I struggled with anxiety and depression for decades. I tried everything including therapy and medications. Through unexpected and unintentional means, I healed my anxiety and depression and have been free from it for several years now. While I don’t intend any of what I share in today’s episode to serve as medical or psychological advice, I do intend to share the comprehensive approach that helped me overcome these conditions.
Today I am sharing the comprehensive approach that helped me heal anxiety and depression without medication. This has include the following :
- Regular exercise.
- Good nutrition.
- Cutting out alcohol.
- Establishing a positive mindset.
- Meditation.
- Journaling.
- Self-healing.
I started experiencing depression at a very young age. It started when I was about 12 years old. I had started junior high that year and with that came the beginning of a new level of bullying that didn’t take too long to start destroying my spirit. While I had been made fun of and targeted in elementary school, it became much worse in junior high. A larger school meant more kids, and that meant more bullies. Not only was I being verbally attacked by about seven different people all day every day in the hallways, but it also started to become physical. Girls would try to grab my eyelashes and pull my hair in the locker room and verbally attack my body as we changed. They made fun of my clothes, my hair, my make-up, my weight.
In the hallways and at lunchtime it was even worse. There were boys who barked at me, spit at me, threw food at me. There was the day one of the popular boys threw and unopened soda can at me, hitting me on my shin bone extremely hard, knocking me down in pain, and soda exploding all over me, as I stood in the quad talking to my one friend. The whole quad roared in laughter and I used every ounce of strength I could muster not to cry until I got into the bathroom. As if this wasn’t sufficient, I was pushed down the concrete stairs at least five times that I can remember, once landing at the feet of my crush. Within a few months of my first year into junior high, it was more than I knew how to cope with as a 12 year-old going through puberty and in that awkward place between kid and teenager.
I didn’t understand this didn’t mean anything about me. Hearing such cruel words and being physically assaulted daily by what felt like the whole school, I internalized it, I made it mean something about me. I didn’t know how huge a mistake this was at the time, because I was just a kid, and I wasn’t equipped for the amount of hatred that was being thrown at me. I felt so alone. I felt unlovable, unworthy, and disgusting. In time, I found myself in a dark place, what I call the pit. I started avoiding the mirror and I started thinking about death. Anger started consuming me and I started experiencing depression. Now, of course, being 12 years old I had no clue that’s what it was. I just knew I was in pain and I started to believe the world would be better without me in it.
Fortunately. I was too scared of what would happen on the other side to follow through with anything. As I got older, what I had unknowingly established a negative, dominant thought paradigm in which I was disgusting and unworthy, that governed every aspect of my life. My outer reality reflected this from my self-image to my finances, to my relationships. Since I was oblivious to the way thoughts become reality and how people only mirror back what is inside us, I saw all these things as proof of my unworthiness, again turning it all on myself. This led me to a pattern of self-destructive behaviors and cycling in and out of depression.
As I moved up I my job, gaining more responsibility, my stress levels increased, at which point I started experiencing panic attacks. I didn’t know what they were at first, so they were terrifying. After the third one, where I woke up on my bathroom floor after I’d passed out from it, I went to the doctor. He didn’t say much except that I had anxiety and depression, before he turned to a cardboard box in his cabinet, grabbed a giant handful of sample packets of an anti-depressant and handed them to me. He said to start taking them immediately and not to quit taking them until checking with him. To this day I don’t know what they were. I tried them for three days and felt like I was in a waking, endless acid trip. I couldn’t function at all, especially not at work. I decided panic attacks and bouts of depression was better than feeling like that and ditched the pills after the third day. Fast forward about ten years and the pattern continued and had gotten worse as I now had chronic stress in the mix, along with the anxiety and depression. I tried counseling to help with it. I did this for about a year and was eventually prescribed medication for the anxiety.
By the time I had come through my divorce, I was in a pretty low place. My oldest was now three and I’d just had my daughter. By this point, I had developed a strong connection to God and was largely managing my conditions through my faith. Fast forward several years later, I now have my youngest child and have gone through two relationships that ended painfully for me. Once again I was in the pit, only now I had three children to take care of. I know I had to figure something out and I knew from past experiences the answer wasn’t medication or therapy. Since most of my issues had be born of my body image issues and my weight, that is where I started. While my sole focus at the time was to lose weight, in pursuing that, I discovered the comprehensive approach that healed my lifelong depression and anxiety.
So how did I go from chronic anxiety and depression to zero anxiety and depression? There are seven components to my current lifestyle that I have built over the years as I moved through my own wellness journey.
- Regular exercise.
