Anxiety symptoms in any form can be bewildering and frightening to the person having them.
Once they start it is a symptom of anxiety and a function of your brain to try to solve your problem and so you spend almost every waking moment in your head constantly churning over and over the same thoughts desperately trying to find solution to how you are feeling. You focus inward and lose your focus on the outside world and present moment. You worry constantly about the future and no longer live in the present moment.
It is easy to become utterly convinced that there is no way that something that feels as bad as this could be just Anxiety.
It is common to think that the doctor must have missed something when he/she was diagnosing Anxiety.
It is also very easy and a very common worry for people to think that they have something much worse than Anxiety or that even if they only have Anxiety at the moment it will soon progress to a much more serious mental illness. You become convinced that if you were to have enough anxious feelings, Panic attacks or obsessive thoughts you may at some point trigger a much more serious mental illness such as Bipolar or Schizophrenia.
Neurotic Disorders such as Anxiety and psychotic Disorders such as Bipolar and Schizophrenia are very different things.
With Neurotic, the condition still happens so you cannot seem to stop yourself falling into it, but you can rationalise it and know it is not reality.
With psychotic, your family and friends would be dragging you up to the Doctors but you would be insisting your fine.
You will not go crazy with Anxiety, Panic Attacks or Depression and I am sure that experienced panicking people (such as myself), who have had many hundreds of anxious feelings, panic attacks and obsessive thoughts, never went crazy even though they probably believed each and every time one came that they would. It just does not happen.
In simple terms If you have an anxiety disorder, you will experience episodes of anxiety until you’ve found a solution.
But all you will have is Anxiety. You don’t just suddenly become Psychotic.
Incidentally, I know people who do have Bipolar and Schizophrenia who live normal lives with good jobs and children. It is easy to believe just what you watch on the news about these issues, however there is nothing to say that you could not lead a normal life with it anyway.
Don’t spend years going over and over things in your mind worrying that your doctor must have missed some other terrible mental illness which could be developing and then look back in hindsight and realise it is just Anxiety or Depression which are quite frankly enough to cope with on their own.
I spent many years doing just that and here I am fifteen years later. I never went crazy, stopped breathing or had a heart attack. All I ever felt was the intense feeling of fear which I trained my body to do myself over time.
The most important thing you can do for yourself is to accept what is wrong and work on reversing the cycle, accepting this is just anxiety in whatever form it manifests in you.