“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression

This is my third time writing this blog post, but I’m choosing to believe that this third time has to be the charm.  Life with anxiety and depression is frustrating mostly because it gets summed up as nervous and sad.  In my experience, there’s {unfortunately} a lot more to it.

Last month, I got asked to review a self-guided therapy app and jumped at the chance.  However, coming to the end of the month and getting ready to share my thoughts with followers has been intimidating.  Lately I’ve felt unwell and struggled to do the smallest of tasks.  However, I’m glad for the purpose of being able to give an honest review.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | The Stigma

It’s a personal flaw, but I get annoyed when people tell me to “cheer up,” “stop worrying,” or “you just need to go to pray more,” when I open up about having anxiety and depression.  Before my diagnosis I felt a lot of shame for struggling with my mental health.  Eventually, I felt comfortable talking about mental health on my platform but in full transparency, I still worry about sharing too much.  My experience entails a lot of guilt; on top of constantly feeling like I don’t deserve to be depressed, I also never want to be a burden to loved ones.  It’s still hard for me to admit to friends and family when I’m struggling with mental health issues and the thought of being more open about them on my blog or social media is intimidating too.  What if someone thinks I’m being dramatic?  What if they don’t understand? What if they’re dismissive?

RELATED: 5 Crazy Things & the Stigma Around Mental Health

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | Cycling

Almost seven years ago now, I started taking antidepressants.  While like any other medication, it helps to keep me healthy I still don’t like publicly talking about it because of the stigma.  The last few years when I’ve traveled for work or with friends, I’ve taken care to hide the bottle or even put the pill into a different container out of fear of someone finding out.  How sad is that?  Realistically, I know most people wouldn’t care or even notice, but irrationally I still feel like I’ll be judged.

Taking medication really has bettered my life — to the point where I’ve become more comfortable talking about therapy and mental health.  However, I still deal with bouts of anxiety and depression pretty regularly.  My hormones have always played a role and so every month before my cycle, I deal with feelings of depression and increased anxiety.  Before I was diagnosed I never tracked my cycle.  I was incredibly irregular during my teen years, but at my psychiatrist’s suggestion started logging.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | Feeling Dismissed

Most of the time when I do share that I deal with moodiness around my period, people are dismissive.  “Oh me too!,” “I have a friend that’s like that,” etc.  So I think it’s probably helpful for me to be open about what I experience before lady time.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | The Hormonal Depression

My insomnia gets worse than normal.  For example, multiple days this week I’ve climbed into bed at 8 PM and haven’t been able to fall asleep until 6 AM.  Even with this super late bedtime, I tend to wake up at 9:30 or 10 at the latest.  I’ve never been someone that functions well when I don’t get enough sleep, but this hormonal week of not being able to sleep makes me extremely cranky and more susceptible to depression.  Basically this whole cycle continues for anywhere from 6-10 days and during that period I feel -trash-.

The physical and mental exhaustion bleeds into being emotionally exhausted.  I’m grouchy and easily set off.  Thanks to therapy, there’s a small piece of my brain that usually recognizes what’s going on and can acknowledge that it’s temporary but…y’all it’s hard.  And it’s -every- month.  Some months are not as bad while other months, I struggle to get out of bed and shower, don’t eat as I lose my appetite, and just check out.  Despite being able to recognize that I’m not the best version of myself during that dip, I still find myself ignoring messages from friends, being mentally checked out, and finding very little drive to do the things I typically enjoy.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | Coming Out of the Fog

The first day of lady time is a blessed day in my book.  This is usually when I come out of the depressive jaunt and feel like myself again.  Before I started seeing a therapist, this was when my self-loathing ramped up.  I’d feel guilty for anything and everything.  I’d tell myself that I would never be able to be successful because of this cycle.  I knew that this combination of anxiety and depression made me not act like my best self; how could people stand being friends with me?  Who would choose to like or love me when a third of the month, I’m an extremely tired robot?

