How I overcame anxiety and depression is a very personal story for me, and today I will go into some details of the pain, isolation and sadness I experienced, and how I took control of my life again.
Instead of getting down on myself for being lazy or trying to tell myself to snap out of being completely overwhelmed, how I overcame anxiety and depression in my own life was by choosing to be very, very kind to myself.
Related: White light protection meditation
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I will talk about my most recent episode of how I overcame anxiety and depression, which was at the beginning of 2017.
I had just made a move with my family, moving out of Canberra and we were moving back to Newcastle which is my hometown.
I was very, very excited and happy to be home.
Very, very excited and happy to see what this meant for the next step in my business and I had spent the previous four years in Canberra while my husband studied and supporting him and growing my family and working very, very hard on my business anxiousrelief.com which had taken a little bit of a back step in our move to Canberra but now that we were moving back to Newcastle, I was excited to see what the future would hold.
So, we put a lot of energy into moving house. We did have removalists to help us but even so, the organization was a lot of hard work and we moved back into a house which we know and which we love, unpacked the boxes and got set up and I just found myself suddenly feeling so, so tired.
It was a tiredness that I can’t even explain.
I couldn’t get out of bed, it felt like my muscles just ached constantly, every part of my body hurt constantly.
When I moved, I felt like I was in slow motion.
It felt like I was walking through mud a lot of the time.
I knew that I was just well and truly burnt out and that my anxiety was returning, I found myself getting kind of worried about little things, health anxiety was returning and it just sort of felt like a cataclysm of a bunch of things, returning back to my old life and feeling like things that I’d been escaping for a while such as some health tests that I had to catch up on and probably like showing up fully in my business as well and just reconnecting with family and friends and that kind of thing, the reality of that just kind of hit me really quite hard.
Luckily, I knew what it was.
Luckily, I knew it was burnout and anxiety and I did feel like I’d had some depression.
And I knew that if I was ever going to heal and be able to tell the story of how I overcame anxiety and depression, some drastic changes would need to be made.
I don’t believe that I had tended towards depression previously, I’m definitely generally more of an anxiety girl.
But this tiredness was just something that I couldn’t get past.
And I just kind of feel like I had worked and worked and worked and worked and pushed and pushed and pushed to the point where I hit that snap point.
So, I just accepted that even though I was excited to be back and excited to see what the future held, that I had just overworked myself that I couldn’t run anymore and that I had to stop at some point and that I had to regather myself and heal myself.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I took a break from my business. I took a good 9 to 10-month break and I didn’t announce anything. I didn’t say anything. I just completely stepped back.
And to be honest, I couldn’t have kept it up anyway. Every time I went to sit down in front of my computer, my energy would just plummet through the floor and within 5 minutes of trying to do anything on my business or social media, I would just hit an energetic wall.
With client work, I was generally still pretty good with because I channel energy and every time I give a healing, I also receive a healing so that wasn’t too bad.
But anything that had to do with creating, anything that had to do with thinking or strategy or coming up with something new, I just couldn’t do it and actually speaking about it just makes me feel so tired, kind of feels like it’s all coming back again.
But I just understood I couldn’t run from it anymore.
That was it, I had to stop.
So, I took a break from blogging and I took a break from taking on new clients.
I have clients that come back to see me fairly regularly throughout the year, and I have people that put in a session with me every three months or every two months, whatever they need, those clients, I would continue to see.
But new clients, I didn’t take any new clients on because I just had to put myself first.
I had to put my own health and healing number one.
So, I just focused on being a wife and a mum and getting my house in order.
When you move house, it’s amazing how you just patch everything together and you can survive for years and years on systems that aren’t fully formed and don’t fully work for you because you’re just like, “Oh, this is temporary. This is temporary.”
I did, however, feel that this move to Newcastle was going to be a somewhat permanent move so I wanted to really set up systems and get my house set up properly so that when I did feel better (and I knew that I would feel better) I’d feel like I was at least starting out on a front foot again.
So, just focusing on being a wife, being a mum and the everyday routine that goes with it was so, so comforting for me in how I overcame anxiety and depression – getting my kids out of bed, giving them breakfast, getting them ready for school and for daycare or just for a day together – having that routine, having regular activities that I did with them really helped just to heal.
It felt like that rhythm and that routine was almost rocking me gently back to health again.
So, just taking the break was really important for how I overcame anxiety and depression.
Then I began to feel little parts of myself light up again.
I remember just walking along the road one day next to a park and I felt like something, a light in me got switched on again and it was a light that I hadn’t realized had been switched off in the first place.
It was at that point that I really knew that I was getting on a point of being healed and I was so excited, I went home and switched on my computer and I thought, “I’m going to do a blog post.”
I went to start writing and my energy just went through the floor again.
I just kind of knew, I did feel like it was a setback but I knew that I’d just pushed it too far in that moment and I chose to celebrate the fact that that light in me had been switched on again to start with.
So that was a good six or seven months into my break.
I felt like little puzzle pieces were finding their way back to their rightful spot again and lights in me were being switched on again which was really good news for me.
I was very happy to start feeling like myself again.
And then, at about 10 months, I just felt like the right thing to do was to get back into it again.
I took a very organized approach and I wanted to make sure that I made sure that my blogs and the regularity of what I was putting out was not impacted by my mood so I made sure that I was a good couple of blogs ahead, that I had some blogs set aside so that I could upload them quickly if a week came along that I didn’t feel like doing a blog, that I could just find something and use it.
So I really prepared myself for the up days and the down days.
Luckily, sort of ‘getting back onto the horse again’ and getting back into the routine again has really helped me in how I overcame anxiety and depression in a very holistic way.
I didn’t need to take any supplements or any medication for my depression and anxiety even when it was at its worst and it was just because I had the know-how to get through it.
And the patience and the ability to know that no matter how bad I felt in that moment, that things would eventually turn around.
I just gave myself some space and time for healing.
So that’s what I suggest that you do as well if you’re struggling with depression and anxiety in your life.
I actually recommend that you download my free white light protection meditation which takes you through a visualization where you put yourself inside a bubble of white light and this white light is perfect, pure healing energy which is just so good for you and so nourishing for you as progress along your healing from depression and anxiety.
So that’s all for me for now, my butterfly. All the best for your recovery and I have faith that you will recover. If I’ve done it, you can absolutely do it.
Go download my white light protection meditation.
Love + light
Eva xo