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Chronic Anxiety Disorder: The Price You Pay for Hiding Your True Self

The more I learn about anxiety, the more I realize just how widespread a problem it really is. There are millions upon millions of people all over the globe struggling with some sort of chronic anxiety disorder, often more than one type. Seeing how much people are suffering makes me really sad sometimes. It also pushes me to understand and overcome the limitations my own anxieties are still placing on my life.

One thing I’m becoming more aware of — and more pissed off about — is how often my own chronic anxiety is caused by hiding who I really am. Hiding how I really feel. Hiding my true self behind an emotional mask of what I think other people want me to be.

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

– Jim Morrison

Characteristics of People with Chronic Anxiety Disorder

Anxious people tend to be intelligent, sensitive people. The world is a pretty brutal place that doesn’t have a lot of sympathy or patience for sensitivity. As a result, sensitive people often develop emotional coping skills called “avoidance masking.” Wearing an emotional mask is a way to protect the hurt parts of us that feel abused, rejected or misunderstood by the world around us.

I’d hazard a guess there’s not one person with chronic anxiety disorder who hasn’t hidden their true self behind an emotional and/or behavioral mask at one time or another. It’s a very effective coping strategy for protecting the sensitive parts of ourselves from a callous world. The only problem with pretending to be something we’re not is that, in the end, it makes our anxiety worse.

There’s nothing wrong with hiding what we really think or feel in certain situations. That’s part of being a sane, rational adult. But when we make a habit of hiding our true reactions too often, over time we lose touch with our real thoughts, ideas, and feelings. We can end up not knowing who we are anymore. We’ve lost touch with our true selves, which is VERY anxiety-producing, not to mention exhausting.

Some common emotional masks anxious people tend to wear include:

  • The People Pleaser Mask. This is where you bend over backwards to make sure everyone else is happy. People pleasers (like me) are terrified of being emotionally attacked and do whatever it takes to make sure everyone likes them out of fear. Then we feel angry at ourselves for being afraid. We can do this so often, we don’t know what our own thoughts and feelings are anymore.
  • The Angry Mask. Anger feels more powerful than hurt, fear or sadness and can be used to avoid these painful feelings. Anger also keeps people away and protects from feeling vulnerable. Most people would never guess that those who use anger to cover up their sensitivity are often deeply hurt on the inside.  Emotionally sensitive people who use the mask of anger tend to be lonely and have major problems with self-esteem.
  • The Happy Mask. Another way to protect yourself is to behave as if you’re always happy. No one ever knows when your feelings are hurt because it seems like nothing ever gets you down. You joke and smile even when people behave cruelly or are insensitive towards you. Fake happiness covers up your REAL feelings.

Overcome chronic anxiety disorder and stop hiding your true self

If you’re tired of living with chronic anxiety, one way to overcome it is to start dropping your emotional masks and show the world who you really are. Here are some steps you can take to do this:

  • Make the decision. You first have to decide you want to drop your “avoidance mask.” You must be committed to taking this action even though it’s painful. Letting go of your mask is not easy. It will help you succeed to realize this going in. Taking one small step at a time will probably work best. For example, you could decide to speak up about which restaurant you’d prefer for dinner as one initial step.
  • Focus on self-awareness.  Spend some time asking yourself what you really think and feel.  It’s likely that you’ve lost touch with your feelings and preferences, so ask yourself and experiment and they will come back to you. Accept whatever comes up and trust that it will pass. Consider writing down what you liked and didn’t like each day as a way of getting back in touch with yourself.
  • Be visible.  Start expressing your opinions and thoughts gently and with kindness. Notice if you have the posture of someone who is trying to hide. If so, stand up straight and let yourself be visible.
  • Face what you’ve been avoiding.  Accepting your internal experience instead of avoiding it will allow you to check to see if your feelings have any base in external reality and to choose healthier, more effective ways of coping. Facing the external fears will help you overcome those as well. Being rejected or criticized by others is not pleasant, but you will find out you can survive it. Take small steps, and make sure you have support.

Living with chronic anxiety disorder because you’re constantly hiding your true self is no way to live. It takes time (and courage), but you can learn to break the lonely, isolating bonds of chronic anxiety disorder. I’m going to keep working on it, and I hope you will too.

