So a lot of you will know that anxiety is something that has plagued my life for longer than I care to remember, ever since I was a kid I have been haunted my a sick feeling in my stomach, sweaty palms and an inability to speak, leading to panic attacks of me sat breathless, unable to speak or breathe properly in a fright on the floor.
One thing I've learnt in coping with anxiety, is finding out my triggers, what makes me anxious, what triggers a panic attack etc, and alongside this, learning my behaviours when I am feeling anxious, and helping me and other people notice when I might need taking aside and having a minute. Learning these behaviours has been hard, and accepting that this is how I have learnt to cope and trying to unlearn bad methods is also difficult, but has taught me a few things. So today I thought I'd share my learnt behaviours of anxiety and hope some of you might relate.
Ignore How I'm Feeling
I am queen of the passive aggressive sometimes, and often when I'm feeling anxious, depressed, or just having a bad day I will respond with "yeah, I'm fine" or "no, nothing's up" instead of just accepting that yep actually, I'm not okay and I need some time. I often ignore how I'm feeling and try to shake it off on my own, when really what I should be doing is accepting how I'm feeling and asking for some help.
Projecting
Another bad habit of mine is projecting how I'm feeling onto other people, when I'm feeling anxious I tend to be very defensive of my moods, especially when I'm not in the mood to admit something is wrong. Because of this, I tend to become very snappy and grouchy, I'm not the nicest person when I get like this but I tend to lash out at my loved ones and shout and just storm off on my own - basically a 21 year old stroppy teenager.
Paranoia
I tend to struggle with paranoia quite a lot in general, and is one of my worst BPD traits I have, but is also something that crops up a lot during anxious states of minds. When I'm feeling anxious and overwhelmed I tend to go into overdrive in my thinking and quickly spiral out of control with my paranoid thoughts, thinking that people don't like me, I have no friends or the friends I have are pretending to like me, that I'm bothering people with my anxiety that they don't want to help or be around me, everything like that basically. This is a really painful trait of my mental health that I struggle with a lot and will talk about it in more depth in another post one day.
Unable To sit Still
My, and probably a lot of other people's, biggest giveaway of anxiety is fidgety behaviour. My personal ticks are fidgeting with my hands, twiddling my thumbs and shaking my legs. It's a very common trait to be fidgety when anxious and is also one of my very annoying ones, at school I was always the person shaking their legs or tapping their pen because of my anxiety, and still do it now.
Stop Speaking
Another thing I tend to do when i'm anxious is stop speaking, I suddenly go very quiet and take my mind somewhere else to distract myself. This is usually when someone says "are you okay?" and the cycle of lying to myself about how i'm feeling begins.
Other notable mentions are stress induced IBS symptoms - like incredibly painful stomach cramps -, panic attacks although luckily are very few and far between these days and stutter/unable to form sentences, I tend to forget how to speak when I'm very anxious and just make a string of non-sensical noises to indicate my state.
Let me know what you thought of this post and if you relate to any of these, or what anxiety causes you to do in the comments below!
Meg x
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