My Personal Journey With Anxiety

This article has been a long time coming.

It rounds out my “sob story” trilogy! Part 1 is about my journey with Tourette’s Syndrome. Part 2 goes into why my Physio career imploded. Part 3 - this article - is about my personal journey with anxiety.

I’m writing about this for two reasons:

1/ To highlight that recovery IS POSSIBLE.

Sometimes I feel as though we have quite a deterministic view of mental health, regarding it as fixed and unchangeable. If we have depression and anxiety, it’s genetic and nothing can be done except using medication. The old “chemical imbalance” way of thinking is still very common. While I think genetics (and other factors beyond our control) have a very large influence, I believe the things we choose to do and the way we choose to think have a dramatic impact.

2/ To tell the story of how exercise helped me. The healing effect on my brain from regular training has been profound.

Here we go then.

Until I was about 21 or so, I wasn’t aware of being a very anxious person. On the contrary, I viewed myself as being very calm and stable.

There were certainly some anxious traits present in my immediate family members and among other relatives but I seemed to have dodged that.

I was quite a sensitive kid though - things which may have rolled off others cut me pretty deep. That’s my memory anyway. 

One event encapsulates the dynamic well. 

I had been playing footy with my year seven classmates during PE and I got a big scrape (by someone’s footy boots) across my achilles tendon area. 

The teacher (Mr “J”) looked at me and, maybe sensing it was not especially minor, but understandably wanting to avoid making a big deal of it, said,

“You’ll be alright Tim! You’re practically the size of a man!” (or something along those lines).

He was right. I WAS alright. And I was pretty big for my age (I stopped getting taller at about 15). 

But I still burst into tears retelling the story to Mum when I got home that afternoon. 

When I was a boy I had mild exercise induced asthma and experienced a couple of attacks which were brought about by emotionally stressful incidents. Looking back I think it is more likely they were panic attacks.

And, of course, the experience of having Tourette’s was a pretty big deal. One of my specialists told me a number of years back that the tics could be partly understood as a manifestation of anxiety.

Anyway, fast forward to my late teens past a pretty great childhood and teenage career. I call this my “golden boy” phase: kicking goals academically and socially, fit, outgoing, great group of friends. Full of promise and potential.

Then the wheels fell off. It started with the implosion of my Physio career. Read about that here.

We pick up the story in Queenstown, NZ. It’s winter 2005 and I have headed to work in the snow to rest, re-set and regroup for the next phase of my life. 

I had caught the snow bug quite severely in 1999/2000 and all I could think of at the time was “I NEED TO LIVE IN THE SNOW!!!”.

(Similarly afflicted people can relate).

So, when Physio had decidedly NOT worked out, the snow bug came in for another nibble.

By then, I had definitely experienced a fair degree of depression (and had been medicated using SSRIs) and I had not thought of myself as having an issue with anxiety per se, although I had had a few episodes of pretty intensely elevated “stress” which had lasted days to weeks. These had mostly revolved around job/career tumult and included racing heartbeat, intrusive negative thoughts and difficulty sleeping.

But while I was in Queenstown I was beset by worry about financial stability and the future direction of my career.

I used to go to the internet cafe (shwoing my age here!) most evenings after work to check my email and look at seek.com and other job sites to get ideas of what I could try next. I would spend up to two hours doing this.

That pretty quickly became a compulsive behaviour. I would repeatedly check job sites and strategise about the next phase.

These thoughts began to take up more and more of my headspace. I would later learn about the term “rumination”, which is the constant chewing over of the same themes and ideas in your head.

When I got back from the snow, I was very blessed to meet Deb! We got engaged about 6 months after becoming an item and were married in March 2007. 

While I was mostly functional, I had lost a tremendous amount of self-confidence. I thought I had a very limited capacity to handle pressure, and I needed quite a bit of time alone to process the emotional “work” of my relationships. I inhabited a narrative where I was a broken person who needed to construct a sheltered life for myself just to get through. So much for the golden boy. So much for thriving. I was content to survive and make it to the end.

As an aside, I’d like to say that my Christian faith has been a massive help to me in all of this. Particularly, I had to die to the idea of “successful Tim”, where I defined success as measuring up to my potential or the expectations people may have held of me before the wheels fell off. The depth of the resources I had to draw on in my relationship with Jesus Christ cannot be over-stated. Nowadays, I regard that as a great gift and a huge asset - to be dead to the need to please other people and live according to their expectations. To have put to death the need to be seen as “a somebody”. Not that I have accomplished this fully, but I cannot imagine having gotten this far without the hardships I have faced and without the ability to anchor my worth to something outside of myself and my own performance.

Back to the story.

The first few years of our marriage were a great time. Our eldest, Saskia, was born in 2009. My work life had stabilised a lot. I was working in government and had good prospects for advancement.

But I would still ruminate a lot. Could I handle it? Was I up to withstanding the pressure?

I took a reasonably big step up and accepted an opportunity for promotion in 2011. Jemima, daughter number two, was born in 2011 too. Things were looking better.

Then I hit a career roadblock but had some massive wins in other areas.

First to the wins.

