My Journey with Anxiety: Navigating Medication, Healing, and Self-Discovery

Grab a beverage cuz this is a long-ish story.

I take Zoloft for anxiety and have for 15+ years. It takes the super sharp edges of life and softens them.

I’ve found a good combo of exercise, no caffeine, life coaching, and Zoloft, that works for me.

I used to think taking Zoloft was “cheating” somehow. Like I wasn’t trying hard enough. Sometimes that thought still creeps in. The stigma around mental health medications still exists.

In 2018, I was having a physical symptom my doctor thought might be a side effect of Zoloft. So under his direction, I slowly came off it and stayed off it for a month so we could see if it was the cause.

It wasn’t. And when I saw him for a follow-up appointment, I burst into tears because the super sharp edges were back with a vengeance and I was struggling to function. He set up a plan to go back on it and I was so relieved.

That weekend though, I had my first panic attack. I could not get my heart rate to come down, my chest was going from cold to hot and I felt like I was going to die.

It takes time for medication to get in your system, and during that time I had countless panic attacks. With each one I thought, “This might be the one that kills me. I hope Sully and the dogs know how much I love them!”

There were many days I didn’t want to wake up. Not because I wanted to die, but because I knew what the day was likely to feel like.

I had to cancel work appointments because I just couldn’t do it.

I saw my therapist a lot. Twice a week for a month.

During this crazy ass dumpster fire of a season, I found life coaching. And I started to learn the most amazing things about our beautiful human brains and bodies.

Life is 50/50, amazing and crap and everything in between and now I know how to work with my thoughts and feelings and not run from them.

If you experience anxiety to any degree, I see you, and I have an idea of what you may be going through.

And most importantly, you are not alone.

Interested in seeing if coaching would be a good fit for you? Click here to schedule a discovery call.