Can anyone agree with this?

Ok. Bear with me here. This may be a little long but if you can read it and help that would be great.

Anyways, I first started getting anxiety about 2 and a half years ago. I struggled with it back then for about maybe 6 or 7 months before it vanished. Now, these past 4 months I have been dealing with anxiety again.

I have been trying to identify triggers or what could cause it and then I realized something. A couple of months before I first started feeling anxiety, one of my girlfriends broke up with me. For months I would be worried constantly about running into her at school and worried if she had moved on yet or not. A couple of months later I felt weird and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Fast forward to October 2018, my girlfriend broke up with me and I would always be worried about running into her at school or in public. Even after the breakup she kept leading me on until the beginning of this year then blocked me. I felt super awkward and would always worry about running into her. A few months later I noticed anxiety again.

Could these events in my life have caused my anxiety? Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot!!

adamden said:

These events could definitely have caused your anxiety.
The harrowing thought of potentially running into your girlfriends at school or in public can definitely be something that triggers you. Especially if you are nervous about it throughout the entire day. That thought can remain in your subconscious even though it is not fresh in your mind, and can cause you to still experience anxiety symptoms.

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Thank you for your reply! And yes I agree.. when I didn’t experience this “anxiety fog”, I would have butterflies in my stomach very often, like how you would feel before playing in a big sports game. I’m wondering if those feelings of constantly being nervous for months resulted in these anxious feelings.

adamden said:

I would say with 99.9% certainty that they did. That continued nervousness can put a lot of stress on your physical and mental state, so it would not surprise me one bit.

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Do you think this is a topic I should work on a lot with my therapist?

Brad66 said:

Any major life change leads to stress. Overly stressed brain leads to all the symptoms of anxiety disorders. That is why I hate labels like Generalized Anxiety Disorder etc. Had your doctor just explained the effects of stress to you and why everything happened and told you it would pass eventually you would probably feel a lot better about your situation now. But instead that told you you have a disorder so now you are being hyper vigilant about stress symtpoms. It's a natural response, not a disorder, your reaction to the symptoms is what causes you the most suffering.

Give yourself a break, you have had a rough thing happen to you and being anxious about it is understandable. Just put one foot in front of other until it passes and you have moved on.

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I appreciate your reply and everything you said. It definitely did help to relax me a little bit about my physical symptoms. It’s crazy how something like a breakup can trigger all of these symptoms and feelings months later.

Kenny said:

Hello, so first are you talking about social anxiety? Yeah when someone breaks up with you, or when you have to break up with them, you can make the mistake of thinking that it means something about you. I wasn't good enough for her type thoughts. If you're not good enough for her, you must not be good enough for anyone else. So first thing to do is to see if that triggers an emotion. If it does, then its important to rationalize the issue in your mind.

One way to do that is to discredit her opinions about you. Think of something you love, that she doesn't. Is it bad because she doesn't like it? No, she can't make something bad just because she doesn't like it. So if she doesn't like you, does that make you bad? No, again she has no power to make you good or bad.

Its also important to realize that your own opinion of yourself isn't true either. If you don't like something, and someone else loves it, are you making it bad just because you don't like it? No its just an opinion, not a fact.

Yeah a therapist would be able to help you rationalize these things in your head. Thats the best option for any anxiety issues.

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I have my appointment tomorrow with my therapist. I want to make that the main focus of the session. Thank you for your reply!