Walking around with the perennial dark cloud of anxiety disorder can bring anyone down. I’d say it would be unusual if anxiety sufferers didn’t feel bummed about their condition from time to time. However, the slippery slope of self pity is a mental trap that will not only make it more difficult to recover from episodes of anxiety but it also perpetuates the hated thoughts and feelings you endure on a daily basis.
To acknowledge that anxiety sucks is one thing, it is another thing altogether to let this realization permeate your bones and poison your outlook on life. Feeling sorry for oneself is perhaps one of the worst things someone can do to themselves when they’re in a bad situation but for an anxiety sufferer it is the worst thing they can do to themselves.
Feelings and thoughts of self pity destroy your self esteem, ruin your mood, and create a long term sense of defeat, even self loathing. Now these things I’ve mentioned are all negative but the feelings and thoughts that go along with self pity are not the pitfall in and of themselves.
The pitfall is how self pity adds, or in some cases, even creates serious feelings of depression and an anticipation of a life wrecked by anxiety. It sets the stage for the “everything really sucks” mentality. This is why some of you never have fun anymore, don’t enjoy things that used to bring you joy. The feeling and anticipation of anything good has been lost or at least seriously diminished by your constant state of anxiety.
One reason that self pity plays such a prominent role in the lives of anxiety sufferers is because most are self centered. I’m not suggesting that it’s self-centeredness as it relates to vanity or self importance, but rather the extreme introspection that anxiety creates.
Everything becomes about how you feel, think, and react to anxiety. The worry associated with anxiety dominates your mind and constantly plays games with memory and possible future disasters of all kinds. The anxiety sufferer gets so enveloped in themselves that their problems become magnified and incredibly significant.
This type of thinking leaves the door wide open to self pity because everything is about you and or your anxiety. But of course I’d like to point out that this is somewhat natural. In other words, if you’re tempted don’t dare blame yourself or feel bad if this sounds like you in anyway.
The reality is that it is exceedingly difficult to endure the kind of pain constantly dished out by anxiety. And what I suggest is to not pretend like this is not the case, but to pursue a less anxious state in the face of it. You might wonder if you’re courageous enough to even try but given all this time I’d say that you’re more than brave enough. It takes guts to live an anxious life and clearly you’re still alive.
It’s not a matter of courage, it is much more about deciding to not be a victim. Oliver C. Wilson once said, “What poison is to food, self pity is to life”. I can’t really emphasize how important it is to choose the opposite of pity. To recognize the things that make you feel bad but to not succumb to them emotionally.
Having a pity party when you’re faced with adversity is a choice. If you choose to not feel sorry for yourself and instead choose to seek out the things and thinking that will reduce your pain then you will have done more to help yourself than perhaps any other remedy alone.
Call it positive thinking or label it however you’d like just understand that feeling bad periodically is inevitable, but feeling and thinking negatively about that experience is not.
This post nailed me to a tee as far as how I’ve been feeling/behaving for the last year. I can’t seem to figure out how to stop the self-pity, but I do agree it’s making my outlook on my situation worse as well as my day to day life. I feel like I’ve pretty much given up hope and feel so much pity over it. Your article has some great info but yet I can’t apply any of typical techniques to try and work on this. I guess it boils down to attitude and I can’t seem to change mine.
Self Pity doesnt like to die.
I am 73. Self pity nearly killed me at age 25. A perceptive counselor opened my eyes to what I was doing. She said, ” poor you, poor you.” It hit me like a bolt of lightning that I was using self pity to get what I wanted, rather than earning what I wanted. Self pity, I saw, relieved me of being accountable for my own actions, which is just Bullshit. Seeing the self pity within myself was an epiphany that resulted in my telling myself that if others could do it, I could do it. IT, meaning succeed at whatever I tried to do by giving EVERYTHING my best shot. If you don’t succeed at first, figure out why, and do it again. Don’t limit yourself. decide what the hell you want and go after it like a tiger. Jobs were a nemesis to me, so I quit looking and became my own boss of my own enterprises and it worked. Piss on self pity.