Greg Weber

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The very real anxiety of having nothing to wear

Ever opened your wardrobe to find that, despite all your clothes, you simply have nothing to wear? Lauren Bravo knows the feeling only too well but, as she explains, it’s time to overcome our wardrobe anxieties

The other week, my colleague Caroline and I were having one of those aggressive compliment battles. “You’re so stylish!” she yelled at me across the desk. “Nooooo, you are mistaken – I am a human dung heap!” I protested. “SHUT UP,” she fired back. “You always look so effortlessly put-together.” And the word “effortlessly” cut through the middle of my “Aw shucks” shield and hit a nerve. Mate, I thought, if only you knew.

I will never see myself as any kind of fashion hotshot (not while most of my clothes are covered in Doritos dust, anyway), but if I can lay claim to any style kudos at all, it is 100 per cent not effortless. I try really hard at getting dressed, actually. I think endlessly about clothes. I shop like it’s a nervous tic. A few days ago, I changed outfit three times just to go to the end of the road, hungover, to buy a sandwich.

Does the “effortlessly stylish” woman even exist? She’s the industry’s favourite unicorn – the off-duty model, the chic French fashion editor. But if I, a non-fashion nobody, find it so hard to put clothes on in the morning, then maybe behind every “well-dressed” woman is a whole lot of sweat and tears. We’re meant to pretend the perfect outfit just falls on by accident, rather than showing our workings.

And I do mean workings. Because getting dressed is a lot like an equation.

Firstly, there’s wanting to look “good” in what you’re wearing. You want something “flattering” that fits well and suits your colouring and performs whatever sorcery it is that “flattering” clothes are expected to do. But, then, there’s wanting to look the other kind of “good” in what you’re wearing – the kind that answers to fashion, to trends, to tribal identities and to your own personal idea of what makes a killer outfit. (NB: to complicate things, this part often ignores “flattering” altogether, or goes deliberately against it).

Then you can factor in a load of agonising sub-criteria, such as: is it appropriate for the location and occasion? How about the weather? And you subconsciously offset each answer against how much you actually care – because sometimes dressing inappropriately for the situation is exactly the thing that’s going to make you feel best, like when I wore a hot-pink wiggle dress to my nan’s funeral.

Lauren wearing a midi skirt, t-shirt, trench coat and brogues – all carefully chosen and “100 per cent not effortless”

 

Then (oh, you didn’t think we were done did you?) comes comfort. Comfort involves so much more than just “heels vs flats”. Comfort is a continually evolving challenge. My high-waisted, cropped jeans, for example, look great in the morning but, after lunch, the rigid denim tends to get a bit too pinchy at the crotch. This is, obviously, not ideal.

And even when you’ve worked through that mental flow chart, there are other considerations and curveballs. Was I wearing the same thing last time I saw these people? What coat works with this skirt length? Hang on, is my “good” bra in the wash? Do I now have to start this entire, godforsaken process again?

“The process begins while I’m still in the shower, when I mentally go through my wardrobe,” says Leila, a content executive. “Of course, the outfit I decided on never looks how it looked in my head and, five to 10 outfit changes later, I’m fully panicking, about to miss my train.”

“It’s completely normal to get changed five times before leaving the house… isn’t it?” frowns Jemma, an old colleague I bumped into on the bus. “I don’t understand people who get their clothes out the night before,” she adds. “There are so many variables that may change in the morning.”

It isn’t hard to recognise that there are a whole heap of pressures on women as we stand in front of the wardrobe each morning

For most of my life, I assumed it was normal, too – just the occupational hazard of being a clothes obsessive. Or even, for that matter, just being a woman. It isn’t hard to recognise that there are a whole heap of pressures on women as we stand in front of the wardrobe each morning; as Caitlin Moran writes in How To Be A Woman, “When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.” But could the daily wardrobe meltdown be a symptom of something internal, too?

Clinical psychologist Dr Jessamy Hibberd tells me it probably does have a basis in anxiety and low self-esteem. Clothes make a handy outlet for displaced stress, she explains, and deliver quick validation when you feel insecure. “It feels like an outfit is something you can get right, whereas, for most things in life, there’s not a perfect answer. The time you spend evaluating what to wear is a kind of avoidance of those other things,” she says. “[You think] ‘because I got that outfit right, it’s going to be the perfect evening.’”

