What, Me Worry?

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 3, 2011

Just as it’s sometimes better to be feared than loved, it’s sometimes better to be afraid than completely at ease. Yes, anxiety may push up your blood pressure, pound your pulse and punish your insides to the point where it feels like pure punishment. On the other hand, anxiety will also help you run faster, be more aware, and work harder. All these survival skills go back to the cavemen, who couldn’t kick back and feel too good, lest they end up getting snatched up and tasting good to a predator. Even now that we’ve moved from caves to condos, everybody needs a healthy dose of stress to stay alive.
–Dr. Lastname

I never used to be particularly anxious, but that’s because I could count on my wife to run the family, manage the finances, and take care of the kids while I focused on work. Then a month ago, after she announced she was having an affair and wasn’t sure that she wanted to stay together, I started to have anxiety attacks and a feeling of dread. It changed my entire outlook on my life, past, present, and future. My anxiety got worse when I started to look at our finances and discovered we’ve got loads of debt she never told me about. Now she tells me that the affair is over and she wants to make the marriage work, but the anxiety isn’t going away—this whole incident has opened up a Pandora’s box of worry that goes way beyond her cheating. My goal is to get back to the way I felt before and not wake up to this terrible feeling every morning.

If you believe every pharmaceutical ad you see on TV, you might think that anxiety is as deadly as cancer and machine guns combined.

There’s a great disconnect, however, between random anxiety attacks and the very real possibility that you might lose everything and go totally, tits-up broke.

When you let someone else do life’s worrying for you and then discover they’re not really competent, you’ve probably got a lot of past worrying to catch up on.

You discovered a financial debt, and that comes with a worrying debt that you’ve got to pay until you can finally assure yourself that someone is now doing a good job of worrying about the risks in your life. And that someone has got to be you.

Maybe you had good reason to entrust your worrying to your wife. You have to wonder, however, whether you were genuinely blind to warning signs, or purposefully ignored danger signs about her competence because you wished to feel protected and avoid the pain of worrying.

You’re not alone in wanting to feel protected; every election illustrates our irrational wish to find someone who can solve life’s problems for us, because we’re scared and feel helpless and want to give responsibility to someone for keeping us safe. As they say, the main reason people get elected—or married—is to have someone to blame.

In any case, you now have an opportunity to do your own worrying and manage your own life. Yes, in the short run, confronting your expenses, developing a budget, and imagining what you need to live life on your own will make you more anxious than you’ve ever been before. In the long run, they can give you strength and the confidence that goes with knowing your strength.

As much as possible, ignore the panicky side of your anxiety. If there’s a good way to reduce it, like exercise or medication, use it. Your higher priority, however is to become a good manager, regardless of how bad it makes you feel.

Crippling attacks are one thing, but being anxious about any number of things—money, health, Oscar results—is a perfectly normal part of life. If you’re not worried about anything, that’s the real cause for concern.

STATEMENT:
“It’s hard to think straight when I wake up scared, but I know what I need to do and have faith that, if I figure out how to manage my life and care for my kids as a single guy, I’ll have less to fear and will be better prepared to deal with life with or without my wife.”

I went to a shrink because I was really depressed; I was anxious and miserable, had trouble sleeping, even had digestive problems, but I still managed to fool people into thinking I was fine and function pretty well day-to-day. My doctor prescribed me an antidepressant, and it’s good because it makes me feel much more relaxed/less miserable, but not good because I’m not getting much work done and, pretty soon, my boss is going to notice. I don’t like the way I was feeling before, but even if I was miserable I could get through the day. Now I don’t hate life and I can sleep, but I also have no motivation, so I’m not sure if this medication is actually helping. My goal is to feel better but also not to lose my job.

If antidepressant medication seems to take away a valuable survival skill, like being worried enough to get your work done, don’t panic (that is, if you can still get up the will to do so).

No matter what, you’re still in charge. The medication can’t force you to do anything, nor can it strip away your initiative forever.

One of the basic rules of medication is weighing the side effects versus the desired effects—the pros and cons of your pills. So, if you decide that the side effect is not worth tolerating, you can and should stop the medication, simple as that.

Indeed, that’s your choice and your job. No one knows better than you whether this particular side effect is worth tolerating, and your opinion is what matters most.

If you’re worried about losing your medication’s positive effects, there’s a good chance that another antidepressant will do just as well without similar drawbacks. Yes, it’s a lot of trouble spending several weeks trying a medication without being sure it will work or be tolerable; psychiatry, and medicine in general, has a long way to go. In a hundred years, you’ll take robot pills on your jetpack, but for now, you’re stuck with trial and error.

That’s the burden you undertake when you decide a medication trial is necessary, and that’s why you don’t decide it’s necessary unless you’re really depressed and/or depression is interfering with your life in a major way, and you can’t find any less risky or easier treatment to put things right.

In the meantime, credit yourself with a good try and near miss. You’re right, you can’t continue a medication that endangers your job, but you were right to give it a try, and you’d do right by yourself to explore other options until you find the right balance of benefit and misery.

STATEMENT:
“It’s scary to bounce from a mind-numbing depression to a will-numbing medication, but there’s nothing wrong with the way I’m making decisions, just with the way life is treating me. I was right to give treatment a try; and right to decide that this side effect is unacceptable. I’ll keep trying as long as I think treatment holds substantial promise.”