The Evolution of a Battle with Anxiety and Depression - Part 2
Addressing anxiety - dealing with the shakes, crippling self doubt and a racing heart
Part 1 of this post was one of those, ‘well that escalated quickly’ moments.
What started as a simple thought of, oh, I should probably make a point that foundational to all of this progress with anxiety and depression is the relationship that I started with God on Aug 8th, 2023, turned into a full blown post on the importance of that foundation. Everything listed here on today’s post is building on top of that entirely critical and deep foundation.
LET ME BE COMPLETELY CLEAR ABOUT SOMETHING - the actions and practices that I have listed below are activities that I did practice while I was drinking. While they helped, they did not alleviate the suffering and eradicate anxiety and depression from my life as I have experienced since entering into active recovery. If you truly want to rid yourself of crippling anxiety and depression, go back to the first post on the topic.
My intention with this post is not to intimidate with a laundry list of “to-dos” for anyone to take up. Instead, I want to show you how I have to prioritize my life and activities as an alcoholic. It is my top priority every single morning that I wake up to maintain this day in front of me in active recovery.
These practices help, but are not perfect. I will show how I still struggle quite a lot with moments of anxiety. Progress, not perfection is the name of the game. You need to make the decision about how dealing with these issues falls out on your priority list. How willing are you?
Now, to finally get to the practices. The way I will format this is by listing out, “Where I started” and detail how anxiety and depression were playing a part of my life on May 14th, 2023 when I checked into rehab. I’ll lay out the practices, detailing how they came into practice and why they seemed to help, and then note if it’s something that I’m still doing. I’ll then summarize where I’m at today, because my life is not completely cleared of these burdens, yet they are so much more manageable than they were over a year and a half ago.
Anxiety
How It Started:
By May 14th, 2023, my anxiety was all encompassing. I couldn’t have one on one conversations with people and look them in the eye. I visibly, and audibly, shook when I had to give any presentation at work or in front of any size group of people. I was managing with beta-blockers, which alleviated the physical and audible manifestations of my anxiety, but I was an absolute wreck inside. Taking the beta blockers, I could still feel the anxiety wanting to explode out of me as my insides twisted with madness.
My thought patterns were black and white. Things were always or never going to be this, that and the other thing. I would let my personal declaration of fact (which was not fact) run my mind into overdrive. I future tripped, worrying about things way out in time that I had no control over myself. I was emotionally unstable, where a uncomfortable emotion that I had no control over welled up, and I would desperately chase it away. I was irritable and quick to snap to anger.
Sleep hardly came easy. I would lay awake at night staring at my bedside clock, sometimes witnessing every minute change over for a couple hour period. My mind would be spinning in overdrive as I lay there, agonizingly begging for sleep to come.
I could almost sense that my nerve endings were completely fried and not firing and connecting effectively. I was constantly on edge, and therefore, constantly exhausted.
Practices:
Morning meditation
I picked this practice up alongside three of my closest companions in rehab. We would do a 20 minute guided meditation session first thing in the morning, and the practice helped most of all with awareness. In the past, I would only recognize that I was having issues with anxiety when it was too late, and the feelings and thought patterns had a full blown grip on my system. Meditation help create awareness of the early emotions and thought patterns so that I could catch myself and mitigate a full blown anxiety induced spiral.
Today, I don’t have a regular practice of meditation, but I incorporate the learnings by staying focused on being present and recognizing when new emotions and thought patterns enter the scene. The biggest change for me, is that I allow myself to talk about those emotions and thought patterns that crop up with others without feeling fearful of judgement. In talking with others, I have experienced an incredible decrease in anxiety as I accept these emotions and thought patterns for what they are, and then move forward.
Morning journaling
I locked into a routine with journaling while I was in rehab. I recognized that I had over a dozen years of personal emotional neglect and baggage to work through, and I figured that writing could provide an outlet.
I have journaled in the past, but never to the degree of consistency since entering recovery. I use the Phoenix Planner, which as the title states, is part daily planner, part journal. I enjoy the prompted journaling versus staring at an empty page. Another prompted journal I have used in the past, and enjoyed, was the 5 Minute Journal.
Here’s the power I have found in this practice. It allows me to lay out my day, and identify what would make this day great. Given my propensity for setting low expectations, this allows me to stare at those activities that I want to do in the day that would make it great. It also allows me to list out those things that I may be fearful of, or thinking too much about.
This is a practice I still hold to this day. I always end my morning journaling exercise by writing, “get to it, today is a gift”. This has just worked for me.
Memorizing the Serenity Prayer
I say this bad boy a minimum of 30 times during the day. It’s the first thing that I go to when I begin feeling discontent. It helps me set everything in its proper place. The easy shortcut (not that the prayer is long) is asking yourself, “What do I actually control in this situation?” Answer honestly, and then move forward.
God,
Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The Courage to change the things that I can,
And the Wisdom to know the difference.
Group Therapy Sessions / Honest conversations
Going into my rehab experience, I had no idea what to expect out of the group sessions. I was intimidated by the fact that seemingly 90% of our time in rehab was spent in some sort of group setting. I wondered if I could heal myself in such a setting.
