Anxiety effects changing through the years

Good morning!

Ofcourse we shall know that not everybody reacts to mental illnesses the same way; Not all panic attacks looks the same, nor will we get the same symptoms.. However- did you know it can also affect your own body differently through the years?

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After thinking about it for a while, I noticed a few things that appeared through my childhood that stopped upon growing up, and I kinda forgot about them. Ofcourse I had a few hiccups aswell before being properly medicamented, and now my “Anxiety ladder” looks different.

 

▶︎ Through Childhood

Looking back, it’s kinda obvious that I grew up with anxiety.. however it wasn’t something we were aware of back then. As a child, I was constantly coughing- which my grandma called it “stress coughing”, but we never got it checked out or anything.

It followed me to high school, and the coughing increased with my stress level. I remember the first time I went on a date with my first “non-serious” boyfriend at the time, I was coughing every 5sec, almost choking as I kept coughing 😅 I honestly can’t say when that dissapeared, it just hovered on my mind one day like «oh yeah, that’s something that happened..» 

 

I also have nail psoriasis. Came down to me from my dad we’re assuming, as he do have that too- but i’ve never seen anyone with the same fingernails as me. It’s rare to see the condition on it’s own and nowhere else on the body, like mine.. but basically I have little dents & creases within my fingernails. Some fingers’ worst than others, but it doesn’t bother me too much and it’s not treated or anything.

 

 

▶︎ Before finding the right medication 

When I got to College, even before my bad work experience, I’ve started having stomach problems. So bad that half the time it couldn’t stay down.. I’ve lost about 10pounds in the span of a month; I could see my belly looking slimmer, and my weight going down, but yet I wasn’t doing anything to lose weight- so I was panicked! However, I passed different tests and the doctors assured me that everything was fine.. so they had no idea what was wrong with me.

 

The physical stomach problem was definately a psychic one, as that got resolved after I started taking my first medication for anxiety.. however, something else showed up. The medication was helping, but the dose wasn’t enough.. so that created a rash-like psoriasis going up my face- from my lips to my eye on the left side. because of the texture of it and the itching, I couldn’t place anything on it even if i’d wanted to.. which was a nightmare as I was working in the produce department of our grocery store at the time, so you can imagine the looks- one dude I was working with even dared to ask me what was that on my face.. 😬

I also had the rash around my lips.. but after going to a dermatologist, she found out that I was having an allergic reaction to the eos lipbalm. so that somewhat resolved itself a bit, but we never got anything to help the big rash in itself; I don’t even remember what she said about it, just that it didn’t helped and it went away on it’s own as I upped the dose. It thanksfully left out of nowhere as it appeared..

(Related; un-usual anxiety effects)

 

Unlike the other two above, one that I never really talked about before on the blog, I also got stress migraines. I’ve tried going into accounting again after bad experience happened, back in 2019 ithink. One of my dad’s friend needed someone to help him calculing transport charges for his produce transport business – Him itself was such a good dad-like figure, but his wife was the devil itself. I could NOT tolerate her.

She also had her desk in the same office than mine was, within their home. She was he type of lady to always yell at you that you were doing something wrong for not following the same way she did, or compare you to the prior girl, or just- put her nose too deep into your business. After a few months, every time that I would come to work, i’d get terrible migraines.. which really isn’t cohabiting with working with numbers too well. In that period of my life, I went to the hospital multiple times for them to inject me something to help it; as I couldn’t manage the pain anymore — every tme they would just look at me like «Well, idk what’s happening with you».

Though i’m prone to migraines around the “time of the month”, although I don’t bleed anymore, this problem got erased as I quitted the job.

 

 

▶︎  My new anxiety ladder 

Out of all of that, the only thing that remained was my nail psoriasis.. as it’s a condition i’ve grown up with — everything else left me as I tried up medication and increased the dose to find what soothed me.

 

Now, whenever something makes me anxious, my hands starts itching. As I can’t refrain myself from scratching, it forms some tiny bumps on the back of my hands, going so far as to make them bleed by scratching too much. Because the stress had been coming from my workplace, again, the scratching moved up my arms.

Just like all of the prior ones, it had been proven to be anxiety-induced because the itching absolutely stopped as soon as I gave my two weeks notice. Almost two months after being at my new work, it still hasn’t came back 😅

 

 

Has your anxiety made you live through something similar?