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Is Anxiety Toxic? Mind-Body Solutions to Stress?

May 15, 2011 Kate White
  • Is panic emotional pollution?

Running on adrenaline, cortisol -the fear center of the brain staging neurochemical warfare on your nervous system- is the equivalent of climate change. It's dangerous. It's doing your whole system damage you can't even see: Forests for trees.

Anxiety: I can't stand it anymore

Anxiety alters the way our minds and bodies respond to stress so that it's harder, in the long term, to return to a state of calm and restfulness.

I can't stand it anymore. If you have an anxiety disorder, you know what I mean. It isn't just an empty phrase. It's a feeling, in and of itself. I can't stand it anymore! Which feeling eventually lands you in a corner, hoping something, anything will change.

And it does: change. Eventually, it tires you out. Sleep, wake, whatever, it's all the same at some point because your body has stopped reacting to its own signs of stress; It knows only too well.

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Where you can, you'll intervene. Major, minor, somewhere in between. Do some more exercise, eat less "junk" food, pretend you can meditate, distract thyself with 101 Ways to Balance a Life that's so thoroughly imbalanced you wonder how you're walking upright. Some days you're not. Some days it's a matter of prying open your eyelids, and holding yourself up until the world just falls away.

I think you can do something about emotional pollution (panic and anxiety at extreme doses) but it isn't fast. It requires a vast commitment, and a decision to never give up. No matter what's going on for you, nor why.

It also means that clearing one's mind, preventing the toxic build-up of anxiety and stress, is sometimes going to take precedence over everything else. Which is hard, and not always possible; There are real world responsibilities, other factors, that may mean there's no going back.

Panic: When surviving the thing itself creates a harmful state

Coping with a mental illness is kind of like holding a jar of toxic waste in one hand, while being asked to go about your days like anybody else. And if I think of a panic attack as the mind-body equivalent of an A-bomb, it's not far off.

  • What would you do after a nuclear attack? Is that a question you plan your life around?

Sometimes I just want to tell people who try to help, who've never actually had a panic attack, to let me deal with my fear and anxiety on my own terms. In my own way. When I'm ready.

I want to say: Don't treat a disaster like a disaster - it's already bad enough.

Because it's rare that anybody actually does treat a disaster like a disaster, if you look at the way people behave in crises. For the most part, most people get on with things as best as they can, under the circumstance - provide for the basics: needs, versus wants, that sort of thing.

That's what treating anxiety is; Nothing more, nothing less.

APA Reference
White, K. (2011, May 15). Is Anxiety Toxic? Mind-Body Solutions to Stress?, HealthyPlace. Retrieved on 2024, November 21 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/treatinganxiety/2011/05/is-anxiety-toxic-mind-body-solutions-to-stress



Author: Kate White

pamela prater
May, 16 2011 at 5:11 pm

i feel toxic tonight i have panic attacks from hell im wking to save the hungry and the homeless.and im actutually living it. have i lost my bloody mind.

Jaliya
May, 15 2011 at 6:51 pm

Kate :-)
As always, you've got the thinker in me going at a zillion miles an hour ;-D
"...holding a jar of toxic waste in one hand while being asked to go about your days like anybody else" -- Yes, that's what it is often like ...
Thanks xo

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