8: Anxiety@ The Pub

The final of my eight part 'Anxiety @' series (blimey, this has been going on for a while eh?!*) focuses on what it is like to have social anxiety.  I refer to the pub specifically, although this could include any type of social activity involving other people. As I understand it, a social activity is not 'social' if it doesn't involve other people, so by it's very nature, this is the sort of anxiety that occurs in the presence of others.

Photo from Anxiety UK website - Google's were all crap

What a great blog this is so far.

The way I would define social anxiety is having a chronic lack of confidence when in a social situation; a fear of looking foolish; a fear of appearing uninteresting; and of course a fear of all of this resulting in a panic attack.  It's often the case that social anxiety and panic disorder collide.  In fact, panic disorder pretty much collides with everything.

The other factor to throw into the mix which is more specific to me as an individual, is the fear of eating, which, as number 4 in the 'Anxiety @' series demonstrates, has been particularly difficult for me over the years.  Often, struggling to eat can lead to social embarrassment, as various previous blogs have described. 

So for now I'm going to cut out the panic disorder and eating elements, which cloud the social anxiety problem as a whole.  I don't have social anxiety just because of the panic disorder and eating problems.  These are simply other factors that make it worse.  This is proven by the fact that even today, when both my panic disorder and eating out issues are much improved, I still experience social anxiety.  So the two questions are how and why?

This is best demonstrated via the medium of case studies.  Sorry - I appear to have gone back to work.  But in all seriousness, examples of where social anxiety has occurred where eating out hasn't been involved, and recently enough so that panic disorder was less of an issue, is the best way for me to explain what it's like.

Example 1: This was about 18 months ago, not long before I left my previous job.  There was a fairly generic work do taking place.  Work do's are generally a fuel for social anxiety, because 1) I never feel as comfortable with work colleagues anyway for obvious reasons, and 2) because no-one at work has ever known about my anxiety conditions.

Ah - and this is really interesting actually as I'm kind of finding out things about my condition as I write this.  Because of health anxiety, I have a fear of the effects of stimulants on the body.  Alcohol is included in this, and consequently I tended to only drink a little and then go soft, so to speak.  In the past, whenever I drank too much, I woke up at about 4am with my heart racing and feeling terrible, which then led to a panic attack.  So I stopped drinking.  But of course, when you're out with work colleagues, and they ask you 'why aren't you drinking much,' my reply generally won't be 'because I have an anxiety condition and it causes me to have a panic attack if I drink too much.'  Call it stigma, call it a conversation killer, what you will, but I never gave a legitimate reason.  Well OK, so I may have said 'for health reasons,' which technically is true, but you get the point.

Anyway all this drivel shows how significant the influence of alcohol has on a social situation.  Sadly, in modern society, you're often automatically seen as uninteresting if you're not drinking for no reason that is deemed acceptable by those who are drinking.  So I often go into social situations, especially with people who don't know about my condition, knowing that talks of alcohol are going to dominate the night.  And you may have noticed (or maybe not, if you too are pissed), that when people start drinking, one of the main things they talk about is around stories of other times when they have been so off their face that they had intimate relations with their friend's grandmother, or something equally as worrying.

So what this example - and many others - shows is that alcohol has a huge influence on social anxiety.  I either drink and suffer the consequences, or don't drink and get badgered all evening as to why I'm not drinking.  Call me a tiresome bore, but I generally go for the latter.  

Example 2: A house party, probably about five years ago now, at my friend's house.  This particular friend generally sits in other 'friendship circles' to me, which means apart from her and my mate who effectively came with me, the other people at the party weren't people I knew well.  Put me in a situation with new or unfamiliar people and I'm petrified.  I feel bullied by others in conversational terms - I feel I need to have seen that film or heard that band or visited that country that they are talking about.  The reality is, I rarely watch films, my music taste is so specific I have no idea what is happening in the mainstream, and my only venture outside the UK and Ireland was on a university fieldtrip.  Sadly, the materialistic fabric that makes up modern life dominates social conversations, especially with people you don't know well, and as such I'm automatically perceived as 'unusual' as someone who doesn't really treasure the same things most others do (ironically - some of these 'unusual' character traits that I have are often as a result of anxiety!)

Now this would be fine if I had confidence.  You could argue that being 'different' could provide a real social opportunity, a tonic amongst the generic nature of most social conversations.  But sadly, what social anxiety makes you do is cower under the discomfort of being 'different' rather than allowing you to express yourself.  You become wildly uninteresting rather than the most interesting.  And even if people don't see you as uninteresting, you feel uninteresting - because you have no confidence.  The reality is this:

I don't feel I have anything interesting to say.  Or rather;

I don't feel I have anything to say that other people would find interesting.

