Anxiety: Mostly Harmless?? Let's Try a Few Facts

Why is anxiety viewed as the relatively benign step-child of mental health conditions? Because if you think it's benign, I assure you it's not.

There's a tendency for people to look down on anxiety because maybe it's not the worst case scenario, or there's a bit more of a silver lining to be found - tatty though it may be.

What disturbs me the most is that with depression, they think you're weak - with anxiety, they think you're hysterical but that it's mostly harmless.

Fact: Anxiety is a serious condition

Not treating anxiety as such - regarding it as just nerves, sidelining it - it's the equivalent of believing that being rained on gives you genuine insight into a hurricane.

Fact: Anxiety and panic kill

Don't think people with PTSD commit suicide? Think OCD doesn't cost people their marriages, or that panic attacks don't put people on the unemployment line?

The stories people hold inside, when they live with anxiety day in and day out, aren't filled with a whole lot of happily ever afters.

But that's easy to overlook, once the panic has past. Everything looks normal enough, and sometimes 'normal enough' is good enough. But it isn't good enough to get to the causes of panic, or treat anxiety.

Fact: Anxiety is destructive to relationships

I tend to take a lot of my stress out on those closest to me, as do a lot of us.

Because I'm juggling work, relationships, and an anxiety disorder, and the panic and stress has to come out somewhere.

Usually that means waiting for "a good time" to allow that to happen, so that it doesn't happen at a really bad time: in the middle of a meeting, driving the kids to school.

Which means anxiety affects us the most when we feel safest - with close friends, family, or a therapist.

Ideally it would all be carefully corralled so as not to cut destructive swathes through the more public arenas of my life; It'd come out in therapy, or be managed with medication;

Back in reality, where nothing stays in its place and my name might as well be Alice, I know that...

Anxiety is unavoidable in relationships. Fact.

When the normal stress of vulnerability experienced inside every relationship is added to the very real need for release, anxiety is unavoidable.

I can only keep the panic boxed in for so long -- and the eye of the storm may be pleasant, but it's rather foolish place to build a Zen garden. Which is exactly what one is trying do having a relationship and hoping that it won't be chewed up and spat out by your anxiety disorder.

Anxiety, relationships, and you

Anxiety is the third wheel, and very likely the most uncomfortable menage-a-trois one could think of short of waking up next to Al Gore in a Telly Tubby suit.

Hence I tout the whole awareness thing, and force myself to get out of the house, do things like yoga, which allow stress and anxiety to vent, elsewhere. Better than it all pour down on the heads of my nearest and dearest, though rain I know it shall.