Self-observation on my anxiety

“I realize my anxiety is acting as some kind of motivation in my life. It is helping me to go on.”

If this resonates with you, what follows may help you see something about yourself. It is a real self-inquiry — one person’s inner dialogue on this question, unaltered except for readability.

Self-Observation on my anxiety

• I am in a constant state of mild panic.
• I am tired.
• I cannot exactly phrase what is bothering me; The best I can say is that I am in a state of fear.
• When I can concentrate a little then I realize I am afraid of losing my safety.
• I cannot tell exactly what I feel.
• I am confused. This is really threatening; these racing thoughts. 
• The worst is this confusion. It is making me want to speed up and do more more more, get more more more. Like as if it is feeding itself.
• It feels as if it will never end.
• I have a much harder time to do self-observation on my anxiety than on other things in my life because it is a whirlpool. I am so easily pulled back into it.

Chain of thoughts coming when I can go deeper

• My anxiety is turning my life upside down.
• I cannot do what I once set out for myself. 
• Wait. Is this necessarily a bad thing?
• I want to get out of my anxiety but at the same time, I also want to stay in it and solve it. So that it never comes back.
• Right now, I just want to give up. I am fed up and exhausted.
• Another strange observation: My anxiety acts like some sort of motivation for me.
• If I stop caring, my anxiety is pretty much gone. I don’t want to go on anymore because I find that what I have been doing before is not what I truly want.
• Strangely, I find that my anxiety is making me even more self-conscious. 

If you want to sit with this question, SelfChatter’s journal is built for exactly this kind of inner work.