Example 3: I mentioned in my last blog about living in a shared house that social anxiety has been an issue here too.  I've been fortunate, in that this has forced them to find out more about me and in so doing make me feel more comfortable with them over time.  But it's not been without it's difficulties.  There have been other people there during my time at the shared house who have always made me uncomfortable, the sort who assume that you're uninteresting if you don't share their views or find the things they are interested in interesting yourself.  I began to appreciate that's not so much my fault, but it doesn't help my own confidence either.

But even the people I have got on with well, I still find it difficult to answer a question such as 'what have you got planned for the weekend?'  If my answer is 'watching football, chilling, walking' for example, then those feelings of uninterest come back.  I feel like the social eyes of the world are watching me, expecting me to say I'm going hang gliding or parachuting, or at least going out with 'the lads' on the piss until the early hours.  Which takes us back to example 1.

Incidentally, none of my friends, nor myself, could be classed as 'the lads' in any way, shape or form.  And that is one element of my social personality that I'm quite proud of.

Now to factor back in the aforementioned eating problem: could it be that this has caused the social anxiety to be worse, or could it be that it's the social anxiety that's caused the eating problem?  As with trying to identify the cause and effect of many anxiety problems, especially those that interrelate, it's very much a chicken and egg situation. Does health anxiety cause panic disorder?  Or the other way round?  In truth, I don't think even the most highly qualified psychologists know the answer to that.  That said, I think I'd still have social anxiety if I didn't have an eating problem, as the confidence thing can occur whether eating is involved or not.

The final question is, what has caused this social anxiety.  Is it other forms of anxiety and the effect it has had on my personality?  Is it my upbringing?  The eating problem as mentioned above?  Is it purely genetic?  Where does the lack of confidence come from?  Years of being unhappy and, for a while, bullied at school?  Years of being single?  

I would suggest all of the above have had an impact.  I don't think, after so long, it really matters now.  It's more about appreciating the people I do feel comfortable with, of which there a few - but this core group of friends has really kept me together over the years.  It's more about welcoming those few new people into my life who do accept me and value me for who I am, not who society wants me to be.  And it's about managing those occasions when I am thrusted into uncomfortable circumstances and managing them in the best way I know how - if anyone can tell me what this is, by the way, please let me know.

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* As I said at the start of this post, this is the final blog in the 'Anxiety @' series.  I also said it's been going on for a while, which it has.  Eight blog posts all around different themes in terms of how anxiety has affected and still affects me, and several sub-themes within each one.  What does this show?  Just how much anxiety and mental health conditions as a whole can affect someone's life.

I would never say that I've had a severe mental health condition.  I say that because I'm here today in a position to write this blog, and I've never been hospitalised as a result of my condition.  And yet despite this, anxiety has still affected my life, its outcomes and my future in a multitude of ways.  So how about those people who can class their condition as severe?

Which is why all the talk about cuts to mental health budgets, the stigma that still exists and the lack of awareness that is still abound in certain pockets of today's society frightens me.  This needs to change.  The time to act is now.

That's all I hope to achieve by writing these blogs.  A microscopic needle in a land full of haystacks.  But I hope, occasionally, that the right person with the right microscope picks the right haystack, and finds something amongst my ramblings that they find helpful.

Best wishes
Al

7: Anxiety@ The Shared House

The latest in my 'Anxiety@' series continues with focusing on what it has been like living in a shared house.  I didn't move out of my parents' home at all until April 2012 - nearly three years ago.  I lived at home and commuted during University and simply didn't have the mental strength to move out.  The thought of it scared me.  After the incident in 2011 (see last blog) any likelihood of this seemed even less likely, but thanks to my therapy that I started a year before I moved out, it gave me the belief that, if the right circumstances came up, I could do it.

It never quite got like this

Not that I specifically looked for it.  It just so happened that my friend, who I met at the start of GCSE years (2001) was moving back to my home town in 2012 after spending four University years and two subsequent years up north.  Needless to say he didn't want to move back with his parents, so he asked me if we wanted to share.

Now the nature of his job means that he's away quite a lot (he's a musician).  He is usually gigging at weekends, which is of course the time when I'm not at work.  I knew back then that living what would effectively be on my own was not an option.  Being alone causes the anxious thoughts to prevail, to rise to the surface and stay there, to be more profound.  If the mind has nothing to focus on, it focuses on physical pains or things to generate anxiety.  Mind clutter, if you will.  So living alone was never an option for me.  

