An Open Book

I have anxiety. I struggled with it for a while before finally going to my doctor and talking about it. She was wonderful and prescribed meds and referred me to a therapist. I was a bit nervous about taking medication but I have to say that it has greatly improved my quality of life.

I am a big advocate for medication if you want to do it for your mental health and as long as you work with your health care provider. Someone asked me why I decided to do meds when I was such a hippie kind of person. The answer is this. If I could have knocked my anxiety out with lavender oil and meditation and all the other hippie and homeopathic remedies for anxiety I would have. But they were not working. Some of the use to work as a coping skill but they stopped because my anxiety got to a point when I could no longer self-manage it.

I was averaging 3-4 panic attacks a week and one day had 4 in one day just one after the other. It was exhausting. I was anxious all the time and if I wasn't anxious I was exhausted from being anxious. I also had a lot of fears about things some more irrational than others and it was much harder to reason with my brain that my thinking was irrational when I was so anxious about everything.

I also don't like the particular faith groups who say that you should just pray and it will all be better. If that were true I would be able to teach on how to pray away a panic attack but it doesn't work like that. Yes, I find prayer to be soothing and can help to calm me down now, but I am not already highly wired on anxiety. It is helpful as a way to cope but not as a solution or cure.

Now on medication, I have been able to do things and function in life in ways I didn't even realize were possible. I didn't know that not everyone felt on the verge of a panic attack looking at a syllabus for the class. I didn't know that most people didn't experience anxiety when going through a drive-through. It is a whole new world.