Anxiety Blog 2: My Mind is Noisy and I want to Scream

I have noticed that lately my overall levels of anxiety have decreased. On a day to day basis I generally feel calmer, more in control and less stressed in both social situations and in the work place. But as many of you know, anxiety never lets you just “be”. My constant feelings of anxiety, panic, stress and nausea have now been replaced with something that is not necessarily physically harmful, but is incredibly annoying: A noisy mind.

I have always had trouble “switching off”, and it is something that has cost me relationships in the past and has many a time prevented me from sleep. Lately though, I get home from work or perhaps a day of running errands, and my entire evening will be consumed with my own thoughts. Previously, I would obsess over a situation and I would run every little detail on repeat over and over and over again in HD. I of course still do that, but mostly my thoughts are now scattered and incoherent. The noise which fills my mind is similar to being in a pub and hearing chatter in the background; you cannot hear everything that is being said, you only manage to catch snippets of the conversation, and these are not enough to make sense of what is being said. The mental noise is like a background resonance that never ceases and it feels like the silence of my house is being filled with the chatter of my own noisy mind. I am locked in and I cannot escape.

In amongst this noise there are strands of thoughts, like pieces of a jigsaw which do not fit together. My mind repeats the thoughts, as though they are on a loop, like a stuck record. More often than not, the thoughts are negative and because they are not necessarily fully formed, they increase stress, worry, anger or frustration without me even noticing straight away- they just sit there in the background of my mind unsettling me. My mind is a pot and the thoughts stir round and round, brewing up anxiety. I cannot help but wonder, when will they boil over?