ANXIETY & OCD
The alarm keeps going off.
Whew, take a breath with me. You know the spiraling thoughts, the tightness in your chest that has become background music, the dread that is so exhausting no amount of sleep can make up for? That's anxiety.
So of course your mind has looked for escape hatches: cleaning. Obsessively rehearsing every event. Having not just a Plan B, but C, D, and E. Little mental games you play "to fall asleep" that are really just negotiations with the noisy little gremlin in your head.
It's like your mind made a handshake agreement somewhere along the way: “I'll shut up if you just...”
Even when you do the thing, you're still somehow being held hostage.
It’s exhausting and scary to live in a mind throwing alarming “what-ifs” with the unrelenting urgency of a fire alarm.
Something trips the alarm and the what-if's begin
You do the thing: get reassurance, make the back-up plans, clean again
A moment of relief. The alarm quiets - for now
The alarm gets tripped again ("Okay but what if you...")
Sometimes the anxiety is a quieter hum that you've grown accustomed to: wondering how people felt about you after a hangout, planning and rehearsing for disaster that never comes, what-ifing your life into oblivion. The tragedy is that the mind says it will stop once the feared thing is past, but it will always find something new to worry about, some new horror - or inconvenience - to plan for.
A FICTIONAL CLIENT
MonicaPET WORRIES
Every time she flew, Monica would have a "pet worry." Once it was if she would get to the airport on time. Another time it was if her bag was too big for the cabin. Another time it was worry that her crafting supplies would be confiscated by TSA.
She'd spend the entire day of her flight with a persistent ache in her chest, packing and repacking, checking and rechecking, planning and planning some more. Then getting onto the plane and feeling relief — then immediate shame at how much her day had been hijacked by worries that never came to fruition.
It would take years for her to put it together that her mind found something to worry about every time she flew - calling them her pet worries helped her not take them so seriously.
Exiting the pattern
Together, we can help you get out of this pattern and create something new. By noticing the pattern, we can learn why and how the pattern gets activated in the first place.
