At Last A Life

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He said it was at that moment that he fully accepted his situation and with it, this immense calm came over him. He realised he wasn’t suffering because of being in a wheelchair but because he hadn’t accepted it. Perhaps it’s my sheer frustration in not finding this blog as helpful as before and there are different reasons Paul and Stephanie have given: I know at the moment it feels like you can’t move forward until you feel less unsure. But again, the problem with that is there will always be a new sensation or thought that will make you questioning again. You have to decide that enough is enough. You’re done trying to figure it out. You’re done trying to comfort and reassure yourself. If you’re scared, fine. If you’re questioning everything, ok. Turn your I can’t into I can and I will. Turn your what if’s into so what. I finally accepted that life was a mixture of ups and downs, highs and lows. Some days great things would happen, and other days everything would go wrong. This process was part of life, and the ones who suffer less are the ones who accept this.

So my brain is constantly on high alert (it feels like this) and I cannot stop thinking about this feelings of ‘uncertainty’ – a feeling like something bad is about to happen! It keeps me really away of normal living.. I really try to accept and not overthink about this but at the end I find myself doing so.. And this feelings of dread and dizzyness/ foggy feeling in my head – or this lightness in my legs – somehow convince my brain that there is something wrong with me , and really I feel all the time this ‘feeling that there is something bad about to happen with me’.. Something else has to be your goal – something that moves you beyond (despite how exhausted, fear-tormented you are) the pain of despair that you’re currently feeling. It’s making your life bigger than the dictates of anxiety. Because we blame them for how we are feeling, then we may lash out or think that the answer to our happiness is to change them and this is what ends up causing so much friction and arguments. So my brain is constantly on high alert (it feels like this) and I cannot stop thinking about this feeling of ‘uncertainty’ – a feeling like something bad is about to happen! It keeps me really away from normal living. I really try to accept and not overthink about this but in the end, I find myself doing so. And these feelings of dread and dizzyness/ foggy feeling in my head – or this lightness in my legs – somehow convince my brain that there is something wrong with me, and really I feel all the time this ‘feeling that there is something bad about to happen with me’. I feel like I’ve been posting on the blog so frequently (for me). Usually, I just browse (probably too much) at past posts, many of which are extremely helpful. Acceptance is so hard. It seems like it should be so easy. Oh, just stop worrying about this horrific thought you have- it’s normal. How can that be normal? How can you not analyze the hell out it. Anyway, here’s where I am and I’m hoping someone can shed some more light on me. At times I feel really low and discouraged I’m never going to see the end of this time in my life.Sleep issues were my biggest issue. I had others, but none shook my quite like the issue with not being able to sleep and constantly thinking about sleep (or the inability to sleep). It now made sense to me why I suffered the way I did and how I was responsible for the majority of it. I had created so much of my own suffering by obsessively trying to escape it, and so it made no sense to stay on this path.

It is only when you can get to a place of truly not caring about how you feel that you’ll finally be free. Your feelings will no longer matter. If you’re not anxious, great. If you’re a little anxious, so what. If you’re really anxious, who cares. Even if you live the rest of your life with a low level of anxiety, it won’t matter. That’s acceptance. It’s allowing anything and everything, for as long as it wants to be there. I think sometimes we view acceptance as another removal method, when really it’s an attitude adjustment: going from effort to no effort, from caring to not caring. Alz, I have a suggestion. It’s not the actual thought that is scaring you because you already know that it is only because you have anxious energy in your body that that thought is in your head. If you had no anxious energy in your body then that thought wouldn’t even be there. Instead, its the fact that the thought keeps popping into your head and you feel like you have no control over that, I feel like that is the bit that is freaking you out – The fact that it keeps intruding. With that intrusion you feel weirded out because the thought has negative connotations but because the thought feels powerful it evokes a fearful reaction in you. I feel, that if you were to lose the fear response when the thought appears then you would be able to just see it as an anxious thought. I wanted to ask you, Nolan, as you’ve recovered so you can see things clearly, I listened to a guy on Youtube and he spoke about how the not doing something to fix how you feel will make you feel uncomfortable and vulnerable but it is the only way forward. I struggled to implement it so I decided to speak to myself, and I said ‘You can get through this’ and ‘You’re going to be ok’, when I was in situations that I felt uncomfortable in, and I realise now, it was not to make myself feel not anxious but to remind myself I am more ok than I think and fill my mind with something other than all the negative self-talk. As I would say that I’d realise that I am going to make it through and that I am ok, and that my mind is creating a lot of BS. In a large social situation, I felt anxious sitting alone and afraid of what people would think if my husband got up for a bit. But by saying this to myself, I felt really ok with the situation and even was able to enjoy it a little and feel ok something I haven’t done in so long.I also left my mundane job so that I could dedicate all my time to helping other sufferers around the world. Being able to help others gives me a great deal of satisfaction. I have an aggravating cough that seems to be caused by anxiety and stress and has now become the source of anxiety for me. It has become a vicious circle. The cough causes anxiety and the anxious feelings about the cough cause me to cough. I apologise if my comment seems complicated but I couldn’t explain it any better and I hope it resonates. The question is then , when will my mind reach its natural state after hving been badgered so long by anxiety . When will it reach its equilibrium ? This endless search usually occurs because people are desperate to find an instant relief from how they are feeling or they feel that if they stop looking for a solution, they will be like this forever. The compulsion to solve is the only chance they have to get better and the only hope they are hanging on to, not realising the endless search and obsessing is the cause of many of their problems and a big contributor towards how they feel.

