 This is the video about how I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and welcome back. I am back to doing videos every week where I dive deep into a certain mental health topic and this one is anxiety if you haven't guessed it yet. All right so in this first video for this week I'm going to be talking about how I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. All right so please do me a favor and share this video. Share this video because someone out there who you know might be struggling with these symptoms and some of the information in here might help them get the help they need like I got okay because my anxiety is very very very manageable these days and I don't know how I would function or operate or do anything that I do if my anxiety was not under control. So just to give you a little bit of background about me if you haven't met me yet or you're new to my channel um my anxiety has been around forever since I was a kid I was very nervous I was always worried and things like that um one of the things that I often talk about when I talk to my clients and sometimes I've mentioned they're on my channel is especially my generation like I know for me personally where I grew up in school in our health classes they only taught us about physical health okay taught us about what foods to eat how to exercise diets stds cancer all sorts of stuff like that they never taught us about mental health okay and man like I just always felt like I was going nuts I had a brain that was going a million miles a minute and I was just constantly in this state of worry I was constantly scared I was constantly in fear so for example when finals are coming up everybody's like okay cool I'll just I'll just study you know some people will get stressed some people would hit the books or whatever like I would freeze okay like I would go into this panic mode and it even happened in sports and stuff like that like and like it was more than just being nervous but the problem is is since I wasn't taught about mental health it's not something that we talked about you know like I didn't know who to turn to I didn't know who to turn to to tell him what my brain was doing because I knew it was was not normal but I didn't want people to look at me differently I didn't want them to lock me up in a psych ward and like when you're a teenager like that's this kind of stuff you think like I get a ton of teens who message me on Instagram or email me and like they have these concerns of what their family or parents or adults are gonna think and I like I get it I was there and the unfortunate thing for me was I turned to drugs and alcohol and the reason why I kept abusing these substances is because they were the only thing that calmed me down I had insane amounts of social anxiety too I was constantly worried about what other people were thinking about me I was worried about what I was saying and how I was being judged and like when I drink or use drugs all that went away but that developed into a full blown addiction and I just celebrated six years clean but it consumed about a decade of my life and the problem with addiction is too that it only makes your anxiety even worse especially when you're lying and you're cheating and you're stealing you feel bad about yourself all sorts of stuff so what happened was when I got clean and this is an interesting story I've never told anybody and I don't know if my old roommates are gonna watch this but if they do they still love me anyways I remember you know I I lived with two of my good friends who I got sober with and we were living in my mom's house and man like I remember it was a day where they they had been judging me right they had been judging what I was doing how my sobriety was going and things like that and like I was getting furious I was getting angry I used to have a lot of anger issues too and I was talking to my mom because my mom lived with us too and she was a psychologist and like I remember like I felt like I was going to have a heart attack I couldn't breathe my chest was pounding and like I was telling my mom what was happening with me but I told her like I felt like this a lot ever since I got clean and like my mom's like it sounds like you're having an anxiety attack I'm like what are you talking about right but like when I sat back and I thought about it I'm like man this is the feeling I used to get back in high school this is the feeling I used to get before I turned to drugs and alcohol like that's what this feeling is and now it's back now that I'm clean now that I'm sober and I was losing it right and I ended up setting an appointment with a doctor but before that happened and I want to make this very very clear to anybody out there who's struggling with anxiety one of the things that helped calm my anxiety down before I saw my doctor was I had a conversation with my friends we sat down on the couch and we hatched it out was it uncomfortable yes all right we're like feelings and emotions running all over the place yes but it brought my anxiety down like that's something that has helped me with my anxiety aside from seeing a doctor it's just talking and letting people know what's on my mind as well as doing other coping skills like meditation and writing and stuff like that but anyways I went to the doctor and just a regular primary care doctor I went there and I told her and I was like hey my mom wanted me to come here's what's going on with me she thinks I have anxiety I don't know and she asked me a bunch of questions and we sat down and she's like yeah um and pretty much after a couple visits she diagnosed me with a generalized anxiety disorder now because I'm an addict and alcoholic I said I cannot take any narcotics I might do a video this week on benzodiazepines like Xanax Xanax and Valium but I told her I cannot have that stuff so she prescribed me a medication called lexapro which I've talked about on my channel before so lexapro is primarily an antidepressant but it also works as an anti-anxiety medication and as soon as I started taking that medication I started feeling a lot better and the best way I can describe it especially when I first started taking the medication was I could feel my brain trying to worry I could feel my brain trying to get anxious but it wouldn't like I could I could literally just sit in my experience and realize that this medication was working my brain wasn't going to the places that it usually went and I was like wow these medications actually work and again they're non-narcotic medications now I will say this the medications only did so much for me all right they started me off at a low dose then they doubled it and they said that's the maximum amount we can give you and that's when I'm like crap what am I going to do because my anxiety was coming back I get tolerant to medications pretty easily and that's when I found meditation okay that's when meditation helped save my life because I can't stress enough medications will only get you so far there's a lot of other things that you have to do that's why I make so so so so many videos for you to check out and start putting things into practice like I mentioned meditation journaling having conversations with people okay my imagined fear will take me to crazy places now one of the things about generalized anxiety disorder for those of you who aren't too familiar with it I have a brain that can get triggered out of nowhere all right if I am not doing the things that I have to do to keep up my mental health my brain can just get anxious even though everything is fine all right another video I'm going to make is about the panic attack I had at work out of nowhere out of nowhere okay but anyways please please please go see a doctor get diagnosed if you can relate to any of this story please go get help all right medications can help you out a lot but I can only do so much since you're my my virtual audience you're all scattered over the world like if you need to talk to somebody if you need to learn additional coping skills if you need to learn how to communicate with people in a more effective way to calm down your anxiety please try better help online therapy they help out the channel they provide a very very inexpensive service for online therapy I will put the links in the description down below but it can help you out a lot just simply talking with a licensed professional who can help guide you through and lower your anxiety okay but anyways again like I said please share this video share it so somebody out there might see the symptoms that they have so they can go get the help that they need all right but anyways if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and if you are new here I'm always making videos that help you out with your mental and emotional well being click that little round subscribe button and a big big big thank you to everybody supporting me over on patreon to help me spread this message of hope and if you would like to support the channel on patreon you can click or tap right there all right thanks so much for watching and I will see you next time