Your Brain is Lying to You

Your Brain is Lying to You

Last week I had about six days of what I like to call ‘vicious anxiety’. From Thursday to around Tuesday I was enveloped by it. I believed in those days that many people disliked me. I believed I was a terrible person: I felt like a fraud, imposter, failure. It was a remarkable shit few days.

I leaned into my mental health routine to get through it. I exercised, slept more, drank more water, trusting that the feeling would inevitably pass. And it did. By Wednesday morning I was back to feeling like myself. The anxious voice had quietened.

Now I know well enough when I’m feeling good that anxiety is a liar. It tells you things that aren’t true. It makes you see yourself as the worst version of who you are. Anxiety blurs any semblance of good, forcing you only to see the bad. I KNOW this.

But, when you’re feeling extremely anxious, this knowledge is stolen from you. It disappears. You may still hold the actual information, but you don’t believe it. You know anxiety lies to you but you don’t believe this to be true. Anxiety, in this way, is clever. It takes away your biggest defence against it.

When I was a child I felt the same about monsters under the bed. I knew they weren’t really, but I didn’t believe it. It was only when I was no longer a child that I believed it, the knowledge and the belief aligned.

And so it is only when I am not anxious that I believe that it’s lying. I know all the thoughts I was thinking weren’t true now, but in the midst of the spiral I believed every single word. And that can be rough.

All we can do when that happens is weather the storm. We can trust that it’ll pass and we can ignore the nasty thoughts as much as possible.

And just like as children we looked under the bed to find there were no monsters hidden, we can take solace in the fact that no matter how horrible the thoughts get, none of them are true.

If you enjoy my writing, I also have a Subtack where I talk about non-mental health topics.