 Hello guys, Asperger's Grove here, and today we are talking about anxiety. But what is anxiety? Well, son, according to Wikipedia, generalized anxiety disorder, or anxiety disorder as it's most commonly known as, is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable, and often irrational worry. Anxiety is often undermined and usually thrown in with a depression diagnosis. So recently I've been put onto a form of anxiety medication called propanolol. Now propanolol is a beta blocker, which means it acts on the beta-adrenergic receptors of the heart. And it basically, it prevents the effects of adrenaline, which is raised in people who have generalized anxiety. And it kind of mellows you out. My personal generalized anxiety disorder is more physical than mental. It's more physiological, meaning that there's not much that I can do about it. There are many relaxation techniques, and also unhealthy ways of dealing with anxiety, which I'm going to highlight. Anxiety is usually thrown into a depression diagnosis, which means that it can be undermined in some cases, and therefore people might not take it as seriously. A lot of people believe that everyone in general has quite a bit of anxiety. However, this is true, but there are a lot of cases where the anxiety of someone can impact their daily life and their ability to enjoy their life as well. So I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder when I was around 13 or 14. I was diagnosed with depression and dissociative anxiety disorder, which is basically where the amount of anxiety builds up. It causes a lot of physiological effects like speeding heart rate, inability to talk, panic attacks, and that can lead to a sense of being out of your body because you're thinking about the past so much, or you're thinking about the future events so much that it can distort your ability to be in the present. Before I get into my experiences with the disorder, I want to highlight that if you have anxiety and this anxiety impacts your ability to do things, if you find a lot of the time it's hard to go out of the house because you're anxious about that, it's hard to do sport, it's hard to meet up with people. Yeah, a lot of people can have social anxiety tied in with their disorder. Basically, if it has any significant effect on your ability to feel good about yourself, ability to enjoy life, and also your ability to do stuff, I've only just recently found help for my anxiety. I struggle to understand the fact that you can't get across how much anxiety is affecting you and how much you need it to be sorted out unless you push it because doctors, psychologists, parents, they may know that you have anxiety, but they will never be able to experience the levels of anxiety and the levels of issues that you may have with it. So it's very important that if you believe that you can't deal with this horrible feeling all the time and you want to sort it out, then you need to be proactive and make sure that you take the necessary steps so that can mean going to your GP or talking to your psychologist or counsellor if you are having them kind of things. So with that for a review, I'm just going to talk a little bit about how anxiety has affected my life and also some of the more unhealthy things that I did in order to deal with it. If you don't know, anxiety is a lot more prevalent in people with autism diagnosis. I have aspergis aspergis syndrome diagnosis. Because of my autism diagnosis, I get triggered by a lot of sensory stimuli which maybe people without autistic diagnosis may not experience excessive sensory input from going outside and being around busy cars, busy streets, busy lights. They are likely to induce panic attacks for me and they may not have the same effect for you as well. So it's important to note that although my experiences might be quite helpful for you to give you a bit of empathy, they may not be exactly the same. We try to group things into a big bundle of one term but ultimately the diagnosis is very different for everybody who has it. So I'm not going to go into too much detail but my anxiety has been quite, or I don't want to say quickly and that's a bit of an exaggerated word, throughout my life anxiety has had impact on many key areas of my life and generally it's reduced my quality of life. Some of the things that it has affected is my ability to make friends through social anxiety and confidence. It reduced my ability to have kind of good good relationships because I'd always be anxious about certain things. It would also have an effect on my ability to do sport, especially with combat sports and even my ability to do work for my university degree and also do work just in general school when I was, when I was in secondary school. For someone who doesn't have anxiety disorder it might be quite hard for you to understand but a lot of, when you've suffered with a condition for quite a long time, you develop a lot of masking and coping mechanisms which you use in order to hide maybe your true feelings or maybe hide the anxiety that you might be feeling. So because I've been having it for such a long time, such like six or six or eight years, I've, I'm very able to mask it and not many people will know if I'm anxious unless I'm really having a full-blown panic attack or something. So panic attacks are when anxiety symptoms elevate to a very high and uncontrollable level. This may, this may cause things like hyperventilating. I've had lots of panic attacks during my secondary school years and only a few during my university but they are very debilitating and the very nature of them makes, makes me very conscious and embarrassed when I have them and that can elevate the symptoms and keep the symptoms high and usually my panic attacks can last between one and three hours depending on how full-blown it is. And