So since we’ve talked about anxiety, why not tackle some ‘how-to’s in the overcoming anxiety game plan!?
That’s just what I did over at the Impact Women blog a few weeks ago! I talked about how my anxiety shows up and starts to rear it’s ugly head- not anxiety attacks… those are a beast of their very own- but anxiety in the day to day sense.
On a daily basis, my anxiety shows up in the form of OCD compulsions. I have to say that these compulsions are so much better than they used to be, and they were never as bad as I know a lot of people have them, so please don’t feel that I am minimizing or victimizing this disorder, because it is a beast in and of itself. But when I was younger, I used to not be able to go to sleep at night without kissing about 10 different posters in a specific order, a specific number of times. Silly? Yes. Serious? Also yes. I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t do all the kissing, but I certainly didn’t want to find out. It was a compulsion that I really could not NOT do. And if I knew I would be spending the night away from my room- and my posters- I would have to perform the ritual ahead of time for each night that I would be gone. If I got it out of order, or if I lost count, of course I would have to start again.
I don’t recall now how it ended, or when, but I do remember that it followed me when I moved from my childhood home to my new home- same posters, same process- and then it morphed when I went to college, but I still had a process and procedure at bedtime.
I also recall a process around tickets- airplane tickets, park tickets, etc- and car keys. I had to take my car keys in and out of my purse over and over again to ensure I wasn’t locking them in the car.
Either way, what I’m getting at is, I don’t struggle with these compulsions today- at least not in these ways and to these degrees- but OCD is still a part of my anxiety and actually my anxiety maintenance. I guess you could say that I use it more as an anxiety alert bell and less as maintenance. My OCD alerts me to the fact that I need some maintenance. There, that’s what I’m getting at!
So come on over here and read a little bit more about what I do when I realize I’m a little high on the anxiety richter scale.