Did you know that anxiety often coincides with depression ... and that these conditions are very common in people suffering from addiction?
Furthermore, did you know that depression can be defined as “anger turned inward”?
Depression, Anxiety, and Addiction
When you cut yourself off from feeling your anger, you create a wall inside and begin to feel depressed. When you block yourself from feeling hurt as well, you end up with two “walls” within your psyche.
As you experience the normal course of your life - the challenges, the small annoyances, the stress - your emotions end up bouncing back and forth between those two internal emotional barriers.
This bouncing happens when you’re trying to avoid a so-called unacceptable emotion such as anger or grief. There’s a push-and-pull between your real feelings and your beliefs, and you feel unsettled and ungrounded as a result.
How Anxiety and Addiction Overlap
We see a significant overlap between anxiety and addiction; it’s a common combination in dual diagnosis.
The Clearing co-founder Joe Koelzer explores the correlative connection between anxiety and addiction and the behaviors associated with substance abuse in this new article in Anxiety, Panic & Health.
Anxiety, Panic & Health
Anxiety, Panic & Health is about living with health, wellness, and wholeness. It was created by Mike Nichols in 2008 as a resource to provide information about anxiety disorders.
As Nichols writes in My Story, “Most people struggle with Anxiety for many, many years before being diagnosed with an Anxiety Disorder. The same is true with me. Looking back, I realize that I had been having Anxiety symptoms for over two decades before I was finally diagnosed as having Anxiety Disorder and treatment began.”
In this article, Joe covers ....
- The difference between occasionally feeling anxious and having an anxiety disorder
- The role that internal conflict and suppressed emotions play in anxiety
- The interplay between anxiety, depression, and addiction
- How past trauma contribute to present-day anxiety
- Substance abuse as a coping mechanism … and how to break the addictive cycle