I was amazed at the power of the group. We all shared a common struggle and objective. We lessened the fear of judgement that we had of other people. There’s a madness that exists in addiction where you think that you’re the only person psychotic enough in the entire world to have some thought pattern, or behavior, manifest in your life. And then you hear someone else speak about it in the exact manner it shows up in your life. The power of group is how the perception that you’re alone in your struggle erodes away.
Group therapy settings (I count AA meetings in this category) also is a way for your to practice your thinking in front of other people. You can speak your perceptions and ideas and get a read from the room about how it resonates with others. Don’t read this as a way to be people pleasing (which is a risk in group settings), but instead an area to flush out and form new ideas. In full transparency, many of my newsletter posts and podcast topics are first fleshed out in an AA meeting a few weeks beforehand.
The group setting in rehab made me recognize the power of humility and honest conversation with others. Stemming from that experience, I push to have those genuine conversations as much as possible in my life. I have found it helpful to have these conversations in person, on the phone or even via text. As long as humility and honesty lead, the conversations can be deep and profound.
What’s Next:
As much progress as I have experienced in easing they symptoms of anxiety in my life, there are still improvements that I want to make. My anxiety levels have gone from crippling to mostly manageable, and I’d like to try to push that “mostly” part of the last statement out in the next six months or so, if possible.
These are the practices that I am looking at incorporating into my life to further reduce the current state of my mild effects of anxiety.
Somatic Breathing Technique(s)
For those of you susceptible to the invitations of the snake oil salesman, beware. First bursting on the scene (at least within my world) led by a flurry of articles, YouTube videos and alleged world record breaking feats, Wim Hof brought the concept of breath work to center stage.
As with most everything in the space of holistic medicine, as soon as people started paying attention to the work and outcomes that Mr. Hof was proselytizing, the scene got flooded with copycats and others that were attempting to ride the latest wave. Conversely (and again, consistent with just about everything in the holistic medicine space), there was some genuine truth and lost wisdom that The Iceman was making the broader culture aware of in a time of skyrocketing instances of anxiety and depression in our nation.
Then, James Nestor published his soon to be mega hit Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (“New Science”, huh James? Who ran your book title workshop for you? You should get some money back.) Besides the gaggy subtitle, the book reads well and more than anything calls us Americans a bunch of “baggy eyed mouth breathers” in a manner in which only a nerdy writer like Mr. Nestor could pull off.
My word, get to the point, Kyle. The long and short of it is that there has been a lot of attention pointed at breathing over the past decade or so, with some of the key benefits being able to tap into your Anatomic Nervous System to help regulate some of the symptoms one often experiences while dealing with acute anxiety.
Within the spaces that I pay attention, the continual practice that I see come up, that seems incredibly valid and time tested is what is called box breathing. It’s simple. The Navy SEALs teach it. World class hunters use it as they ready for a shot of a lifetime. It just seems to continually come up to my attention.
Like any skill, it needs to be practiced. As I restructure my day in this new year, I aim to incorporate two minutes of box breathing every morning, and then incorporate it throughout the day when I feel that acute anxiety or nervousness well up within me.
Pray, Act, Reflect
For years I have dealt with an aversion to prayer. I have written about it before, but I got squirmy when people would ramble on with a prayer like some jazz musician taking their turn at soloing. I felt, in some cases, it was disingenuous, and so I removed that practice from my life.
Finding myself living in active recovery, I specifically find myself saying three structured prayers. They are:
The Serenity Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer
Lucy’s Prayer
I have explained this before, but this prayer is where I state out loud, what my personal selfish desires are out of a situation. Then I ask God to grant me strength to accept whatever his plan might be, regardless of what I desire.
I get a lot out of these three prayers. However, as I reflect on my progress living in active recovery, I see an opportunity to start stepping away from the default selfish tendencies and towards a genuine desire to serve others. It is an imperative part of the final two steps from the AA program, to pray for and strive to be of maximal service to others.
AA promotes a structure to your day where you wake up and say a prayer of thanksgiving and ask that you can find yourself in maximal service to others throughout the day. Then it speaks of taking a moment at the end of each day to reflect on your actions. I have taken these ideas and started incorporating a practice of Pray, Act and Reflect, easily remembered as PAR. I have already noticed a lessening of my experiences with acute anxiety, specifically because the prayer session each morning allows me to center myself and focus in on what is most important - taking my role in God’s plan and serving others to my greatest ability for today.
I discuss these plans, and their application within the AA step work, in the latest podcast episode.
As you can see by the length of these posts, taking meaningful action to lessen the grip that anxiety and depression had on my life has been a key part to my healing. I sit here today a completely transformed person, and I want to stress once more in closing that many of these practices listed above were things that I had done prior to entering into active recovery. They helped a little, but things didn’t stick or improve over the long term.
It was only after my complete acceptance and engagement with God on a personal level did these practice enter into hyper speed with their healing.
That’s all I’ve got,
Kyle