Life with anxiety & depression
I got some health insurance:
I decided I could no longer risk living without health insurance. I bought some health insurance through my employer so I wouldn't hesitate to see a doctor if these symptoms didn't improve.
Symptoms Persist :
Ever since I quit smoking, I was simply unable to deal with stress and anxiety. Small things would set me off & make me extremely uncomfortable. I was afraid of having an even bigger panic attack. I was constantly getting pains & tightness in my chest. My friends tried to get me to go out on weekends. But, I couldn't stand to be in crowded places. There was too much noise & commotion in bars. I would get extremely uncomfortable & start to freak out, like I was totally losing control. I started spending a lot of time in bed. Sometimes I would feel a little better after trying to nap. Usually, I would just lay there for a couple of hours wallowing in my misery. I couldn't believe how crappy I felt. I felt like a wimp. I thought only wimps had problems with anxiety. Maybe I was going nuts. I started praying for help, something I hadn't done since I was a little kid. Again, in hindsight, had I told a doctor how bad it was, I am sure there would have been a diagnosis of depression, severe anxiety disorder, or some other major mental illness.
Time to see my doctor about this :
After several months of no improvement, I figured it was time to see if my doctor could help. He gave me some prescription strength Zantac to help with some unbelievably bad heart burn. That worked great on the heart burn. He also prescribed a pill called Buspar for my anxiety. The only change I noticed after taking the Buspar for a month was that it made me jittery. As far as I could tell, it did absolutely nothing for my anxiety problems. My doctor told me if the Buspar didn't work, we could try a much stronger drug. I was too scared to try any other more powerful drugs. Boy did I feel like a loser. I still couldn't believe I was having anxiety problems. I was really becomming depressed. I toyed with the idea of seeking psychiatric help. Again, I felt that only lunatics & extremely weak minded people sought help from a shrink. At my annual doctor's visit, I would lie to my doctor & tell him I was feeling much better. I never admitted to him just how severe my problems really were or how I felt my situation was becomming hopeless.
Taking responsibility for solving anxiety & depression myself:
I began looking for answers online. Back then there was not nearly as much information online as there is now. I bought some self help books. I started listening to self help recordings. The books & tapes were inspiring but not really effective. I tried working out and exercising to relieve the tension. This did help somewhat. After working out about four days a week for two months, I noticed the symptoms were slightly diminished. Although they had diminished some, my problems persisted for several years. Some days were good. Some were bad. Nonetheless, four years after my first anxiety attack, I was still having too many attacks. It was very difficult for me to date women because exposure to any increased levels of stress usually resulted in tightness in my chest & short breaths. This is very embarrassing when you are trying to make a good impression with a girl. I thought to myself "What the hell has happened?" "My life is miserable." "I am never going to get over this!" "My life sucks!" "Why bother?" "It's hopeless."
The magical power of booze:
One thing I did discover that worked to relieve my misery was booze. All forms I tried worked. I sometimes drank beer, sometimes wine, sometimes liquor, & sometimes all of the above. As long as I kept a buzz on, the anxiety was gone. The bummer was the hangovers. Man did I get hangovers. Almost everyone has experienced hangovers. Let me tell you, mine were worse than ever. I didn't drink any more at one time than I had in the past. It just seemed that I would be hungover the next day, even after drinking only two beers the night before. I used to be able to down six to eight before the hangover was a worry. "What the hell has happened?" I thought. "Now I can't even have a drink to make it go away." I started to believe that I was just going to have to live with the symptoms for the rest of my life.
My experiment with natural herbs:
Here we go again. I couldn't drink to make it go away. I wasn't going to take prozac or something similar. Nothing I had been trying had worked well enough. I was reading articles about natural remedies for anxiety. I decided to give them a try. What could it hurt? I went to the drugstore & bought some anti-anxiety herbal remedies. I tried kava kava,St. John's Wort, Multivitamins, & Herbal Teas. Being a skeptical person, I didn't expect these to work. Guess what? They didn't.