Get to know anxiety: Snowballing worries

The first signs that something wasn't right for me was that I could no longer wake up and be okay with the day. Everything that was putting forward was gonna be an extreme challenge for me.

Snowballing worries is probably the hardest thing that I've ever come to terms with. The feeling of going from a state of, I guess, calm, that's when I first woke up and it was almost instantaneous that somehow my thoughts would just be flooded with everything at once.

And I'll think about the meeting that I had, and then almost instantaneously, the thought about the meeting turned into about the thought of whether or not I'd done the right thing for the meeting, which then turned out to be the thought of whether or not the people in the meeting liked me, are they gonna not like me now because I'm proposing the wrong stuff? Am I gonna end up losing my job? Which then somehow went from being about a professional aspect to a personal aspect where I started attacking myself in, it turned from are these people gonna like me too, am I gonna like me, do I like me? What am I possibly adding to any of these situations and why am I turning up?

So, when I came to the realisation of what was going on and then I realised that for once in my life I wasn't gonna be able to fix this myself. I quickly looked into my options, and when I say quickly, I let it go on for much longer than it ever needed to.

In the initial stages I met a bloke at work who worked in a department and he was the biggest guy I've ever seen; he was a bear covered in tattoos. And, very quickly, I built a relationship with him because I found out he was going through exactly what I was going through. And it got me to a place where I realised that I could finally start to look into treating this. I picked up the phone, I went and saw my GP and they referred me in. Yeah, it was inevitably the best thing I've ever done.

The moment that my doctor told me that I was dealing with an anxiety condition was truly just an instant sense of relief. And by no means do I try and deplete the seriousness of that. It did give me great sense and direction in terms of what I needed to do to deal with my anxiety.

I'm in a job now that's tenfold more stressful than I was two years ago and I take it with a grain of salt. I've learned how to breathe properly, I've learned how to calm my anxieties because everything can be fixed. And, there's absolutely nothing that can't.

If you're at the early stages and you feel that you might be, particularly treading down the line of anxiety disorder, my first protocol would be to encourage you to get information, to access information, and there are so many portals to do it. And what you quickly find is the moment that you start being able to tread water with what's going on, the battle becomes just a little bit easier.