💬 TREE 791: Anxiety 2 – get therapy

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 II

When I became ill with depression and anxiety, I went from happily running eight miles to barely being able to run three. I hated going to sleep at night because I knew I would have to wake up and live another day. At its worst, I cried myself to sleep.

My starting point for getting better was seeing my doctor. He referred me to therapy. My therapist helped me understand what caused my depression and what I could do to get better. I was incredibly lucky:

I saw him for free thanks to the NHS.
He was insightful and we worked well together.
The thing messing me up was simple enough that I was able to get my arms round it in the eight sessions I was given.
I didn’t need medication.

(I have nothing against taking medication for mental health. There are people very close to me for whom medication does wonderful things. I’ve never wanted it for myself because I rely on creativity to make a living and I’m afraid that taking a daily medication might affect my ability to be creative. This fear is simply there. It isn’t based on any evidence I’ve seen. I count myself lucky for not having to face that possibly irrational fear while I was trying to get better from something else.)

The process of
struggling to explain the mental and physical misery I was living through,
having my explanations reflected back with insightful questions, and
understanding and naming what was going on
was transformational. I went from being a victim of internal toxic fog to a man with a fan who could start to blow it away. Therapy activated my mental immune system.

I don’t think I would have gotten better on my own. If your mental health isn’t good, please tell your doctor now. Don’t wait until you are in a total crisis. This is especially important if you are a Gen X man like me. We are killing ourselves through drug misuse and suicide in greater numbers than any other age group right now.

If you are in a crisis and you’re in the UK, here’s how to get help:

‘A mental health emergency should be taken as seriously as a physical one. You will not be wasting anyone's time.’ —NHS

It’s an illness. You can get better
Jeff