So, how can we curb the “I have nothing to wear” meltdowns? Well, you could adopt your own sort of uniform, which is great if your style lends itself to a capsule collection of grey roll-neck jumpers, but is basic hell for a trend junkie. Better-quality basics might help, though, fewer tricky prints, more “classic” shapes – the sorts of pieces that make you feel good and also go with everything else in your wardrobe. Dresses or jumpsuits are also a good bet, as you don’t have to match a top and bottom, and recently I’ve had moderate success with loose culottes, instead of the punishing jeans.

But maybe it’s less about what we wear and more about how we feel when we wear it. Dr Hibberd recommends noting down three positive comments you’ve received each day, beyond your outfit, to build confidence and self-esteem. “The scrutiny you put yourself under is 100 times more than anybody else gives you, because they’re thinking about themselves,” she says. “If you’re seeing friends, think: how much weight does their outfit hold in the experience you have with them? Remind yourself that it’s only a small percentage of what makes people impressed by you.”

If I could start getting out of the door on time in the morning, that might be the most impressive thing of all.

@laurenbravo

Source: https://www.the-pool.com/fashion/fashion-honestly/2017/20/lauren-bravo-on-having-nothing-to-wear

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How What You’re Wearing Can Affect Your Anxiety

You may take a lot of time with your appearance, hardly think about it, or passively let others tell you what you should wear instead. Depending on why you do these things, you may be dressing for stress. This article will show you how to avoid these appearance-related anxiety pitfalls, and dress for success.

Regain Your Confidence

Suffering from anxiety affects every part of you, and unfortunately many people allow themselves to live a lifestyle that confirms that anxiousness. Learn how to control your anxiety instead with my free 7 minute anxiety test.

Start the test here.

Are You Dressed for Stress?

Is anxiety caused by your outfit? Of course not. Take my anxiety test to learn more about your anxiety. But even though people should have freedom to dress how they want, the truth is that those that purposefully dress down often lose confidence in themselves. That loss of confidence affects your anxiety levels.

With that in mind, what you wear (and why you wear it) can have a big impact on the amount of anxiety you have to deal with in your life. Because of the power of first impressions, as well as how quickly visual information is processed, the way you present yourself to the world via your appearance will affect your relationships with others as well as how you view with yourself. The following are some of the reasons and ways that anxiety can be affected by your clothing.

Being Dressed By Others

Some people find themselves inabusiverelationships with people who wish to control them via their physical appearance: it may be a new friend, a significant other, or even a parent. Warning signs to watch for and how these people (and clothing choices) can affect you are outlined below.

Controlling friends — People may enter your life who feel entitled to control you. If you find that a friend is constantly criticizing what you wear, or demanding that you look a certain way regardless of your preferences (rather than offering sensitive feedback when you ask for it, or respectfully explaining what about how you dress is bothering them and why), you know that they are a person to avoid because they will only cause you stress by making you act in ways that are untrue to yourself and destroying your self esteem for their own benefit.

Controlling S.O. — A significant other who criticizes the way you dress or constantly demands that you dress up for them, or dress down for others, is worth even less of your time. If you find yourself dressing to suit another person’s idea of who you are or need to be in order to earn love or affection from them, you are being forced to dress for stress and should (with support from friends, family and/or a counselor’s support, with a court order if need be) remove that person from your life as soon as possible. The more you give in to their demands (or allow yourself to be coerced and/or traumatized by them), the more prone you will be to controlling relationships further down the road and panic attacks due to post-traumatic stress.

Controlling parent — Parents may wish to control their children’s lives past the age when such control is appropriate due to overprotectiveness, or simply due to unhappiness in their own lives. This may lead to hypercritical analysis of clothing choices or even attempts to dress you as they see fit, which can be socially mortifying and reduce your sense of control over you own life, leading to high stress, low self esteem, and even depression.

All of these could have contributed to your own anxiety, or make you anxious about the idea of what you wear.

I Don’t Care Couture

Dressing thoughtlessly because you don’t feel motivated to make an effort with your appearance, or because it causes you too much stress to decide what to wear, can lead to stressful relations with others. Friends may avoid you, coworkers or strangers may talk about you behind your back, and you may even be fired from your job. These can lead to feelings of rejection and paranoia, which can easily build into anxiety and panic.

It’s important to realize that there are those that “don’t care what other people think” and “want to dress however they want.” There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what you need to realize is that you DO care what other people think, simply by the fact that you’re purposefully not dressing the way they want. That’s caring. That means that you’re choosing outfits based on making sure that they are not what other people think is “cool,” and you’re going to think about that every time you go out.

