Episode 040 – I Stopped Taking Anxiety Meds After 15 years (here’s what happened)

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

Our society, especially in the United States, is facing a mental health crisis.  Twenty percent of Americans are experiencing anxiety, thirteen percent take some form of medication for anxiety or depression, and the vast majority of the conditions that affect our population physically are “stress-related” in nature.

But what exactly is anxiety?  Where does it come from?  Is there anything we can do about it ourselves rather than solely rely on the highly addictive and potentially harmful medications the pharmaceutical industry is continuously manufacturing?  I’m not a doctor, but I have some thoughts – so let’s dive in.

My 15 Year Experience Managing Anxiety 

I’ve shared this story before, but here’s a recap.  When I was 17 years old I started having severe abdominal pain, resulting in doctors telling my parents that I was suffering from gallbladder attacks and the decision to remove this “unnecessary” organ.  Ironically, the pain continued and the diagnosis remained the same, even though I no longer had a gallbladder.  

Eventually, a specialist decided to make an incision into a small muscle at the end of the bile duct that he thought would alleviate the pain I was experiencing.  It worked, but it was right around that time that I started experiencing anxiety.  I started experiencing frequent panic attacks and feeling an ongoing sense of doom and gloom, so I started seeing a therapist and taking anti-anxiety medications.

I was first prescribed Prozac, which for me did help decrease the anxiety I was experiencing.  Eventually my therapist recommended a “better” medication called Effexor and another called Paxil.  Over the course of 15 years, I was taking these medications to manage my anxiety and panic attacks and they provided great support for me to live my life somewhat normally and function in society.

Then, when I started working the 12 step recovery program, I started seeing a new therapist and began having this intuitive inclination that maybe it was time for me to try something different – to get off my anxiety medications for the first time in 15 years.

From Numbed Out To Brain Shock

At the time, there wasn’t a lot of research or data around the experience of coming off of these medications, simply because the doctors prescribing them and pharmaceutical companies making them believed that people could take them for life with minimal issues.  

My experience coming off of my medications was anything but easy or pleasant.  After 15 years of taking them, my doctor described the sensation I began feeling as “brain shock”.  As you might expect, not taking anxiety medications resulted in the return of my anxiety.

It was just a matter of coincidence, synchronicity, or what I would call God in my life that at the same time I was working through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and I was working with a therapist to process the day-to-day experiences that were causing me stress and anxiety in the first place.  I began to identify some of the originating sources from my childhood of those stressors, limiting belief systems, and childhood traumas and doing the work to process and metabolize them.

I was doing that simultaneously as I was coming off of medications, so I had a really phenomenal toolset for working with the anxiety head-on.  And it occurred to me at one point in time that what was happening was I was starting to allow my nervous system to feel again.  It was quite incredible as I looked backward from that point in time.  I didn’t realize how much I’d been numbing out the feeling of anything in my life between my substance abuse and the medication I’d been taking for 15 years that I believe was suppressing my nervous system and my ability to feel.

Anxiety = Compressed Energy

What I’ve come to realize as a result of my experience with anxiety, going through recovery, and years of therapy is that most people simply don’t have the proper tools to process emotions as they come up.  They don’t have a means for addressing the day-to-day stressors, fears, anxieties, and inherent belief that they’re “not good enough” – and as a result of the struggle to operate effectively in their lives, they turn towards medication.

When I got off drugs, alcohol, and medication – all at the same time – I started feeling in my life again.  I started feeling a relationship with life around me, I started feeling more connected, I started feeling a relationship with what I would describe as my higher power, I started hearing my intuition, which I had never heard or perhaps had forgotten that I had. 

I felt like my nervous system and my senses were coming alive again.  While this was tremendously beneficial in the grand scheme of my life, it was also tremendously challenging.   Because while I was starting to feel my purpose, feel clarity, and feel connected spiritually, I was also having a full-on frontal attack from the scope of emotions that life offers, which is also the sadness, fear, anger, and unexpected disappointments.

