Anybody who knows me knows that I am addicted to Facebook. I’m on it multiple times daily, updating my status, adding photos, and messaging people. I have 1231 photos of me uploaded that are visible to any of my 828 friends. I’ve dabbled in pinterest, twitter, vine, and instagram, but none of them have stuck. I own this addiction, and don’t claim to be special by any means. There are tonnes of us out there.
I have also been diagnosed with both Panic Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t claim to be special in this regard, either. After all, approximately 18% of American adults will develop some sort of anxiety disorder in their lifetime, and comorbidity rates among the disorders are extremely high. In other words, if you’ve got one, it’s pretty likely that you’ve got another one. Symptoms vary by the person and the disorder, but they include cognitive symptoms, such as obsessive thoughts, constant worrying, and, well, anxiety. They also cover physical symptoms, such as sleep disturbances, muscle tension, sweating, trembling, chest pain, nausea, and much more. I get a combination of both depending on the attack and the trigger.
Everybody has their own reasons for using social media, whether it is to feel like a part of a group, or simply to keep track of their life. I use Facebook for these reasons, but it also has a much more therapeutic use for me. It helps me to stave off panic attacks and log my triumphs in my battle with anxiety.
When I first started to get panic attacks, I didn’t know what to do. Even as a Psychology major, the onset of symptoms was so sudden that I thought I was dying or going crazy. I remember when I had my first one. I was hanging out with a friend at Starbucks, and I made him walk me to the bus immediately so I could get home. When he’d dropped me off at the stop, he went to leave, and I grabbed him, terrified, and made him accompany me the whole way home. When I got home, I sat in my bed for hours, shaking and waiting for everything to stop spinning and for the world to go back to normal.
After that first attack, I had a few other separate episodes, but between episodes I was completely fine. They were isolated incidents, and I just lived my life free of worry. Then I decided to completely uproot my life and move to Japan for a year to teach English. I was placed in a tiny town in Hokkaido where nobody spoke English, and my panic attacks became more frequent. Then, one day, I had an attack right at the beginning of my first class. It started out as normal. My hands started to go numb, I started to feel dizzy and sick, and my heart was beating like it had never beat before. I had to sit down, and I barely made it through my first class. I told the teacher I worked with what was happening, and she agreed to reschedule the next few classes. I went to the nurse’s room to rest.
When I woke up from my nap, though, all my symptoms were still there. I was still incredibly anxious. My mind was going crazy, my heart was racing, and I was trembling and dizzy. My teacher took me to the town’s tiny clinic, where a doctor with shaking hands prescribed me pills without asking me any questions about myself. I then went home to my tiny apartment by myself to cower under the blankets and wait for the symptoms to abate. When your body doesn’t want to cooperate with you, you just can’t feel normal no matter how hard you try, and you have no idea when it’s going to end, it’s hard to calm yourself down. I called a helpline, I set up an appointment with a therapist over Skype, and I talked to my mother. All of these things helped immensely.
I still couldn’t leave my apartment for three days. I was terrified that I would have another attack. What if the next one was harder to control? What if I couldn’t get help? What if I was too far away from my apartment, the only space I had designated safe? I finally mustered up the courage to walk to the convenience store. When I had finished the five minute walk and the world hadn’t ended, I celebrated by buying some popcorn and walking home. The symptoms started to abate a little, day by day, and I started venturing out of the house more and more to do things. It started with a soccer game a five minute bike ride away. Then I visited the school for a few hours. Then I went to another town for a festival for the day. And things started to feel somewhat normal again.
In the beginning, I treated Facebook like the enemy. I was so down on myself that whenever I saw people posting statuses like “Just got back from an amazing trip to Osaka!”, I would attack myself. How was it that everybody else had their shit together, while I was curled up under my blanket afraid to even leave my apartment? Then, once I started doing things again, I would advertise them to the world. My first status update after my breakdown was when I finally went back to teaching. That day, I was nervous all day, but I went into school and taught all of my lessons. I went home, and promptly told all of Facebook that “Teaching is fun!”
Soon enough, I started to realize that my profile was looking a lot like the profiles of the people that I was envying just a few days ago. To the casual observer, I looked exactly like anyone else who was making the most of their year in Japan. And when I realized that this is how it looked, I realized that that is how I felt. I was dealing with my anxiety head on, and not letting it get the best of me. There is a lot of literature that states that the act of smiling will actually make you happier. I feel like this is a personal parallel for me. Acting like I wasn’t anxious was actually making me less anxious.
Many other people in my situation might not have thought this was a big deal. In fact, people might even have found it unhelpful, spending too much energy feeling like they were pretending to be “normal”, pretending not to be anxious. I don’t presume to know what works for other people, since anxiety is so personalized. For me, though, it was a way of feeling like I was normal, and focusing on the moments where I was anxiety free. It was a way of recognizing my achievements, rather than my shortcomings. It was a way of reminding myself of what I was capable of.
Two years have passed since I had my minor mental breakdown, and I’ve been getting better and better ever since. Large changes and events can still get to me, though, and I’ll have weeks and months that are better than others.
I just moved to Vancouver, all the way across the country, to get my Masters in Journalism. It’s a big change, and I’ve been feeling way more anxious than usual. But when the anxiety flares up again, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go out and do awesome things anyway, then I’m going to brag about it all over Facebook. And there’s nothing that you can do about it.
