I know I've posted about this before, but I'd love to hear people's thoughts on anxiety. How does it affect you? How do you manage it? What seems to spark your anxiety most?
Over the course of the pandemic, I've come to realize that I've probably always been dealing with some low-level anxiety disorders. I look back at my old drinking and smoking habits and see how that fits into the puzzle. Some behavior observations of past (and current) girlfriends and other people that have been close to me also come to mind.
I'm guessing it stayed mostly latent and in the background because as a healthy white male with a certain degree of privilege there were just not as many environmental factors to trigger the anxiety. It's also traditionally not the type of things guys talk about.
But now COVID anxiety is striking right where I'm most vulnerable! As lucky as I've been to have gotten this far in life with no major health issues to myself or the people closest to me, I think the consequences are that I have limited emotional tools to deal with a pandemic threat like the one we’re dealing with now.
I’m mostly fine, but every once and a while I’ll get a weird set of body aches, tightness in my throat, or a sudden intense headache and it’ll send me spiraling into anxiety for the rest of the afternoon. I can intellectualize to myself that the sensations I’m feeling are just that, sensations that the body gives off from time to time, but I still struggle with feeling like I should be able to just snap myself out of it with these realizations or at the very least not let it derail my day. I can even tell myself that even if it is COVID, 99% of people my age and of my general health get off with a relatively minor sickness, but I still can’t help but worry about those around me or all the various unknowns associated with the disease, and it just cycles further from there…
Ironically, when I google the symptoms I’m actually feeling, the most commonly listed root cause is always—ALWAYS—anxiety. Go figure!
I’ve gotten a heckuva lot better about it through the course of the pandemic, and have developed some personal tools to help me deal with it better, but the recognition of anxiety as being the most likely diagnosis, and that on some level it’s always been there, has got me motivated to investigate it further and learn what I can.
Any thoughts or experiences you’ve got to share are appreciated! I’d especially love book recommendations on the topic. Psychological or therapy driven personal development books would be the most helpful for me at least. I've found that for a lot of stuff in the past, being able to intellectually identify and pick apart the underlying issues and psychological mechanisms also helped me get a better handle on the situation emotionally. Maybe anxiety is a whole different beast, but I'm at least going to give that a shot.