Blogs
Anxiety messes with lives. That's really the bottom line of anxiety, isn't it? It barges into our lives, uninvited, and acts like a boorish guest. It causes all sorts of miserable symptoms, which are annoying enough as it is. Unfortunately, anxiety isn't just confined to a set of symptoms, but, instead, inserts itself into our lives and has negative effects that cause disruption. While the effects of anxiety are unique to each person who experiences any type of anxiety, there are some effects that many people with anxiety share. In the spirit of "misery loves company," and so you know you're not alone, here are common effects of anxiety--six ways anxiety messes with life.
It's been nearly seven months of a dreary, dystopian existence, and this pandemic is worsening my depression. Ever since March 2020, life as we know it has changed forever. Living in this pandemic has been dubbed "the new normal," but there is nothing normal about it.
I’ve been living in a new place for nearly three months, and the anxiety of loneliness is getting to me. This place is more removed from basically all of my close friends and family, so I’m not going to be able to visit them as often as I once was. Obviously, this has been difficult for me. This post is my attempt to try and come to terms with that.
When your mental illness impacts your relationships, it can harm your self-esteem and your happiness. From the time we're infants, we are bombarded with depictions of love and belonging, usually in an idealistic film or a sappy novel. It's natural that we stumble into the desire for those same kinds of relationships. We have an innate need for it--we yearn to love and be loved.
The year 2020 has been stressful and overwhelming across the entire globe. Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial injustices, the political tensions, and the economic downturn, my level of anxiety builds each time I read the news or log into social media. This information overload can exhaust my mental health, but as I continuously must remind myself: stress does not justify an eating disorder relapse.
The journey to stronger self-esteem is easier when you make time to set yourself up for success. Even when we face tasks that we are unable to do, we can improve our success rate by thinking ahead about why we failed and what we can change this time to help us win. With proper setup, we can change the outcome and bolster our self-esteem.
Growing up, meditation was something I was completely unfamiliar with, and never openly talked about by the adults in my life. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID) that I learned the importance of meditation in every sense of the word.
Being pregnant can be mentally and emotionally challenging enough, but being pregnant with an eating disorder is especially challenging. When I found out I was expecting my first child, I was still struggling with my eating disorder. However, I still managed to have a healthy pregnancy and child.
Even though I've been working toward mental health recovery for years now, feeling better makes me nervous. I spent the past few months struggling harder than I have in quite a while, so I reached out to my psychiatrist, and he prescribed me a new medication. He said it should help prevent some of my suicidal ideation and give me more energy so I would be less overwhelmed by my life. There are so many things that can go wrong with new medications, but that didn't happen for me. It worked exactly like the doctor said it would. I feel much better, and that makes me nervous.
Sometimes building stronger self-esteem is about letting go of things that have been with us for much of our life. In addition to adding new skills to our tool kit, it's important to look carefully at the people, things, and attitudes that we carry with us from the past and decide if they are still relevant to who we are today and who we want to be in the future.
Where do we go from here? Most of the family thinks just to let her hit bottom and then if she reaches out to help any we can. Some want to just keep paying her bills and just let her sit in the house with no responsibilities. Never been on medication and impossible to get to her when she refuses to talk to ANYONE.
Help.
On the day we agreed to videochat to make things less awkward IRL she woke up with a migraine so we rescheduled to the day after, I made sure to assure her that it was okay and to take her time. Later that day, in the late evening we had a nice chat but suddenly she stopped replying, even though nothing had happened. The day after I texted her good morning and said I hope she was feeling a little better. she wouldn't open my texts.
A couple days after I sent her a longer text saying that even though I had only known her for a short time I care a lot for her and would like to know how she are doing, telling her I'm there for her, assuring her I'm not going anywhere even though things might not be very easy. She wouldn't open it.
A week later I sent a text saying not to feel bad about not answering and that I will be there when she is able to answer again. It's been two weeks since this and she still hasn't opened my texts. She hasn't been active at all.
I don't know what else I can do. I assumed she might have fallen into a depression. I have tried to just not think about it anymore, and I haven't that much but when I do it sort of kills me inside...