Back then I didn’t know it yet, but I started struggling with anxiety around 2014. I didn’t recognize it as anxiety because I felt more depressed than scared, and I didn’t have the “typical” anxiety symptoms. My main problems were digestive issues. I used to get very bad diarrhoea and extremely painful bloating episodes where my stomach hurt so much I had trouble walking.
These issues appeared once in a while, and doctors couldn’t find any physical cause that would explain them. As time passed, my digestive problems showed up more and more often, and eventually in the summer of 2015 I had my first panic attack. Things went downhill quickly after that.
Like many anxiety sufferers, I started avoiding activities, situations, and places that triggered my anxiety or brought on the panic. It made sense to me at the time – doctors said I was “stressed,” so I thought I just needed to rest and it would go away. But it didn’t. It got worse. I was panicking more and more often, my safety bubble was shrinking, and new symptoms kept showing up.
Within a year of my first panic episode, I had developed full-blown agoraphobia – for almost a year I couldn’t leave my apartment. When I managed to go out, it was only with someone accompanying me, usually to a doctor’s appointment.
At my worst, I was having 10 to 20 panic attacks a day, dealing with severe chronic digestive issues, had lost nearly 20 kilograms, and was plagued by countless physical symptoms, a constant fear of death or serious illness, and at one point, I fully lost hope that I could ever get better.
I tried several psychologists, had a few psychiatric visits, took various supplements, tested grounding techniques, breathing techniques, dietary changes… I even went to an acupuncturist.
But the truth was that my anxiety and its symptoms were only getting worse as time passed.
My official diagnoses included generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, hypochondria, and OCD.
Then in early 2019, while googling and browsing forums – unwilling to accept severe anxiety as my fate – I found a YouTube channel that explained everything. The channel was just starting out and had only a handful of videos, so I watched them over and over and over again, just to make it sink in. I was one of the first people to join the free Facebook group. I was quiet, simply working on myself in the background.
The information shared made me realize that I had been fighting my anxiety the entire time – resisting my symptoms, trying to fix myself – and that acceptance was actually the way out. Give up the fight, stop the resistance, and the anxiety will go away on its own.
That was the first time I heard someone say you can fully recover from anxiety. Up until that point my mind was filled with hopeless stories from forums and even doctors telling me this was something I’d have to cope with and manage forever. And I realized that „letting it be“ was honestly the only thing I hadn’t tried yet.
So I gave it a shot – and in early 2020, I was fully recovered.
