🤒 TREE 791: Anxiety 1 – it’s an illness

Here are the four things I know about anxiety. They come from personal experience. I’m not offering medical advice. I don’t know if the things that helped me will help you.

1. Treat anxiety as an illness

2. Get therapy

3. Remove cognitive dissonance

4. Quit caffeine

Anxiety I

In the first half of the 2010s I had depression. It wasn’t bad enough to stop me from functioning, but any time I paid attention to my feelings I felt sad. I also had anxiety attacks all the time. They lasted from a few hours to a couple weeks. Adrenalised panicky sadness was my default mode of existence for a few years.

It took me a while – maybe a couple years – to realise what was going on. When it finally dawned on me that I was depressed, I did a smart thing that I’ll always be grateful to 2010s Jeff for. I told myself, and then I told Christine: This is an illness.

I’ve been fortunate that my personal experience with illness has been hay fever, a few colds, the flu a couple times, mild Covid, chicken pox and earaches when I was a kid. Never once did I blame myself for these illnesses. They were things that happened to me. I was confident I would recover. I did recover.

I decided to think about anxiety and depression the same way because that’s what they are: illnesses. Immediately I was free from the pressure to do better, feel better, be better. That decision ignited the first little spark of hope that I could get better.

Grow slowly
Jeff