Dressing Up Low Self Esteem

If you are someone with low self esteem, you may feel the need to dress a certain way to compensate for the ways in which you imagine that you don’t measure up to others: this may mean you dress to fit in with a certain crowd even though you don’t feel like one of them, dress to call attention to yourself because you don’t feel like people would ever pay attention to you otherwise, or obsessively follow trends in order to impress people with your new or trendy clothing choices rather than with your thoughts or personality. These ways of dressing can lead to shallow connections with others based on superficial and perhaps dishonest statements that your clothes have made about you, which can keep you from forming strong emotional connections or confidence in your sense of self, resulting in loneliness and stress.

Dressing Uncomfortably

It’s true that some outfits that make you look nice are uncomfortable. But that perfect pair of 3-inch heels, too-small pair of jeans or old belt that doesn’t really fit anymore may be contributing to your anxiety. Looking fashionable or dressing for convenience at the expense of your physical comfort is to be avoided. After all, it’s hard to look great when your feet are screaming or your internal organs can’t digest your food properly, and ultimately it’s pretty inconvenient. Dressing in spite of your body only leads to a negative self image and the idea that you are always fighting against yourself to look good, which can be very stressful.

If you are making any of these choices when dressing yourself, as necessary as it may seem to you due to external pressure, the media or your own beliefs about what looks good, you are setting yourself up for an increase in anxiety in your life. Read on to discover how you can change your style in empowering ways.

Are You Confident in Yourself?

Suffering from anxiety? Trying to cure it? Make sure you take my free 7 minute anxiety test to learn more about your anxiety and how to cure it.

How to Dress For Success

If you are reading this article, you may have noticed that some people seem to dress effortlessly and always look happy, healthy and confident. You may also have wondered how they manage to pull it off, and assumed that they (unlike you) have tons of money, a personal shopper and a life coach. Fortunately, the secrets to their success are things that anyone can do, including you.

Most likely, those people are following one, several, or all of the tips below.

  • *Dress For You and No-One Else – *The unfortunate truth is that you should consider what looks good and what doesn’t, because you want to be confident in your outfit. But that confidence should be based on what makes you confident in front of others. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be considerate when you dress yourself (by, say, wearing pink to a funeral or house slippers to a job interview), but you should be consciously dressing to reflect the best of who you are (rather than letting others decide for you how you appear to the world). This will help you feel good about your own ability to make choices and assert yourself, keeping you from doubts about who you really are or whether people really know you.
  • *Think About What You Wear – *What you wearrequires some planning. Putting together outfits in advance can help you avoid stress caused by having to decide at the last minute, and looking through magazines or on the internet can help give you an idea of what kinds of clothes you would feel good about wearing. Feeling put together and professional can give you a big boost of confidence and self-assurance that you maybe wouldn’t expect, as well as making it more likely for people to give you compliments and treat you respectfully.
  • *Show Off Your Positive Qualities – *Don’t hide behindwho you think people want you to be, or who you think you have to be to be happy. If you dress in ways that reflect who you truly are, and don’t obsess over whether you don’t look good enough, people will actually be impressed by and drawn to your self-confidence and maybe even be inspired by you. Being an inspiration to others rather than feeling you like rely on others for your personality will be a great relief and help you to realize that you are free to make your own choices without fear.
  • *Don’t Hurt Yourself – *Avoidclothes that pinch, pull, chafe, or otherwise hurt your body. If you’re worried about looking good, you should worry first about feeling good: when you figure out how to do that, you will look your best and have nothing to worry about. In addition, limiting the physical stress that your body has to endure will help you to have the energy and strength to deal with emotional stress when it comes your way and allow you to feel stable and in control. If you are forced to dress uncomfortably no matter how you dress due to physical or health problems that make you uncomfortable, you should engage in physical therapy and exercise regularly (or find a personal trainer) to help you overcome those difficulties and dress in a way that makes you happy.

Looking amazing doesn’t have to make you unhappy, uncomfortable and stressed out, and if you are all those things then the chances that you look amazing are slim to none. Get a reality check and review your fashion choices to make the changes that will lead to a new, healthier you.

Anxiety isn’t caused by the clothes you wear, but they play a role. You still need to make sure that you’re reducing your anxiety as well. Once you do, you’ll be more confident in whatever you wear.

I’ve helped thousands of those suffering with anxiety and dressing like it learn to stop their anxiety symptoms using my free 7 minute anxiety test. This test is a great way to make sure that you are able to free yourself of your anxiety.