As I came out the other side of this, I came to believe that the anxiety I was experiencing was just a compressed form of energy that my body was doing the best to manage for me – to offload  my system.  The more I worked to metabolize and transform that energy, the more I began evolving into the version of David that I am today.

Where Does Anxiety Actually Come From?

I believe that the anxiety that you might be experiencing is the seed for the next level of who you’re becoming – it just needs to be properly nurtured and transformed.  Now, I don’t know if you’re currently taking medications or numbing yourself with other substances, but I believe that we’re not able to properly nurture and transform that energy when we’re suppressing our nervous system through the use of these “coping mechanisms”.

But what exactly is anxiety and where does it come from?  For me, it was the fundamental belief that there was something wrong with me.  I traced this back to my mother having the exact same belief as a result of having a monther (my grandmother) who made her feel worthless.  In other words, this was a learned belief.  Coincidentally, my mother also struggled with chronic health issues.  So as I too started experiencing issues with both my physical and mental health, the belief that something was inherently wrong with me exacerbated, which presented itself in the form of anxiety.

As I’ve shared before, I believe that anxiety is your body’s healing mechanism that it utilizes in order to manage the accumulation of unprocessed emotional energy that’s created as a result of our childhood traumas and limiting beliefs.  It’s a way that your body can offload the accumulation of that stress and that tension so that it doesn’t materialize into other more significant stress related disorders or diseases like arthritis, autoimmune disease, or cancer.

We all have these traumas and limiting beliefs that take root at an early age.  But I’ve come to call them “misunderstandings”, because if you really take a look at them, you’ll realize that the meanings you give those experiences or the beliefs you form as a result of them end up not being true – 100% of the time.  That’s not to say that the experience didn’t happen, but what occurred inside of us in terms of the meaning that we give the experience was a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation – and that’s actually why the stress is created.

Overcoming Anxiety…The Metaphysical Way

Part of overcoming anxiety is understanding what it really is and realizing that if we’re using drugs or alcohol or medications to suppress it, then we don’t actually have access to the information that’s wanting to be metabolized or transformed.  And that information – our feelings and emotions – is what enables us to create a baseline that is acceptable for us to live our lives.

As a result of having access to the information from my childhood, not only am able to see that this idea that there’s something wrong with me is a false idea, but as a result of seeing that I’m able to actually experience the opposite – that I’m worthy, I am good enough, I am capable – and that has tremendous value in my life.

So when you think about what you want to create in your life, it’s important to understand that if you want to have more, be more, do more, you have to show up as more of who you really are.  For all of us, our ability to do that – to show up as someone who’s worthy, confident, courageous, trusting, humble, compassionate – hinges on our capacity to transform the opposites of the beliefs we learned from our childhood.  

I think a lot of people are stuck right now in a developmental purgatory because we’re afraid of the experience of stress or anxiety  –  so we medicate it.  But also because we don’t really understand the rules of the game, which is that these things that happen to us when we were younger that are producing stress on a day to day basis are actually the seeds or the material for our growth and our expansion.  Lastly, because most people simply don’t have the tools to transform these misunderstandings.

Got Anxiety?  Congratulations!

That’s why my life has become dedicated to understanding this and sharing it with other people. Because we all experienced trauma and we all have limiting beliefs – that’s not actually the problem. The problem is we don’t understand that this is the material for our next level of growth and we don’t have the tools to actually transform or utilize that material into our next level evolution.

Instead, we treat those experiences and the emotions associated with them as something that we need to kill, something that we need to suppress, something that we need to go away.  Conversely, if you’re somebody who’s experiencing anxiety or depression or some form of high level stress in your life, what I would suggest is there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for you right now.

It’s actually totally normal and I would suggest it’s a good thing, because these experiences are the seeds for everything you’re wanting to become – whether it’s more money, to discover your purpose, to launch a business, have a healthier relationship, heal your body, whatever it may be.  The source of you being able to do anything is in the discomforts of your past that are manifesting in your present. So if anxiety is a part of your life right now, congratulations.  It means you’re on the brink of a breakthrough.