Over-cautious, overthinking and over-catastrophizing:The slippery slope of anxiety

A reverberating heart that is a little too loud, limbs that are immobile as if bound by force, a brain that is freeze-frame, a mind that is foggy, a body that shakes in an uncontrollable spasm are all an everyday reality for me. Years after suffering from debilitating anxiety, I have decided to draw the curtains open, just a little bit to give my readers a sneak peak about how anxiety manifests in me. 

Anxiety the uninformed visitor

It is surprising, even to me, how I can pinpoint the exact date when my brain made this switch to an anxiety drift. Not a simple switch, but a giant leap- that’s how my anxious brain would interpret it. Anxiety hit me out of the blue, I experienced what I call an anxiety spike which never really left my side till date. 

For my volatile brain, a small bump on the road is a deep trench, a slight drizzle is like pouring showers and a small glitch is a big breakdown. Everything is king-size. So I live life king-size, should I say ? The experience surely doesn’t feel like it. 

To put it simply, the chasm between reality and the intensity with which your brain perceives the event is how my anxiety presents itself. It is as if the brain has lost its ability to wrap its head around reality and moves helter-skelter in myriad directions, unable to settle down. The part that is inexplicable is how silently it creeps up on you before you can get a grip on your situation. 

When I rewind the tape of my childhood story, all I can think of is the word “idyllic.” A loving family, a roof over my head, good education, enough food to eat, and much more. I was never a person who identified with anxiety, other than the normal human pressure of tests, public speaking, or roller coaster rides, barring one tiny trigger that completely threw off my blissful existence.

The isolating realm of anxiety

Anxiety can be incredibly isolating, especially when you are surrounded by people who seem to drift through life like a nonchalant feather. Wading through the air, with not a care in the world and yet incredibly efficient. How do they do that? Your brain ponders for answers even though logically you are aware that you are not alone in life wallowing through anxiety. 

When I did a bit of digging around, I took incredible solace in the fact that I am not a lone soul in this journey. The data I stumbled upon was truly eye-opening. A 2022 study by National Health Interview Survey mentioned that about one in five adults aged 18 and older experienced any number of symptoms of anxiety (18.2%) or symptoms of depression (21.4%) in the past 2 weeks. What stood out for me is the telling number of silent sufferers who seem to have made peace with this condition with no respite in sight. 

The Year of the Quiet Shift:

It was the winter of 2022, when I had just returned from a vacation to India and was struggling to catch up with schoolwork when the anxiety hit me like a thunderbolt. It manifested itself like a constant state of worrisome thoughts, a brain deprived of peace, a state of mind I simply couldn’t shake off.  I wondered “Why don’t I  feel like myself? What is going on?” Plus, I didn’t know a lot about anxiety as a perpetual state nor did I know any temporary work-arounds to the condition. 

 For a span of an entire year, the constant catastrophizing, restless sleep, intrusive thoughts, all became a new thing to deal with. But wait, that was not the worst of it. Exactly one year later, during my freshman year of high school, I found myself in the midst of a stressful situation involving my exams.

The Fuse that Finally Lit:

One night, I had disturbed sleep due to constant worrisome thoughts that snapped me awake at 4:00 am. Suddenly the entire room felt blurry, my heart pounded hard like a strike of a hammer. I gasped for want of air, my limbs went numb and I couldn’t move, no matter how hard I tried. I was disconnected from reality as if in an “out of body” dreamy state. Understandably so, I confused it to be a heart attack and felt like I was sinking into death. Since this was my very first panic attack it had a tremendous shock-value. The lack of knowledge combined with confusion sent me into another spiral of disbelief. When something unfamiliar suddenly makes an entry into your life, your first instinct is to look it up on the internet. Again, that was my first refuge, luckily I stumbled upon a research article that actually helped me understand my condition. In one such article, Heart Seizure or Panic Attack? Disorder Is a Terrifying Mimic, researcher Alan Leshner says that more than three million Americans will have a panic attack at some point in their lives. I just didn’t realize that some day I would be part of this statistic. 

Strategies for the Sloped Mind:

As anxiety became the indelible part of my daily existence, I found myself dabbling with various coping strategies almost in a “ hit and miss” mode. Even though the internet is flooded with myriad ways in which a person can hoop over the daily anxiety pull, I discovered that “ trial and error,” is the ultimate name of the game.  The process of experimenting and zeroing-in on what made me feel better, felt like the beginning of a whole new chapter. I had turned a completely new leaf, where my earlier self had lost  into oblivion as if it was an era had passed-by never to return again. 

Now, if I’m being totally honest with you, it can be pretty hard to get yourself out of the spiral, especially during severe moments, since trying to demand calm when in fight or flight mode is like trying to tell someone to stop coughing when they’re choking. At least for me, I’ve had to go through a lot of trial and error to find which are the MOST effective for me out of all of them. Two things that have helped me are to talk to a family member and have them let me know that everything will be okay, even if it doesn’t feel like it, as well as saying some mantras in my head (“This too shall pass”, “I am not broken”, “I can handle this”, “I am worthy”). 

Anxiety is for real, the experience is real, the helplessness is real. The first thing to convince yourself is that it is not a figment of your imagination. It is not you lacking motivation or incapable of executing tasks, what it is though is an individual swimming against a rogue wave during high tide. Get the analogy?

About the author

Rasika Vijay is a freshman in college and is incredibly passionate about the idea of mental health being the ultimate priority of life. To this endeavor, Rasika aspires to be a psychological researcher combining both technology and psychological principles to enhance lived experiences of people.