As I mentioned earlier, this was the door through which I found inner healing. I thought if I lost the weight and got the most perfectly fit body I could possibly achieve, all the rest would fall in place. This only underscores how deeply rooted my sense of worth was in my body. I’ve lost weight a few times and each time it didn’t fix my body dysmorphia. But I’ll get to that in a minute. What exercise did do, in addition to helping me lose weight, was improve my overall outlook and it did boost my confidence. Over the years, I’ve learned that I get mental clarity when I exercise. I feel better about anything that may be bothering me after a workout. I feel better through the day. And, I have more confidence overall. - Good nutrition.
Again, since I started the path with weight loss, diet was part of the territory. When I started eating to fuel my body for my workouts and with a focus on giving it what it needs to be healthy, I started experiencing other improvements as well. Yes, it helped me lose weight, but it also helps me feel better. I have more energy when I eat the right kinds of foods. I have more focus in my work. I have more energy. And, my mood improves when I follow good nutrition, like eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and hydrating well. - Cutting out alcohol.
I self-medicated with alcohol for years and I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing for a very long time. I was stressed in my job, so it made sense to have wine when I got home to calm the nerves. Later, as I experienced other painful, stressful events I found myself drinking to the numb the pain. I didn’t want to feel the emotions I was experiencing. The alcohol only made my anxiety and depression worse. When I cut alcohol out, my anxiety and depression subsided and eventually disappeared completely. - Establishing a positive mindset.
Over the course of my journey to lose weight, I came to realize that most of my body image issues had to do with the way I was talking to myself in my head. I was cutting myself down constantly and it dawned on me, I was basically repeating some iteration of the crap people said to me through junior high and high school. I learned I had to love and accept my body at every weight along the way to my goal. This meant at first I was repeating a lot of things to myself that I didn’t believe, like that I was beautiful and that I loved my body.
Yes, it felt silly for a while, but I trusted the process and stuck with it. I’d rotate new affirmations in and out every month, based on what I wanted to feel about myself and what I wanted to become. Eventually my whole outlook started changing. I learned the power of mindset and that thoughts really do become reality. - Meditation.
I started meditating a long time ago, without really realizing that’s what I was doing. It was simply deep breathing techniques to calm my central nervous system to prevent panic attacks. Early on, after I started experiencing panic attacks, I learned I could slow them down or stop them with deep breathing. This is now something I do multiple times a day. Sometimes it is to connect to myself or God and other times it is to get myself back into a positive and calms energetic state after something upsetting, or when I feel discouraged. - Journaling.
There are so many good things about journaling, I’m not sure where to begin. For one thing, it’s a great way to get it out. Things you may not want to express or want to keep to yourself, you can let it all out on the pages of the journal. It’s also a great way to help yourself really understand your feelings. An even better thing about journaling is it is a great way to manifest. When you’re not feeling great, maybe feeling down about the way a certain something is going, ask yourself some questions about why you feel that way, what is it inside you that may be causing the results you’re seeing, and then you can write the story you want. Ask yourself what you want, how you want things to be and write it all out in present tense. Hold nothing back. Imagine you have a magic wand and whatever you write can be yours (because it can). - Self-healing.
This is a whole course on its own, and I have actually done an episode on this, called Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers. It is too much to cover in this podcast, but it has been one of the most impactful of all of these things I’ve laid out here in my life. Start with self-help books and journals. There are so many great ones out there. Which ones to choose really depends on the specific things you need to heal. I’ve learned my own healing journey is all around healing unworthiness, which has been tied to a number of things in my life, a lot of which I discuss here.
Some of the books I’ve found helpful are:
Dodging Energy Vampires, by Christiane Northrup
Running on Empty, by Christine Musello
Will I Ever be Good Enough? By Karyl McBride
Uninvited: Living Loved when You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely, by Lisa Terkeurst
The Power of Now, By Eckhart Tolle
I have also published a Growth and Healing Journal that is a valuable tool for self-healing, particularly processing emotions and emotional triggers. You can find it on Amazon, by searching for Rachelle Weiss, growth and healing. I have also included a link in the episode description.
So, this is the comprehensive approach that helped me heal chronic anxiety and depression. I still follow all of these today as I have come to learn health and healing is a lifelong thing. Through all seven of these practices and habits I have lost weight, found love for myself and my body, and improved my mental, physical, and spiritual health. I hope you have found some inspiration for things you can integrate into your routine for your health and healing.
I would love to hear from you, so please share your thoughts in the comments. If you find this helpful and want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also find Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram or check out the Podcast. Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!