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | The Benefit of Therapy

And that’s where therapy came in.  Medication helps me with the chemical balance of my brain, but I also have to continue to retrain how I think.  Therapy has improved my quality of life, but it’s also expensive.  I’m very fortunate to have access to mental healthcare and to be privileged enough to afford copays of seeing a therapist.  It’s frustrating to know that on top of the stigma around mental healthcare this is a very substantial roadblock that many people face in getting the healthcare that they need.

The first time I saw a therapist, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief over telling someone how I felt and not being dismissed.  Most of my teen years when I would try to explain how I felt to my parents, they told me it was a phase or something that everyone went through.  {In defense of my parents, I’m not sure they realized how severe some of my feelings were and both came from families where mental health wasn’t discussed.}

These days I tend to call and schedule a therapy appointment as needed.   For me, these appointments deal more with cognitive behavioral therapy {CBT} and talking through my anxiety.  While my depression is pretty limited to the monthly bout, anxiety is a more everyday struggle.  While a lot of the mental aspect is debilitating in being worried, the physical aspect includes trouble sleeping, pain throughout my back, shoulders, and neck, and sometimes even stomach issues.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | Using an App for Therapy

Circling back to the app I’ve been testing; it’s the Bloom App and using it yesterday gave me the push I needed to sit down and write this post.  I want to start by giving my personal opinion that nothing can beat the in person tag team of seeing a psychiatric professional {mine’s a psychiatric RN!} and a therapist to get diagnosed if you’re having mental health struggles.  I plan to continue using the self-guided app while still going to my normal appointments & if I were to feel “off,” I’d still call and make my therapy appointment.

RELATED: 5 Ways to Protect Your Mental Health

But I also know that not everyone has the same mental health struggles as I do & that therapy isn’t always accessible.  This has been a great way for me to revisit some of the things I’ve learned in therapy; since I’m not feeling my best, I’m working through their week long “Understand Depression” track.  These CBT sessions are about five minutes long each, interactive with prompts where you can journal in the app, and end with breathing exercises.

The app also includes a monthly gratitude challenge which prompts you daily and gets you to think specifically about different aspects of your life, journaling exercises, mindfulness sessions, as well as “quick and easy sessions” for starting or ending the day.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | My Last Refresher

Yesterday’s therapy session was about cognitive distortions, specifically mind-reading.  This is definitely something that I struggle with quite a bit.  Basically a cognitive distortion is when our mind convinces us to view a situation a certain way and then emote based on how we’re seeing things.  Mind-reading is when we assume we know how someone else thinks.  The danger of both of these is that our thinking isn’t completely fact based and can lead to…jumping to conclusions!

So for example, a couple years ago someone locally wrote up a list of the “best Louisville bloggers.”  I wasn’t on it and immediately I turned this into people not liking my content then I wasn’t good/pretty/smart enough then {the huge jump} everyone reading my blog and following me on social media is really just doing so to laugh and make fun of me.  Pretty vicious cycle right?  Again, none of that thinking was necessarily fact based but I was able to convince myself that everyone hated me and was laughing at me behind my back.

The session I had yesterday did a more thorough job of explaining what cognitive distortions are, common ones that people have, and then had journal prompts at three different points throughout the exercise.  This kind of therapy has been tremendously helpful for me because it increases my own self-awareness and helps me keep my depression in check.  Before therapy, it wasn’t uncommon for me to project these thoughts on other people, talk myself out of doing things I enjoyed, and totally isolate.

“Don’t Be Nervous!” Unpacking Life with Anxiety & Depression | Wrapping Things Up

I feel very emotionally bare right now, but hopefully this post has been helpful in explaining what anxiety and depression can look like.  If any of it sounds familiar for you or a loved one, please seek out a mental health care professional or encourage them to.  The past seven years truly have made a world of difference for me.

Finally, I asked Bloom if they would provide a promo code for readers and followers and they agreed.  Anyone can try a 7 day free trial of Bloom here, but you can also get a year long subscription for the discounted price of $25 a year with code NICOLE25 — to buy at the discount price, you’ll need to create an account and then cancel your free trial.  If you try out the app, please feel free to let me know what you think!