But I also knew that living with my parents was difficult enough.  I'm an only child, and invariably I'd spend many evenings coming home from work and sitting away from them, either because I needed space from them or simply because they weren't watching the same TV programmes as me.  So home, despite being a comfort blanket in many ways, was also becoming quite lonely.

So, with the help of my friend and my therapist, I took the plunge, and we moved into a shared house with, at the time, three other people we had never met.  And to say the first few months were hard would be an understatement.

Lesson 1: Always try and meet the people you'll be living with before moving in. 

Lesson 2: Try and live with an existing friend, if you can.  Someone you're comfortable with.

For a start, my room was, environmentally, a health hazard, and not just for someone with chronic anxiety.  It contained the hot water boiler and the kitchen was below, meaning it was like the surface of the sun most of the time.  It was April when we moved in, so of course it kept getting warmer then too.  Due to the aforementioned factors and single glazing, it was also very noisy.  It was also absurdly light, due to pointless beige curtains and the sun for most of the day.  The main impact of all this was lack of sleep.  I think I must have got about no more than five hours sleep every night for about two months - and five hours would be an achievement.  It was becoming a serious problem.  

This was partially overcome by moving rooms. One of the downstairs rooms was vacant because it took the landlord so long to redecorate it after previous troublesome tenant(!), but once it became available I moved into it.  It was darker (had shutters on the window), cooler (downstairs) and generally less noisy, so this was a significant improvement.  It was a sizeable bedroom as well, so all in all this wasn't a problem (apart from a fairly frequent appearance of cat-sized house spiders, which I'm not very good with either).  

Lesson 3: Don't be scared to move rooms if the opportunity arises, if you'd like to. On a similar point, don't be scared to ask the landlord if you need something; that's what they are there for.  I went in with too much of a 'I need to wholly fend for myself' attitude.

However, this room ended up being my house, basically.  To say the other tenants, bar my friend of course, were not the sort I had in mind would be an understatement.  My mate and I laugh about it now, but at the time it was hell.  They were all messy and unclean for a start off and none of them really pulled their weight in this respect.  The bathroom wasn't much better.  The floor was carpeted for a start.  For someone who verges on obsessive when it comes to cleanliness, this was very difficult to live with.  I expanded the hand sanitiser market by 40%.  Their personalities made me very uncomfortable as well.  As with shared houses, people came and went, but they were all male (which probably stereotypically explains the mess), and all either rather uncommunicative or a lads lad, if you know what I mean.  They made me that uncomfortable that I tended to avoid making contact with them at all in the end; e.g. if one of them was in the kitchen, I'd wait until they were finished.  I was walking on egg shells all the time.  And in the last couple of months, I went back to my parents every weekend; my friend wasn't there at weekends anyway and I couldn't face two days of dealing with this.  

Generally it was a really difficult situation, with only my friend and the change of rooms early doors making me stick it out for ten months.  I finished the therapy I mentioned about a month or so after I moved into this house, which was also difficult.  That said, had I not had all the things I'd learnt from this therapy fresh in my head during this time, I'm not sure I could have coped for ten weeks, let alone ten months.  I knew it was time to leave when someone said I was looking thinner (as a six foot four inch tall slim build male who is in fear of any physical changes, this was hard to hear!), which was induced by avoiding cooking anything healthy or substantial on the hob or in the oven due to their rancid state.  

So in late January 2013, I moved back to my folks.  I needed to get out - and I remember vividly feeling so happy and relieved for the first few days back.  I left my friend at the hovel, unfortunately for him, but he understood that I had to leave.  

Of course, it didn't take too long to slip back into the lonely, isolated world of living with my parents.  I knew I could only let this be temporary.  So me and my friend looked for other shared houses, as before.  I still didn't want to live alone or just with him, due to the same reasons, but, being armed with the first experience, I was adamant I wanted to find a place with some nice people in it, people who not only I could tolerate living with, but who, if I was lucky, I'd even make some friends with.  

However, by the seventh viewing, I was becoming sceptical.  Some were hovels like the place I'd moved from; and at most, the landlords didn't make the effort to allow you meet the other housemates.  Until house number eight.

Lesson 4: Spend time looking for houses you're most comfortable with.  I found spareroom.co.uk most useful.

I was viewing the house alone because my friend was away, and I arrived at the viewing to be greeted by a middle aged woman with bright pink hair.  I thought 'hello, what have I got myself into here?'  Only to find out she was the landlord's wife.  I was then introduced to two other people who it quickly transpired were also there to view the three rooms available.  Along with the fact that I was viewing the house for me and my mate, and there was also one other person interested, there were five of us effectively competing for three rooms.  The best bit: the current housemates were all there, in the lounge, waiting for us and effectively judging us on who they wanted to live there / replace them. 

