Anxiety evolution: High-functioning anxiety

My background is 10 years as a firearms officer and first responder for the casino industry in Vegas. Somewhere around the three-year mark, I developed generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and had to learn not only to mask it from my colleagues but also from the public, my loved ones and, if I'm honest, myself too. This was necessary as I had a son to raise a family to take care of and in America, there is no statutory sick pay, so if you call off work, you're not getting paid and to see a medical professional you have to be working to get health insurance to be able to see a doctor. Quite the pickle you could say. 

Now imagine you have a radio call for assistance to respond to. You may not know what you're going to and people are relying on you to take charge of the scene and handle whatever is required at the time. Or worse, someone is calling for backup. At that point, thoughts, feelings, and emotions become a luxury you cannot afford, and you have no choice but to put them out of your head. It's not healthy, but it does explore part of the 'why' on this journey. 

Imagine if you will, you called the police or an ambulance or the fire department, because you were having one of the worst times of your life such is the reason for calling, and they showed up, and they went to bits on arrival. Maybe what they were seeing was so difficult to take in that it was just a natural reaction, a human reaction. But you don't need that, you need them to help, and so first responders pack away their thoughts, their feelings, and their emotions, to get the job done. Not all and not always but it does kind of come with the job.

Now we have thought about that for a second, maybe put ourselves in their shoes, and thought about how we might respond to such a scenario, it is perhaps understandable to see how that might look. But we may not know the 'how', so let's look at that. 

It's a complicated biological and physiological process that is not completely understood but let's for a minute suppose we get a bottle of some sort of fizzy drink, we shake up that bottle and nothing happens the first time, maybe even the first couple of times, but eventually after we shook that bottle enough, the bottle may explode and fizzy pop is going everywhere, all over us and those around us who we care about. That is mental health in general but particularly GAD.

If you imagine for a minute that fizzy pop bottle, we go to a call and we shake the bottle, then at the three-year mark, after shaking it at every call, we shake it, now it explodes, that is GAD and our mental health leaking out in other ways. Essentially, we have buried our thoughts, feelings and emotions for so long, and our body and brain have been signalling us in different ways, to which we may or may not have been listening, until one day we develop an anxiety disorder. This is an oversimplification but it does ease exploration. 

In the early stages, GAD is plain to see not only to you but those around you that something is happening to you - there will be signs and symptoms. However, if you go the medical route, it may take time to track down to get a diagnosis because the symptoms are so wide-ranging they can crossover with many other issues. When you do get a diagnosis, your journey with GAD does not stop there, but along the way, you may have had to learn how to still hold down a job, run a household, raise a family, perform parenting duties, so on and so forth, in spite of your GAD. It is in this process of learning how to keep calm and carry on that we lay the groundwork for 'high-functioning' anxiety.

We lay the foundations of having a raging anxiety disorder in the background and still trying to do all we have to do in life. Some days we may achieve this to more or less of a degree but essentially we are 'high functioning' because we can function and do all the things that we can do without our anxiety stopping us from doing everything all of the time. It may stop us some days but not others. It does not mean we don't have anxiety - it's simply in our ability to take care of the things we need, to function without being held back.

This is high-functioning anxiety, and it is very much on the other side of the scale from those first days when we might develop GAD and our ability is severely limited to do what we do now, we have learned to manage our anxiety. This is key here I feel. Management of our anxiety is everything, but particularly so with high-functioning anxiety, which is basically, in a word, managed anxiety.

I hope this helps a few of you who have perhaps wondered what high-functioning anxiety may be or how we might get it, and I hope my story has helped to clear some things up for you. If you are experiencing anxiety of any kind, please do reach out to a professional who will explore your anxiety with you and see how you might manage it.