after those panic attacks are over I'm very unable to do anything. All my energies, my mental energy, my physical energy is being just completely depleted and it's, it's left me in a really bad state and it might take me a few days to recover because usually when you expend a lot of energy you can become quite immune or compromised and you can get a bit sick. Some of the small symptoms that you can get or maybe larger symptoms that you can get if you have a higher level of anxiety is increased muscle tone. So that's, it's basically it's the resting tone that your muscle has, the resting amount of contraction that your muscle has. I've noticed that that's quite a big symptom with me through two ways. One is when I'm going to a sporting competition and before my fight, if it's a long, long time before I fight during the day my muscles will be very contracted and I'll lose a lot of energy in the ability to perform properly. Another thing is when I've had maybe quite a relaxing experience, so I've gone through a massage or I've done some sport or done some exercise that gives me a lot of relief and I feel like my muscles are a lot more relaxed. For me I feel like that's a big contributor in my anxiety and it can have quite large impacts on my energy and ability to do things. So my life is an example of quite an extreme amount of anxiety. I think I do cope with it very well and considering, but it's taken me a long time to get to terms with it and understand how to alleviate my symptoms without being toxic to myself. So one of the things that I used to do when I was younger was I was addicted to fatiguing myself so I was addicted to fatigue and that's basically just feeling really tired mentally and physically. So the ways that I would do that is I'd try and induce an insulin spike so I would drink loads of coke and sugar. I'd eat loads of sugar really fast. I'd have loads of caffeine in order for my blood sugar to raise and then the insulin spike to kind of make me feel really tired and fatigued and obviously that's very bad for you because that can be implicated in stuff like diabetes and stuff and it's good that I got rid of that fairly quickly when I was younger. Another way that I induced fatigue was through exercise. I'd stay up a lot of nights between like 11 maybe 3 in the morning and just constantly just exercising because I liked the feel of not being able to move. That sounds like horrible but I liked the feeling of all the lactic acid and when I worked myself so much I didn't have any energy and then alleviated a lot of my anxiety symptoms and made me feel a bit better but obviously this isn't very good. I'd go for runs during the night. I'd stay up doing press-ups and all that kind of rubbish and I'd get sick a lot as well so I'd be off school because I've worn myself to exhaustion. I'd get ill a lot and not be able to go into school. I know it's not talked about much in males but I used to have a condition called bulimia which if you don't know it's basically when you make yourself sick after eating because you have some sort of really lack of confidence in your own body's image. It's linked in with like kind of anorexia but because obviously I like to eat, I'd eat a lot and stuff and then I'd make myself sick which is really not good because it can be all bad fear, your digestive tracks and all your teeth and stuff and it's really not a good thing and glad that I kept that quite quickly. I also used to self-harm so I used to cut myself on my arm. It's not very easy to see but it's more easy to see when I've been out in the sun and I've got tanned and stuff. I did that a lot when I was younger. Two reasons. One because I was depressed and I thought that was a good way to tell people that I was depressed and which it isn't. I don't recommend you do it all and I also used it to kind of ground myself. As I said before, I had a lot of dissociation when it would my anxiety which meant that I wasn't very present in the moment and I wasn't able to focus on things that were happening and being hurt allowed me to kind of ground myself and feel like I was in the present and yeah. So I just wanted to share with you some things that I faced because of my anxiety throughout my life. I know it's quite intimate and but I think it's very important for people to share their experiences in order to kind of give a bit of empathy towards people who may be going through similar experiences and also to show people that anxiety can be a very debilitating disease and it's definitely not part of someone's personality. I'm still going through the process of trying to find a great way of dealing with my anxiety. I'm a lot better at dealing with it now. I don't have any of those toxic coping mechanisms that I had when I was younger but these videos are a way that I help with my own mental health as well and I hope that they help you. But anyway thank you very much for watching. This has been a video about generalized anxiety. I may do a video about social anxiety and other types of anxiety in the future but if you like the video make sure to give it a like and press the subscribe button and the little bell in the corner in order to get notifications when my videos come out as I don't put them out very often. I'm in a bit of a period of wanting to make a lot of videos probably because I've got a lot of revision to do and that's a good way of procrastinating and leave a comment if you have any suggestions of other videos that you want me to make or maybe just to share your experience or even just to ask me questions. I don't have that many subscribers right now so I'm very open to communicating with you guys if you want me to. So it's Sunday the day of rest. I hope you guys are getting a good amount of rest not getting too anxious about it and hope that you guys are doing well in yourselves. Peace.