Anxiety and doing well

'Doing' being the operative word.

I don't want to be all pessimistic and miserable and imply it's all doom and gloom and never gets better. It certainly can get better.... It's just really hard work. Hence the 'doing'.

At the moment I'm stable for the most part. Which I'm totally and constantly grateful for. But on the other hand I didn't wake up one morning thinking 'oh yay, I'm well!'....I wake up every morning and work hard to do the things I need to for wellness. Those things don't cure the anxiety or make it go away but they do help me manage it well enough to live my life in a meaningful way. Often I get frustrated because 'enjoyment' and 'fun' tend to occur in a somewhat detached way, you can't really try to be happy. But I'd rather have detached happiness than no happiness at all...and I know how easy it is to slide away and into the chaos of I give thoughts like 'is it worth it?' Any sort of brain-space.

Ah yes, that's the other thing. Yes you fight to get out of bed and out of the house and on with your life. You can fight to force yourself outside your box and out into life. Fight to see people, do things, counter negative thoughts, urges, compulsions. There are a tonne of things that can, and will be fought along the way. But before you do any of that you have to fight to convince yourself it's worth fighting.

When you're feeling dispirited because 'well' isn't as well as you were hoping for. Or when you're feeling crap about yourself and spiral off into the place where you're such a pathetic excuse for a human being that you don't deserve to be well. Or when you're just plain tied and can't be bothered. All of which can become can become frustratingly cyclical of course, if you haven't got the energy to fight how can you gave the energy to fight to fight (now there's a silly sentence!).

This, I'll admit, is where I fall down more often than not. I'm quite good at convincing myself to get out of bed or get to ringing or try new things and push through the anxiety. What I'm not very good at is convincing myself it's worth it. Or, to be more honest, convincing myself I'm worth it. I have a terribly tendency towards silly, self-pitying thoughts of the 'What's the point? I'm a horrible person, I'll always be a horrible person, I'll never be able to cope with life, I deserve to feel like shit so why bother?!'. Not productive.

That's the bit I haven't quite got the hang of yet. I'm better at using all those therapy type techniques to ignore and counter negative thoughts on a routine basis. But they don't go away and the slightest stupid little event, like missing an appointment or saying the wrong thing, can instantly and those thoughts spiralling. From that point things can slip incredibly quickly if you're not careful.

I feel like I've gone off on a tangent and not really said what I meant to with this post, sorry. I need some sleep lol. And to pay attention to everything I just wrote and be reasonable with myself.

Final thing. As I said at the start, I'm not in any way suggesting that everything is hopeless. I'm also not suggesting that recovering from anxiety is just about getting a grip and trying harder. Obviously. Or that people who are ill just aren't working hard enough. Just that improving is hard work. X