Critically, I had begun exercising a lot more again. For me, this was huge. It started with bodyboarding and surfing, which morphed into running and the gym. Then back to swimming again as I was suffering with a knee issue and pretty extreme shin pain. The penny had dropped that I needed to be exercising a lot. I can clearly recall one night walking back to my car after a big swim at Beatty Park feeling like I had a peaceful and calm mind. I said to myself, “So this is what rationality feels like!” 

The difference in my mental state when I had been exercising became more and more apparent to my wife Deb, and she was able to gain a lot of valuable insight as to how I was wired. Previously, my desire to exercise quite a lot had been a source of some conflict between us.

She was understandably reticent to free me up as much I wanted given the phase of life we were in with little kids. And, in fairness to her, I do have a pretty insatiable desire for more and more training. There were some other important relational dynamics going on but I’ll leave that for another time!

(Nowadays, Deb is incredibly understanding and self-sacrificial, freeing me up to self-medicate with exercise about 1.5 hours per day on average across the week - once you factor in some transport time).

Next, the roadblock. This was an act of self sabotage in my part. I was bored with work (but to be fair to me it was quite boring…). At that time I was working in quality assurance with the Water Corporation. 

I felt hemmed in and trapped. I was in a very bespoke role which I found hard to imagine existing anywhere else. I felt like my whole day was filled with intangible items - meetings, audits, writing plans and procedures. It was a pretty soul destroying way to spend your day.

I decided the solution was to start my own business. (I cringe now as I write that because I clearly had no idea what was involved). Naively, I left the excellent money I was on to enrol in TAFE accounting, with the idea of starting my own bookkeeping business.

After I had been studying again a few weeks, the financial repercussions began to be more apparent, and my anxiety ramped up.

I began experiencing chest pains and racing heartbeat.

This was when I finally bottomed out and my anxiety started getting better.

Next to exercise and my faith, the major factor in my recovery has been education.

Specifically, education about how anxiety works in the body and how it is commonly defeated.

Getting to the point of having anxiety related chest pain prompted me to do some reading on the topic.

Two books were transformational for me. The first was “My Age of Anxiety” by Scott Stossel. This book sketched out the history of the understanding and treatment of anxiety, interspersed with stories of the author’s own troubled history in this area. I was introduced to the concept of exposure therapy, where you learn to tolerate anxiety by gradually exposing yourself to the situations, ideas and environments which freak you out.

The second book which changed my world forever was “The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook”. This opened my eyes to what happens inside your body when you’re anxious, and how your physiological response can influence your thoughts. Simply grasping that this was “a thing” was a paradigm shift. If I could just sit in the feelings for longer, my body would metabolise the adrenalin and I’d start thinking straight again. I’m sure it is more complicated than that, but this was my thought process at the time.

These books crystallised a profound realisation:

“I’ve been running away from my problems. And it’s only making them worse.”

Once I got that sorted, everything began to head in a good direction.

I started using HIIT (high intensity interval training) as exposure therapy.

I practiced paced respiration.

I worked on becoming more assertive. Conflict avoidance was one of the reasons I had been holding on to so much tension. I had to learn to not run away from conflict, to take people at face value and to not imagine what they were thinking, to simply assert reasonable requests about what I wanted or express my honest views as politely as I could without counter-productive self-censorship. 

This was a very interesting yet often bewildering experience. For a time, I probably over corrected and was a little bit aggressive. Because I was so uncalibrated, I often didn’t have very good intuitions about what was the correct path in negotiating difficult interpersonal siutations.

I think at around of this time in my life, some people found me to be a little bit blunt and maybe too forthright.

I think some people maybe still find me a bit this way. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure whether I have a problem, or whether Australian culture is extremely conflict avoidant and passive aggressive.

(Actually, you can probably tell by my language that I’m pretty sure I’m not the problem…)

After having bottomed out, there was some very rapid progress in terms of anxiety.

The crippling emotions, feeling like a deer in the headlights, those sort of feelings died away pretty quickly.

Now, my body tends to break before my mind does. Today I’m writing this having taken the day off because of stress induced back pain. I have been burning the candle at both end for many weeks now and my body decided to stop me in my tracks. It would have been a panic attack before, and that at much lower levels of mental and emotional strain.

Since 2013, I have been more-or-less continuously involved in some form of vigorous exercise 4-7 times per week. Running and weights have been the common denominator, but hockey has been a more recent (and fun!) addition. I get a wave when I can and lately I have been loving getting out and about on my mountain bike - especially up in the hills near Mundaring.

In 2015, shortly after realising I was running away from my problems, I was able to get off a Tourette’s medication I had taken since 2001. In 2023 I was able to get off benzodiazepines, which I had taken since 2007.

To be honest, the hardest thing to recover from has been the financial implications of all that happened (including all that I did wrong). Now, as a father of four kids who are home-schooling, with all that entails, money is very tight. But our situation is very, very common. We’re incredibly fortunate to have extremely supportive parents who have helped us immensely with housing and other big costs.

I remember a time when I was about 23 years of age, driving along one night and reflecting on the issues I was having. I was reflecting on the Christian belief in the sovereignty of God, the teaching that He uses all things for our good - even things which appear tragic, harmful or even downright evil. 

I said to myself, “I honestly cannot imagine any good coming from this situation.”

It took about 20 years or so, but I can now definitely see the pain of that time was not in vain. I have learned things I don’t believe I could have learned any other way. 

At the least I could not understand them deep in my bones like I do now.