I posted this in the anxietyzone.com forum as a response to a thread. Despite the forums “copying or redistribution” of content on the forum is “strictly prohibited” policy, I wrote it, and I wanted to include it on my blog, even for no other reason that to let myself read it again and again to help reaffirm things to myself:
It’s hard to talk yourself down when you’re feeling anxious/panicky, and it’s hard to accept what the Doctor tells you. Trust me, I know how hard that is. But logic does come into play here. Doctors see dozens (or more) patients every day with a wide array of symptoms and conditions. I’ve been seeing my family doctor for 25 years, and he treated my mother when she fought breast cancer twice, so I trust him, and he has the experience to back up that trust. And yet, even I’ve found myself doubting what he tells me. Sure it makes me feel better briefly, but after a while, the anxiety takes hold and starts to convince you that maybe they’re wrong, even though the logic defies that idea.
What I almost find funny is how people like us won’t accept that which our medical professionals (ie: they went to school for this stuff and have daily experience with it over several years; we haven’t), yet we come to forums like this one looking for the ‘truth’ and we’re more likely to believe it because someone else has experienced the same thing as we have. Not to say there isn’t value in that, but how can we put all our trust in other people that we’ve never met before, yet reject what the professionals tell us? That’s like asking someone at a red light about the sound that their car is making instead of trusting what a mechanic tells us it is (and yet, I’ve even done that to certain extents). It doesn’t make sense, and I’m just as guilty of it as anyone.
But that’s part of the puzzle that is anxiety; understanding that our mind is trying to trick us into feeling something that, granted, feels completely real, but has no real basis in reality. And all too often we’re prepared to look ONLY at the medical side of things. We feel symptoms, so we assume it’s physiological in nature. But the source of those symptoms is mental, triggered by stress or fear harbored deep within our own minds. Only by facing those things and dealing with them head-on can we begin to resolve the problems that are causing us to feel the things we feel. Unfortunately it’s not an immediate relief of the symptoms, but anxiety is a marathon, not a sprint, no matter how badly we want it to just be over as quickly as it comes on, it just doesn’t. It doesn’t take long to break your leg, but it takes much longer for it to heal properly.
