Living with anxiety. Interesting topic. Many of us live with it. Notice the ads. Many say "Do you have trouble sleeping at night?" Many magazine articles are about how to sleep better and telling us we SHOULD get 7 hours of sleep a night. We have a lot of medications to 'help us' sleep. One ad says "Don't take this medication unless you have 8 hours to enjoy a long sleep." It's phrased like a warning but I'm sure many viewers are thinking like me "O dear, such a problem - it should be me!" Which is of course what they WANT you to think after all, they want you to bug your doc for the drug THEY are selling. If sleep and anxiety weren't a problem for many people, why so many ads and magazine articles about it?
Think about it, all of us can find something which makes us very anxious. Living today:
** the country might get bombed or worse yet the city I live in might get bombed
** we might get robbed or worse yet, we can be attacked by a maniac
** in fact what if a drive-by shooting goes awry and a bullet lands in our bedroom, killing us?
** since most of us STILL die in auto accidents, don't we have a tad of anxiety when we step into our cars to go somewhere?
That's all before we even GET to our bodies. As we age, there are plenty of things with ALL of us to be anxious about. Very few 50 year olds and older, don't have some condition going on in their body which could (and probably will) get worse and really bite them.
Our WeightWatchers leader asked yesterday "Who in this room takes prescription medication?" This was a lead-in to the topic of the week which was an interesting one - prescription foods (the ones which are high in energy) vs. 'generic foods' the ones which are low in energy but furnish similar sensations eating-wise to the "real thing" ... for instance, 1/2 c Haug n Das Ice cream = 7 points, 1 Skinny Cow ice cream bar = 2 points.
But the thing which I found very interesting was that when she asked "How many in the room take prescription drugs?", EVERY HAND.. EVERY HAND IN THE CLASS went up. I know because I looked around the room in amazement.
Now I would say that the lowest percentage of the folks in there were young folks. Also, only 2 or 3 in the room could be considered "clinically obese" and most were somewhat fat and some (even though on a diet) were not fat at all. But EVERY PERSON IN THAT ROOM had some kind of medical condition which required prescription medication.
I have studied this a lot because anxiety has been a real problem for me in the last couple of years. Last year, it became so bad that I was not sleeping at night and after 2 months of 1-2 hours of sleep a night (sometimes 3 or 4 but not often), my immune system broke down and I got very ill. That was TOTALLY not fun so I said to myself, "Self, I need to do something about this anxiety". It was not an easy thing to combat. But I'm conquering it, slowly, very slowly.
Dr Phil said something which really helped me. He said, "Why worry about something which hasn't happened yet? We never know if it WILL happen and even if it does, worrying about it will not keep it away - it will only spoil our time when it's not happening."
Our priest gave a seminar for Lent and he said, "It's hard to understand why God allows pain in our lives. It's not reality to think that if God loves us, He will keep the pain out of our lives and thus we have nothing to fear. Instead, reality is knowing that God loves us, that the things we fear will probably NOT happen but in any case, with God at our side, we need not fear anything."
Another thing, a sort of motto or affirmation I remind myself of is this: The past is gone, the future is not ours - we only have the moment. But sometimes we tend to spoil the moment by worrying about the future, a future which often is quite different from what we have envisioned. If I feel afraid, I ask myself "am I hurting or in danger at the moment?" Most often I am not - I'm just worried about the future.
Do I have anxieties about my body? Heck yes! And I got to the point of saying, "Heck with this... I'm experiencing the pain of a POSSIBLE thing in the future before I EVEN GET IT IF I GET IT - how dumb is that? I'm ending up lengthening, doubling, tripling my pain this way."
And the bottom line, I asked myself... have I EVER been able to predict the future? No! In fact, the future has always surprised me and most of the time, it's a good surprise and NOT the dark fears I harbored.
I think of an air conditioner we had when we moved in. They told us it was on its last legs and should be replaced within two years or it would die. We replaced it 12 years later and it was still running. Not cooling really well but still running. We just never know.
Following is a mantra which I've used in times of anxiety. It's from the book, "DUNE", a sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert. It's called "The litany of fear" and something I've been using since the 1970's:
"I will face my fear.
I will let my fear pass around me and through me.
And where I turn to face fear's path, nothing will be left.
Only I will remain."
(Article by Sue Widemark, copyright 2003, all rights reserved - write for reprint permission)
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