It’s All in Your Head

Bryce Mann
3 min readNov 6, 2020
Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash

Your heart races. Something’s not right. While your chest cavity pounds like boulders in a washing machine, every vein and artery pulsates with infected blood.

Your vision narrows. Your comfortable reality is slipping. Tunnel vision creeps in as your eyes convince you that inescapable threat is nearby.

You can’t breathe. With each terrifying thought, your straight jacket tightens. Your chest caves in a little more and your lungs fill with toxic sludge. Breathing becomes a flooded storm ditch, shallow and rapid.

You feel nauseous. Your stomach knots and you’re certain you’ve been poisoned. A foreign enemy has entered your body and slaughters you from the inside.

Your head aches. As the poison spreads, it reaches your brain and feasts on weakened matter. Like a scavenging raven, it smashes your head to break open casings and gorges itself until satiated.

Your muscles tense. You’re frozen now. A paralysis of unease. Worn by stress, you weaken and fracture like the teeth you clench so tightly — a crumbling sculpture of pain and fear.

You tremble uncontrollably. The poison surges through your body and agitates every nerve ending. It steals the warmth from your blood and leaves you shivering and trapped under the ice of a frozen lake.

You’re sweating now. A bath for the broken. Acid rain spews from your pores and drenches every inch of your body. Fear escapes your insides and envelops your cold and clammy skin.

But they tell you it’s all in your head…

Your anxiety is real. The physical symptoms that you experience with your anxiety are also real. Real in the sense that what you are experiencing physically, is actually happening. You’re not “going crazy.” You’re not in danger. Your anxiety is gonna tell you a lot of lies. That’s what it does best. Each and every one of the symptoms you have are completely temporary and undeniably survivable. Anxiety is not just an illness of the mind. It infects the body, your environment and society as a whole.

You’re not broken. You’re having your own experience that doesn’t fall in line with what some people view as “normal.” And that’s okay. Normal doesn’t exist. Normal is a herd mentality that we need to feel comfortable and accepted. What you’re going through is common and treatable. There are millions of people out there just like you. We fight the same battles, the same enemies. With the proper treatments and support, the pain you experience now will become less of a sword cut and more of a fingernail scratch.

There are valid reasons why you feel this way. And there is an antidote for this poison.

Photo by zenad nabil on Unsplash

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Bryce Mann

Aspiring writer. Mental Health Advocate. Trying to navigate my own brain.