attitude behind the desire for awareness, etc.) To me, it means something relatively simple. It means looking at people in a new way, leading to a new understanding of them as human beings. Mental illness happens to be part, just part, of who they/we are. Awareness of the whole package brings understanding of the whole person.

Managing an anxiety disorder is a bit like navigating a minefield. There are safe places to step and there are dangerous places to step. The trick to navigating a minefield successfully is to not step on any mines, which is made easier by being able to detect where the mines are buried. The trick to navigating anxiety is much the same. Avoid the anxiety and/or panic attack by knowing how to avoid the triggers.

I once had a therapist whom I admired, respected, and trusted who observed during a particular session that I have an anxious personality. Hmm. What, I wondered, did that actually mean? Is that better than the anxiety disorders I had previously been diagnosed with? Or was it worse, because “disorder” implies that something can be improved, whereas a personality is just what it is? Of course my anxiety skyrocketed and I set out to discover what personality has to do with anxiety.