As my anxiety fell away then so the thoughts weakened but without my constant interest and belief in them, they eventually faded into nothingness, they just had no fuel to sustain themselves. Whatever you focus on, you strengthen, so it was vital to let go of my focus also, which again came through less fear through a better understanding As long as you make your goal “complete relaxation” or “always being happy”, it will elude you. We can’t force ourselves to feel relaxed and happy any more than we can force ourselves not to feel anxious. Like Nolan on here says, what we can do is create space for relaxation/happiness/peace by choosing to focus less on how we feel and instead just live our life. Those who have recovered fully didn’t tell themselves “I’m going to get rid of all my anxiety until I’m totally relaxed and at peace!” No, they said “I can feel however I’m going to feel, who cares, I have a life to live!” The irony is that the more you try to overcome anxiety, the more focus and attention you give it and so the brain begins to obsess about it, keeping you in a loop.You have to learn to be the observer of this inner show and not attempt to be the controller. It is the attempt to control that causes so much extra suffering, as you constantly push against or attempt to suppress how you feel. It also keeps our mind constantly active and why we can start to feel tormented by it, like it is constantly restless and won’t shut up. The compulsion to solve how we feel Which is exactly what Paul says: make the issues less important by not doing so many things dedicated to their removal. And, in time your body/brain/mind will drift away from it being an issue. The thing is, I feel in my situation, I know the information and I believe I have an understanding of it; the allowing and acceptance which allows all the negative energy to basically detox, I have experienced this in the past too which has cemented this for me, however, I find that when it comes to implementing it, there is so much negative self-talk and fear that I cannot go in a situation with my defences down. Hence I keep adding anxiety etc, and I suffer so much and constantly. I was interested to read in your book that you don’t isolate the symptoms and treat them all separately, but just accept that they are all just anxiety and try to live a normal life alongside all of the horrible sensations. Most of the symptoms are not there currently.

Again, wise words Stephanie, I spent 10 years in the exact cycle you are talking about, it was like a full-time job that kept me in a never-ending, exhausting cycle that took me nowhere. One where I thought of nothing else but the subject and forgot to just live. Life just always seemed to be against me and wouldn’t fall into my ideal; nothing seemed to go right, and people didn’t act in the way I wanted or say what I thought they should say. Acceptance is not an immediate stain remover – in the sense that as soon as you have finally got the right understanding of it in place then all of the pain will just drip off of you. That doesn’t happen.I have no interest in becoming rich out of other people’s suffering and selling them the newest miracle cure, online course, or C.D set. I spent more money than I care to remember through my own darkest days, and it pains me to still see some of the false claims that are about on the internet. I would get little loops of a song playing over and over in my head that at one stage of my anxiety had me wanting to bash my skull against something. And that eventually changed (later on in my journey) to me saying something like “oh well, that song loop is playing again…. play on as long as you’d like”. It didn’t immediately take the pain and torment away, but it was signalling to my body that I didn’t care as much as I had in the past. I finally realised that finding peace and happiness is an inside job and that the outside may bring snippets here and there, but I won’t find true peace and joy out there if I don’t already feel it within. Blaming the outside can harm our friendships and relationships.