Anxiety

People with anxiety live with panic as a constant companion. It doesn't show on the outside, but anxiety is a mental health disorder every bit as debilitating as a physical impairment. A prosthetic leg or a white cane are obvious disabilities; but people who struggle with anxiety are broken on the inside.

“There’s a misconception that anxious people are antisocial, short-fused or over-dramatic. But they’re most likely processing everything around them so intensely that they can’t handle a lot of questions, people or heavy information all at once. Anxiety is when you feel everything.” — Katie Crawford

Anxiety is debilitating. It feels like a constant heaviness in your mind; like something isn’t quite right, although oftentimes you don’t know exactly what that something is.

Sometimes my brain can barely function properly.

Sometimes it takes every ounce of strength to get out of bed and move to the couch.

Sometimes taking a shower takes a Herculean effort. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. Even when things aren’t that bad, I feel terrible because I feel terrible. It shouldn’t be so much work going about the business of everyday life.

Why? Because I have a number of mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety.

During a negative life event, the amygdala, the part of the brain that monitors the “fight or flight” system, holds on to the negative event which continues to repeat itself over and over. This is called a “the pain of a thought” and occurs at the cellular level. Energy therapies reduce or neutralize that “pain” so that the negative event can be forgotten, and life can become less stressful and produce peace of mind in an individual.

Anxiety disorders are the the most common form of mental illness in America , according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. The condition affects 40 million adults in the United States. That’s 18 percent of the U.S. population.

Despite this, people with anxiety disorders still live with a stigma often associated with invisible conditions. So we asked our readers with anxiety what they wished the world could understand about it. This is what they had to say.

I hope you never know what it’s like to wake up and wish you hadn’t. Not because you’re tired and you want another few minutes of sleep; not because you’re hungover; not because it’s Monday and you don’t want to go to work.I mean you wake up, and you realize tomorrow came — and it’s not a good feeling. I mean you wake up and you open your eyes, only to close them right away and silently will yourself away from it all. I mean you wake up and you are disappointed that you didn’t, by some miracle, die in your sleep.