The good news - great news, in fact - here is that this meant that the landlords genuinely cared about who lived with who, and cared that the newbies were able to meet the housemates.  The bad news - I have social anxiety.

So during this whole charade, I kept trying to come across as confident, and wondering the whole time 'how am I coming across compared to the others? How am I coming across to the people I want to live with?' The most difficult were the questions they asked; I kept over-analysing my answers - too short? Too long? Too weird?  Did I look anxious?  This is a vomit of information and a lot to think about in about 20 minutes, whilst trying to secure a room. 

But I was so adamant that I needed to get that into that house.  Why?  Because it offered the biggest opportunity of my lifetime.  A chance to grow, a chance to make friends, a chance to really test myself, with the therapy armed within me.  A chance to strengthen.

Fortunately, two of the other viewers didn't come across particularly well - one barely said anything (even compared to me, which is a challenge) and the other wanted to draw up things like cleaning rotas.  Even I knew this wasn't going to go down favourably.  The landlords also saw me as favourable, because I was able to fill two rooms at once - with my mate in the other room.  So in September 2013, I embarked on my biggest social challenge ever - I (was allowed to) move(d) into this house.  

The first three-ish weeks were a living hell.  All that hard work for not just nothing, but for pain.  It was one of the few times I've ever actually suffered from depression.  I was in despair the whole time.  I was in tears just cooking dinner, which I then struggled to eat.  Sleeping had ceased again.  My dad came round a few days in for a reason I can't remember, and for an hour after he left I was crying manically.  I was close to leaving before I'd even settled in.  

The first question is, why did this happen?  Well, I always expected it to be fairly hard at first, because I have chronic anxiety and a big change like this will take it's toll, initially, just like the previous place.  But I think the key thing here is that I had put pressure on myself to make this experience go well and for it to improve my life.  Perhaps, in a way, similar to why I had my biggest ever panic attack on a train (see previous blog) after I went to visit a University about doing a masters that would 'change my life for the better.'  Combine that with pressure not to eat and do things solely in my room and to go into the communal areas and socialise.  The exact reason I moved in here was causing me utter hell.  

And, as I've said before on this website, I don't suffer from depression, but I have had short bursts of it in the past.  I cannot begin to imagine how people go through chronic depression because it is just absolutely unbearable.  

The second question is, how did I get out of it?  A trip to Wales with another good mate helped; this occurred about three-four weeks in.  I came back more relaxed and refreshed and stronger - able to hit the problems where they hurt.  I focused on my therapy techniques, which had gone out the window during this first period.  My good friend that I lived with was also around for longer than usual after I came back from Wales too, so his familiarity and advice helped.  And I'm still here to this day.

Lesson 5: Don't be scared to take some time out of the situation to freshen your mind up.  Inadvertently it worked for me.  

It took a while, but I actually started to enjoy it.  The other people we were living with were all great people, we had a laugh, and have since even socialised from time to time.  I think I've made a lifetime friend in at least one of them.  The phrase short-term pain for long-term gain was certainly applicable in this case.  I become comfortable, I felt more popular and the only things I had to concern me were the little things you'd get at any shared house.  

But these little things are now starting to get to me more and more.  One of the good housemates has already moved away, the other is doing so in the summer.  For the last six months or so, I've become happier to be on my own, and less tolerant to not being able to cook or shower when I want.  I still have social anxiety, too, and an improved social life as a result of moving here hasn't actually changed this, so I still feel uncomfortable from time to time, a feeling I'm fed up with now and want to minimise.  This combination of reasons means I feel it's time to move on again.

And alas, I've recently been successful (subject to contract) in buying my first house.  Fortunately, my good friend who has been with me throughout both of these shared housing experiences, will join me as my tenant, so I'll still have the company, but with more space than before and hopefully less discomfort.  I will reserve my thoughts and feelings about buying a house for a later blog, when I've actually moved in, but to say I'm experiencing a myriad of both positive and nervous feelings about it would be an understatement.  

But despite going through some really tough times during my shared house experience, ultimately I achieved my goals of (a) having the balls to move out of my parents' in the first place, (b) having the balls to move back temporarily when the first house didn't work out, (c) meeting some great new people and improving my social interactivity and (d) making me mentally tougher and stronger, which I believe it has done.  I think my shared house experience, both the bad and the good times, has helped me manage, test and allow me to learn more about my anxiety second only to the therapy itself.

But now it's time to move on again, to another new chapter in my life.  That will involve me being a lot poorer than before.

Best wishes
Al