"I wanted to climb out of my skin”: what it’s like to live with severe anxiety

For years, Eleanor Morgan kept the high cost of her own debilitating, undiagnosed anxiety disorder under her hat, struggling through university, going on to lead a ‘double life’ with a high profile job as a journalist. Her life was dominated by panic.

She describes flying to Kenya for on an assignment for The Guardian, but ending up in the toilet at Heathrow Terminal 3 “convinced, absolutely plain as day, that my neck vertebrae were about to snap like bits of chalk because the pressure in my head as my thoughts spun out of control was so strong. I was anxious of being anxious and frightened of having a panic attack the minute I left the house.”

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For most anxiety disorders manifest themselves as a constant internal diatribe of ‘what ifs’ with, sometimes frightening, physical symptoms. Forms of the disorder take can take many shapes: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, specific phobias, generalised anxiety and then panic disorder – which is the one that ruled Eleanor’s life for many years. She says, “I have a propensity for panic attacks, but that can become a generalised fear you feel all the time,” something she describes in her book as a ‘dread with no name.’

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It might be characterised by regular panic attacks, but that’s not the only symptom of anxiety. As luck would have it, it also often goes hand in hand with depression, so Eleanor was also dealing with the fact her brain was “buzzing like a fridge in the middle of the night,” and she “couldn’t run a bath without sobbing at the desolation and pathos of it all.”

”Eventually,” she says, “every panic attack took longer to get over than the last. Three years ago, I thought ‘I can’t live like this anymore’ and I finally got help and went to my GP and found a therapist.”

So what was it that prevented her from telling anyone about it for years?

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“It’s one of the most prevalent psychiatric problems of our time, and yet so many people are forced to conceal their struggles from friends, employers and medical professionals for fear of stigmatisation.”

Eleanor adds that one of the hardest things to overcome first of all was her own ‘self-stigma’.

“I was so worried about telling my friends. I found it very hard to accept that I had an anxiety problem because I couldn’t accept that terms like ‘mental health problem’ and ‘disorder’ applied to me. I even find that hard to accept now, because of my own ‘self-stigma’ and shame. I didn’t want to be seen as ‘mad, hysterical or neurotic’ and because it went on for so long and I kept it to myself, I had built up an irrational fear of how people would view me when I ‘came out’ as anxious.”

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