Four words to my past self: part 1

So, I'm sure everyone has played this game: you have the chance to send a four word message to your past self. Any age, any place. What do you say? My answer has been the same for years now: I'd go and talk to my 19 year old self, the year before my brain really started to hate me, and I'd say this:

Look. Up. Anxiety. Disorder.

When I was 20, I got my first serious bout of anxiety disorder, and I had absolutely no idea what was wrong with me. I couldn't eat, my brain kept just putting me to sleep, I had no control over the horrifying thoughts and images that kept clustering into my mind, I was constantly on the verge of panic. I knew something was really wrong, but I didn't know what. I had friends who suffered with depression, and I could see some similarities, but I also knew it wasn't that. I figured it out when I was 24, and I finally plucked up the courage to a doctor about it when I was 27.

Now, after two rounds of therapy and lots and lots of hard work, I have my anxiety disorder pretty well under control. I know the ten or so unhelpful thinking styles that my illness feeds off of, I know the traps it uses to make me feel worse, and I'm reasonably good at avoiding them. It has taken years and years of application and failure and picking myself up again, but the strategies I use do work.

I like to be useful. And I suspect that somewhere out there is someone else who is feeling this way and has no idea what is wrong with them, or knows what's wrong but has no idea what to do about it. So it's you I'm speaking to. Hello! Firstly, it's going to be OK. It's going to be really tough but eventually you will learn the skills you need to be in charge of your own mind again. Secondly, go and see a doctor. They can get you a therapist who can train you to use the right strategies to manage this. Request Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It's the one that has been proved to actually work.

But in the mean time, while you're waiting in the queue for therapy, or summoning the courage to go and tell someone that you're not OK, here are some hints. I'm going to spend the next few posts talking about the different unhelpful thinking styles anxious people (well, most people!) fall into, and how you can start to make yourself feel instantly better by training yourself out of them. It will be really hard. Like, try-for-years hard. But you can do it.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a professional counsellor. But I also didn't make any of this stuff up. It's all things I learned from a qualified NHS counsellor, and they would probably explain it all a lot better than me. So go talk to them. But if you can't, I don't know, this blog is better than nothing?!)