As a child I grew accustomed to feeling ill when my worrying waged a war within my brain, and then moved into my body. With my first period, I thought it was actually my annual 'first day of school' gut-wrenching anxiety. A connection between my cycles & my concerns would grow more complicated for the next 30 years, often confusing one issue for the other. Even realizing it didn't help immediately, as I was coping with each of them in an unhealthy way, contributing to making each of them worse.
The stresses of life and infertility were spiraling my life seemingly out of control. It was the end of my 52nd failed cycle that finally pulled me down to the bottom of the pit one day, I couldn't see anything but darkness, so I certainly couldn't see my way out. Yet, I had just begun a journey to overcoming the stressful thoughts that significantly impacted my body, so understanding why I was in the pit, that's what convinced me I needed to prioritize my mental health in order to support my physical health. I wasn't certain it was my solution, but it shone a glimmer of hope.
With that I dove into all the resources I could to help me find relief from my anxious ways, and I found some essential tools that have worked wonders. Anxiety typically comes from stress that we don't feel capable of dealing with, but what I've come to understand is that even if we can't resolve the situation causing the stress, we CAN deal with the stress! Here are four of the most effective steps I took to overcome my anxiety:
Serenity - one key to peace of mind is learning what problems we should work on and which we shouldn't. Through counselling techniques, I discovered the best ways to view our struggles is through the lens of 'what can I control' and 'what can't I control'. This filter quickly shows us the reality of what we're capable of changing and what we're not, and once we understand that, we need to work on letting go of what we can't control. There is no sense in worrying or fighting against the situations in our life that we can have no effect on, but not only that, we can feel less powerless if we put our efforts into what we do have the capacity to change!
Simplicity - once we can see which of our troubles we can control, it reduces our long list of choices of what to focus on. That can be half the battle with anxiety, being overwhelmed by the sheer number of things to deal with is just one more thing to worry about. With a smaller group of issues to concentrate on, we can more easily figure out which are the priorities, allowing us the space to be more aware of which are the main things that need to be addressed first.
Self-talk - the words we speak to ourselves are often the default thoughts that have become auto-pilot, they once seemed to work for us and have now become hard-wired. But if you recognize these as anxious thoughts and are trying to stop them, it's hard to tell yourself you can change how you think. The auto-pilot turns on and says 'no way, that won't work, this is the only thing that has worked!' Instead of accepting our self-talk as truth, we can question it! Don't immediately own it. This will give us the space to examine if these thoughts really do help us, and if not, in that space we have room to figure out new things to tell ourselves about the situation.
Share - last month I had a post about the value of sharing the weight of worry with other people, and how much that can benefit us, but there is even more value that can come from sharing beyond the unburdening. Experiments have been done on how much pain a body can handle depending on if the person holds in their hurt or whether they verbalize the discomfort, and the result was those who expressed their pain could withstand it almost 50% longer! But this doesn't only have to come out verbally, artists have long claimed the healing benefits of creative expression. Creating something has also been proven to have therapeutic effects because it can alleviate both the emotional and physical pain, whether that be through writing, music, painting, poetry, etc., the possibilities are endless.
While these tools have been tremendously helpful to me personally, they have taken time, none of them are a quick fix, but what they did give me instantly was hope. Once I realized that I had choices in how I dealt with my stress, the panic lost it's power over my life, I could stop my cycle of downward spiraling even when my physical cycle wasn't where I hoped it would be. After decades of letting my mind determine my health, I decided it was one of those things I could control, and I did. And I know you can too.
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