The Real Health Cost of Anxiety Disorders

Happy is what brings healthy, and viceversa, so it can't be that much of a surprise anxiety and depression have had some pretty rough consequences on my health; High blood pressure at 25, on-and-off flings with anemia, near-constant sleep deprivation.

I may as well have an imp bouncing up and down on my kidneys whilst someone tells my nervous system to pump out all the stress hormones its got, so I can feel normal, or at least prepared. Like a Girl Scout on crack. That's PTSD hypervigilance for you.
It's also that sometimes our bodies express what we are otherwise unwilling, or unable to say. "Swallowing one's pride, being choked up with grief, she hated my guts," these aren't just cliches but expressions of the relationship we have with ourselves; The way emotion and physical sensation remain interlocked despite the best efforts of Western medicine to treat them as entirely different bodies of knowledge.

Anxiety is a whole self issue; We may stay locked into patterns of poor health if the root cause isn't even looked for, let alone found.

Body and Mind: Treating one without the other is almost no treatment at all

I grind my teeth when I'm anxious. The dentist knows this -he hands me a stress ball, whenever I bother to show up. He also made me a niteguard to get between my tension and my teeth but it doesn't do much good since I unconsciously extract it whenever I have nightmares. ...You may see the problem here.

“As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.”

Sonia Johnson

Beyond the science, there's a lot we don't say. Like how this is my body, this my path, and I need to find a way to connect to that. Not to some ideal on TV but in some way that doesn't make me so uncomfortable I'd rather grind my teeth into stubs than deal with it.

The mental health mind-body connection

Emotions aren't airy-fairy, hysteria-induced things. They're the tides that pull us, push us, hurt us, and help us. They keep us in sickness and in health, in some very literal ways >>

• People with anxiety disorders often experience shortness of breath. There's a real, physical set of precursors that go with that one symptom of anxiety but where is it coming from?

To get in between all that and start to change things has been an incredible, steep learning curve. Part of it comes through getting that my health is unlikely to look like your health. That there's no such thing as an ideal body, or mind.

What does happy even mean, when it comes to health?*

There are averages, bell curves, and BMIs. Maybe you fit the norm, maybe you don't but what helps is meeting my own body where it's at and not feeling like I've failed in doing so; By putting down a few of the cultural ideals and facing facts -about anxiety and stress, and the intersections of mental health and mental illness.

When I was miserable beyond any measure they've invented, I didn't always look it, on the outside. A blood panel would've told a different story; I wasn't happy, there was no way my body was going to be.

Health is both a state of emotion and a physical reality. They're interdependent--working on the one helps the other; 'Happy' doesn't end at the brainstem.

*this post inspired by my good friend/fellow blogger Svasti.