Anxiety Symptoms

Will Not Kill You or

Make You Lose Your Mind



The human brain can produce terrifying states. During my worst fears, I was absolutely positive that I was going insane. That false belief was a fantasy at best, a delusion at worst. It was a morbid fear and unconscious wish anything but a true perception. Yet at the time, nothing had ever felt more accurate.

Massive anxiety states are usually accompanied by fears of imminent: Death and/or Insanity

By all means, get a physical check-up - but once you receive a clean bill of health, take a good look at what anxiety can and cannot do.

It cannot kill you plain and simple. You will believe it can, and you may claim to feel the life force literally slipping out of your body. You might have near-death sensations -- or such a profound sense of impending doom that you trust the premonition over any solid facts. Youre still wrong.

Granted, when you have panic attacks with pounding heart, shortness of breath, trembling, chest tension, tingling in the hands and arms, lump in throat, constriction of neck, those physical sensations are very real - not your imagination. They are very real biological responses occurring in your chest, in your throat, in your veins. However, being physically real does not mean they are signs of illness. You are experiencing the bodys reaction to fear (conscious or otherwise), and producing healthy responses to perceived danger. No matter how intense those feelings become, they cannot kill you. The question is: why are you so afraid? (not why is your body responding this way?).

Anxiety will not summon a heart attack or burst a blood vessel. It will not cause enough oxygen deprivation to harm your brain. It cannot rupture organs or sever tissue.

Important: Those obsessive thoughts of impending doom are a piece of your symptom. Within the details of what you imagine is about to happen are some valuable clues to underlying fears.

The assault of a breakdown causes the mind to seek escape. And the stronger that wish becomes, the faster we develop a fear of dying/disappearing/losing self which in turn, creates relentless self-observation. Caught in our own imaginations, unable to hide inside or outside, we become hyper-vigilant guards protecting a self that we know wants to vanish. It feels necessary as if we are monitoring our own mental death watch.

A fantasy of wanting to disappear or magically escape ordinary existence (I do not want to be in this body anymore) can be a precursor to a consuming phobia. We try to counteract feelings of helplessness by over-inflating our power. If that works, we start to believe that we have amazing abilities, and soon start to worry that the strong desire to no longer exist could be enough to make it happen. Of course we know better we are not insanebut at times we both know and dont know. That partial knowing is the trap making symptoms persist. Our own harmless magical thoughts have betrayed us.

Besides pounding heart and shortness of breath, anxiety states can produce bizarre states of consciousness feelings of unreality or of being lost in a dream, frantic thoughts and a vanishing sense of self. Altered consciousness can feel very much like madness, but they are not psychosis (a break with reality, such as occurs in schizophrenia) and will not develop into psychosis.

An onslaught of emotions during already mounting anxiety can make you feel close to losing touch with reality. That is not what is happening, however. It feels so close but it is an illusion.

You are no more susceptible to losing contact with reality than someone who has never had a single anxiety attack. Believing theyre connected -- panic & psychosis -- is like fearing a bad ankle injury will develop into a heart attack. It could be argued that these both involve brain, not two different parts of the body, but it is still faulty logic. The mechanism causing crippling anxiety and the process that activates psychosis have nothing to do with each another any more than an ankle is related to a heart. Terrible anxiety can only turn into worse anxiety -- as if thats not bad enough.

If you can realize that your symptoms are harmless, why not just ignore the sensations? If you can, by all means, do it. However, that never worked for me. Regardless of how many times my fears were de-mystified, explained, counteracted, I returned to my conviction that something was horribly wrong.

I might come home from a doctors visit still clinging to reassurancesbut by days end, I was sensing new warning signs Oh, my God this is itits finally happening

Through my constant need for reassurance, I was begging for water to be poured into a leaking bucket. No amount of words would ever be enough - because I was addicted to the process of being reassured.