GOING TO SEE YOUR DOCTOR...

It’s worth starting this post by saying that when we feel extreme anxiety for an extended period of time there’s absolutely nothing wrong with heading along to the doctor for assistance.

Please don’t mistake this post as an anti-doctor rant.

Doctors save lives.
Doctors can give us hope when there is currently none.

I’m a fan of doctors.

However, it’s important to realise that the one thing we don’t need to put any weight behind is a doctor’s diagnosis of an anxiety disorder/illness/condition.

Of all the helpful information we receive from our doctor, the one entirely unhelpful and unnecessary piece of information we might get is our diagnosis... our label.

Now we have a disorder.
Now we have an illness.
Now we have a label.

Now we have one more thing to feel anxious about.

In my TedX talk I speak about the limitations a doctor has placed on them when talking about our mental health.

I don’t say this to discredit your local GP, I say it to allow those that have left the clinic feeling hopeless as if they now have to manage their mental illness for the rest of their life that the truth is quite different and much more hopeful.

Our diagnosis might have us feeling like life will now be a constant struggle with mental health which we can expect to ultimately lose, but in reality, the first step to changing the way we feel is to understand that there is nothing permanent about it.

You don’t have to manage your mental illness.

You just have to manage yourself ...

... and doing that is much simpler when you get rid of the restrictions of the label and the weight of your diagnosis.