This Is How It Feels to Live with Severe Anxiety
Eleanor Morgan
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
 

My anxiety disorder can make me feel like I'm trapped in a cyclone of negative thoughts and fear. But thanks to the right treatments and techniques, I've discovered how to live my life.

 

As part of the human body's acute stress system, the "fight-or-flight" response works by stimulating the heart rate, dilating air passages, and contracting blood vessels—all of which increase blood flow and oxygen to the muscles, so we can be ready to run away from something life-threatening: a wild mammal, a fast car, a dangerous person. As physiological responses go, it's pretty important. Only, sometimes, we short-circuit a bit.

 

Charles Darwin, who for years was reported to have suffered from crippling panic disorder that often left him housebound, argued that, to a degree, it is highly evolved to be "on alert" most of the time. But the fight-or-flight response, as explained by Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, "isn't conscious—it's controlled by one of the most 'primeval' parts of the brain, which means it's often a bit simplistic in the way it interprets danger. In fact, it makes no distinction between an external threat, such as a tiger, and an internal one, such as a troubling memory or a future worry. To read more click here.