Anxiety hijacks your life. It steals your time, your energy, and your joy. It gets in the way of you living the way you’d like to live. Anxiety feels like worry, overwhelm, panic, and paralyzing fear. It looks like self-consciousness, dread, and ruinous self-doubt. It can feel like a pounding heart and shallow breath. Anxiety is limiting - it makes your life small when you desperately want a bigger, fuller life.
You’re overwhelmed. You can’t get it all done and you’re definitely not doing enough. In fact, you’re not — and have never felt — good enough. Or, you feel stuck, like you have no idea what’s next. You could never have known that the path you chose would lead you somewhere you don’t want to be. If you’ve had zest or sparkle before, you don’t have it now. You feel like you’re flailing, with no sense of groundedness. The uncertainty, the unknown, is almost intolerable.
IBS has taken over your life. It limits everything you do, starting with what you eat, where you go, and how long you’re away from home. You’ve become afraid of your own body, fearful of it betraying you in the most humiliating way. You always, always know where the bathroom is. You feel helpless to control it, and have begun to think it’s never going to get any better.
Your eating is out of control. And, you’re so self-conscious about your body. You say the most awful things to yourself, things you would never say to anyone else. You think about — and plan for — food and exercise all the time. You know it’s supposed to be a ‘lifestyle change’ but how do you actually make that happen? You’re so afraid you’re going to be ‘like this’ forever and that you will never, ever figure this out.