One winter night while studying for exams in my second year of university, I called my friend to drive me to the ER in a state of panic.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

They performed X-rays, EKGs, and a battery of other tests then sent me home as nothing was identifiably wrong. As I walked out of the hospital, I still felt like I couldn’t get a full breath. Like there was a forty-pound dumbbell strapped to my chest.

Over the next two years, I noticed the correlation between stressful and uncertain periods of my life and not being able to get a full breath. I eventually concluded, “I have anxiety.”

But I was wrong.

I should have never diagnosed myself with anxiety. That’s the job of a psychiatrist. In reality, I have no idea what it’s like to live with clinical anxiety. Besides a heavy chest and restricted breath at times, I function perfectly fine. 

Casually self-diagnosing myself with a mental health disorder was the psychological equivalent of strapping a boulder to my back, carrying around the extra weight of thinking I have a clinical problem when I don’t.

I wouldn’t diagnose myself with pancreatic cancer when my abdomen aches, so why did I think I was qualified to diagnose myself with anxiety when my chest was tight?

Your Internal Monologue Matters

You aren’t burnt out, you’re just tired.

You aren’t depressed, you’re just sad.

You don’t have social anxiety, you’re just shy.

You aren’t traumatized, you just have a bad memory.

You aren’t addicted, you just have bad habits that you haven’t changed.

Some people are clinically burnt out, depressed, anxious, traumatized, and addicted. But most of us are not. This language has sneakily crept into our vocabulary and it’s hurting us.

It’s normal to feel a wide range of human emotions. To feel tired, shy, stressed, and sad. To have memories that make you cringe or moments you wish didn’t happen. That makes you human, not someone inflicted with a mental health disorder.

If you tell yourself that you’re burnt out after a hard work week, you now have a clinical condition that can’t be fixed by a good night's sleep and a restorative weekend. Instead, you convince yourself that you need months off on a sabbatical to recover and, until you get that, you have to slog through feeling burnt out every day.

If you tell yourself that you have social anxiety when you’re shy, you just turned a normal human feeling that can be overcome, shyness, into a gigantic brick wall that you can’t even see over, let alone think about starting to climb. 

When I bounded myself with the unfixable self-diagnosis of “I’m an anxious person,” my reality was one of unsolvable limitations and problems. I saw my shortness of breath and tight chest as lifelong ailments I had no control over. 

If I hadn’t changed the story I was telling myself and allowed anxiety to fully attach itself to my identity, I would have become paralyzed. I probably would have started to think I needed medication. And I would have drummed up a list of all the things I can no longer do because of my anxious condition.

Reality is largely negotiable. It can be altered by the story we weave in our heads.

And precision of speech—the words we select—matter.

By telling myself a different story in which I wasn’t someone who had anxiety, I saw the shortness of breath and tight chest for what they are—normal human reactions to stress and uncertainty—not as a crippling condition. I dropped the boulder I was needlessly carrying and empowered myself to tap into the immense strength and adaptability innate to humankind.

Now when my chest tightens and my breath shortens in response to stress and uncertainty, I see it as a signal coming from my body rather than my brain. Instead of pushing it down and pretending it isn’t there, I sit with it, breathe slowly and deeply into my stomach, and ask myself kind questions to understand what it’s trying to tell me.

Notes

Seek MEDICAL ASSISTANCE in managing your mental health if you think you need it. 

Asking for help is a sign of strength.

If you’re struggling with normal human emotions like sadness, tiredness, or stress, tell those you love what you’re dealing with. You don’t need to get through it alone. Humans thrive in tribes. Lean on yours.

~~~

This post was inspired by an episode of Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Podcast podcast (Spotify, Apple) a good friend sent me: How Bad Therapy Ruined a Generation (ft. Abigail Shrier).

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And a special thank you to Jeremy Scharf from Jeremy Scharf's Newsletter for your generous and invaluable edits on the initial drafts of this essay.

Lots of love,

Jack

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