At last a life: surviving anxiety

Full disclosure: 'At Last a Life' is a great book by Paul David and you can download a free PDF version here. Also, insights from this article come from my personal experience. Please seek help from a mental health professional if you are experiencing distressing symptoms.

This article is inspired by Paul's book, and the countless conversations I've had with friends, family members and mentors. If you are one of them and reading this - thank you!

I want to share with you all my journey surviving anxiety. Despite losing more battles than I can count, I've managed to come out the other end - healthy, happy, and most importantly, living life in hope and not fear.

And here's my goal writing this: to share with you my understanding of this experience, the things I've tried that worked, and those I wish I would've done.

It started with a panic attack.

At 18, I had a panic attack having dinner outside with friends. My eyes went dark and I felt like my heart fell through a limbo. The existential dread persisted for 3-4 seconds. When it left, I remember not being able to move and thinking:

Wow, this must be what dying feels like.

I didn't understand why it happened. However, in the coming months, I avoided going out at night. I started having dinner early, and stopped meeting friends. Nevertheless the panic attacks came: first when our family went for a photoshoot, then when I went to take a stroll with my dad, and finally whenever I sat down at the dinner table.

My life was cut away from me. I couldn't step outside of my room without feeling like I would lose control. I had a persistent fear of going crazy: my head felt so tense I could hardly focus on a TV show. I tried to draw, and most of my paintings depicted what I felt like I was living through:

Soon I was prescribed anxiety and depression meds.

My parents cried at the psychologist's watching me put paroxetine through my system: I felt slow for a week, then again - nothing changed. The meds blunted my sensations, but did not make me feel more prepared. My life was as small as it was before: can't go out, can't have dinner with the family, can't take a phone call. I was drifting through my days, surviving.

After a month, I decided to forfeit my university offer. I would take a gap semester and spend 6 months with myself to 'fix this'. If things come to the worst, I would check in to a mental ward. At any rate, it didn't feel like it was up to me anymore.

I was letting life happen to me, not through me, every step of the way.

A terrible way to live, isn't it?

I decided to take control - I started reading.

My anxiety symptoms did not go away after 6 months but improved. Having traveled to Australia in 2016, I kept taking meds for 2 years, eventually becoming clean in 2018. I enrolled in classes, took exams, and iterated through my coping strategies with the help of CBT in the meantime.

Slowly things got better, then all of a sudden life went back to normal. I travelled solo across continents, met with friends from all over the world, and started companies.

I never thought I would be able to make it. When I look back, there is me, sitting in a bedroom in the cold winter of Shanghai with an iPad, educating myself on everything I could find about anxiety. Little did I know that's how I would slowly find my way out.

This is my survivor tale, and here's what I've learned:

1. Find the unresolved.

Our subconscious is powerful. We resolve and understand experiences that we go through as kids. Unresolved ones, sometimes due to parenting and traumas, stay in our subconscious.

We rationalise most of them, thinking that we've 'gotten over' them (esp the painful ones). However, without truly confronting the experience, the unresolved ones will stay - and they will surface whenever our conscious self loses its grip.

Every anxiety has a reason. Even GADs developed at a very young age. This is tricky because for most people with anxiety, thinking about the 'why' actually worsens their anxiety. And when there's a hypothesis, there is a target to blame. This is not helpful.

Instead, move closer to the emotion. You cannot reason your way out of anxiety. The unresolved experience is often primitive and childlike: an unfulfilled desire for love or approval (guilt/shame), extreme fear (confronting an unfamiliar situation), helplessness (lack of caring). It sucks to think about those things, so our brain rationalises in different ways:

What you need to do is to get as close to experiencing that moment as possible, and come to terms with what would have happened otherwise. What if you stayed? What if you didn't flinch? What if you held their hands and apologised? It might be difficult to engineer the experience, but the more you get to live through the moment again, the closer you are to processing the traumatic event.

Anxiety cedes when your subconscious off-loads its weight. It worked for me - the difference is night and day.

2. Climb the ladder.

Anxiety is a trained thinking pattern. When it becomes a problem, it means the pattern has been somewhat established. To unwire this response, you need to intentionally and consistently reroute your thinking process when presented the same trigger.

Since you are trying to re-engineer something that has already been built up, it is going to be slow and will require reinforcement. There will be relapses. If your trained behaviour is too hard to change, you WILL need help from meds.

Know that you are in it for the long haul and things will always get better if you keep trying. Move the needle a little bit every day. Set a fear ladder and rank events from the most anxiety-inducing to least. Start at the bottom first and only move up when you've had repeated success completing those events. Try not to go too fast: your subconscious will remember the failures which will make future endeavours more difficult.

An interesting surprise for many is that once you've completed most of the bottom ladder, the anxiety dissipates so you won't even have to worry about the top half anymore! Confidence is a powerful thing. It also shows that anxiety is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. You are in control.

One of my PTs used to tell me this when I struggled with weights:

You lift weights. You are in control.

But what if it's too heavy? Drop it. Go home, take a shower.

You are in control. If you are having a bad day, there is no one stopping you from taking a nap. If you are having a panic attack on a train, there is no one stopping you from telling your friends that you need help and some fresh air.

And most importantly, when you experience thoughts, you can control whether you should pay attention to them or not. You are NOT your thoughts. Just noting that they are there, and you will always have the options to sit with them or engage, is a powerful reminder of the control you have.

Just watching your thoughts unfold, and remaining critical about whether the narratives make sense or not, is one of the best ways to dissect anxiety apart. Thoughts are perceptions not realities. But a lot of times we forget about that and let them take over.

Meditation is a great way to get better at this. As cliché as it sounds, spending 5-10 mins every day not having an agenda does wonders for letting us listen to our internal dialogue. Creating that space between your mind and your thoughts goes a long way to coping with anxiety. At the end of the day, it is a natural, biological response that is designed to protect us. How can we be so stupid to let our defence mechanism take out the joy from our lives?

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Did you find the above helpful?

This is the first time I'm writing on the topic of anxiety. Having spoken with many peers my age, I've realised that there is incredible power in sharing these stories.

If you are going through tough times or would like to chat, my DMs are always open. However, I am not a trained mental health professional (yet), so please speak with an expert if your symptoms are becoming hard to manage.

Comment your thoughts about this article below! Feel free to also suggest other topics I should write about ??

#mentalhealth #anxiety #survivinganxiety