Using Every Last Drop of Resilience! Two Weeks of Intense Anxiety

I've had to be extremely resilient over the last few weeks. I'm moving house in a few weeks, changing my place of work and generally turning my life upside down.

I've been feeling very anxious as I've been waiting for things that sit outside my locus of control. My level of stress got so high over the last two weeks that I started experiencing some the more difficult to manage aspects of my mental health problems such as highly-anxious intrusive thoughts, irrational ways of thinking, moments of paranoia about my relationships and myself.

I actually don't want to write about the content of the thoughts as they are personal and they relate to various people in my life.

I tried my very best to sit with my feelings and not act on them. I remembered the DBT skills about riding the wave of emotion and surfing the urges that often follow the emotions.

Overall, I was not perfect but I feel I did pretty well with holding back from acting on impulses. As strong and painful as they were!

Now I'm coming out of this anxiety phase, I feel pleased with how I managed not to act on my intrusive thoughts.

As always, I'm grateful to my patient, loving, open-minded, reassuring husband who helped me through this. I'm also grateful to the handful of friends I spoke to in some form or other when I was in the middle of my flurry of anxious, intrusive thoughts.

One thing that stood out to me during this episode of intense anxiety was how my anxiety about moving house transmuted into anxiety about other people. It helped when I reminded myself that my fears about other people were arising because of my stressful house move, rather than as a direct result of anything I had done or said in the context of my relationships.

I couldn't fully trust in this, but I told myself to try to partially trust with a 'wait and see' attitude. I was able to do this instead of careering towards the hard and fast conclusion that any of the relationships in my life had ended or been broken beyond repair. This was a success for me— in the past I don't think I would have been able to do that in such a heightened state of stress.

If you're going through something stressful that's using up every last drop of resilience, I am hoping things feel a little easier for you soon.

Rosie x