A 2004 study found that two-thirds of people with eating disorders suffer from an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives and that around 42 percent had developed an anxiety disorder during childhood, well before the onset of their eating disorder. Other studies also confirm that an anxiety disorder usually the onset of an eating disorder, but panic disorder often follows.***

Dear Readers,

 

UK will be marking Mental Health Awareness Week from 12-18 May 2014. Mental Health Awareness Week is an opportunity for people to unite in the fight against mental illnesses. This year the theme is Anxiety. Eating Disorders are closely associated with anxiety and depression. Anxiety contributes to social difficulties and adds to other problems in life. Anxiety can make eating Disorder worse and recovery more difficult. It’s important to seek treatment for both disorders.
If you suffer from anxiety or know someone who suffers from anxiety then please seek help and encourage them to do the same.Take care of those who suffer from mental health illnesses.

Me Anorexia and Anxiety

 I accept and acknowledge that I often suffer from serious anxiety problems. I was first diagnosed with depression/anxiety in 2007. I just brushed it aside, seeing it as  a phase that would soon pass. With anorexia, I was so brain dead that I had no time to focus on anything except planning surreal elaborate meals for my imaginary starved family.

I don’t remember how my anxiety started. All I know is that the longer I lived with my Eating Disorder, the worst and more out of control my anxiety got. Appearances are often deceiving. People often see me as a cool and determined person. After coming out of an Eating Disorder unit, my real battle with anxiety began. My father could not understand why I would get myself into a sheer state of panic over small things like going to library or accompanying him on a long drive across the country.

I thought the solution was to avoid going out to all those places that caused my anxiety. So I topped going out, and would stay at home all day long, looking at the four walls of my bedroom. Everyone kept telling me that I looked so good “You’re looking well,” my relatives told me. “You’ll be fine, you’re strong” my friends would say. “Be grateful, you’re healthy, your family is healthy, everything is perfectly fine in your life”, a family friend would tell me. Then why don’t I feel fine? I would often Question myself, I said to my father one day, why do I feel my heart is going to stop, why do I feel so helpless and hopeless? You know I studied this topic half my life, why do I feel I know nothing?

With anxiety, every moment spent awake is a torture on your mind and body, you feel you are no longer even living, but simply surviving in the little hope that someday you will return to your former so-called normal self. What a wistful thinking?

Last Ramadan, I was invited to present a research paper at the Conference in Sydney, Australia. Despite the assurances that my research paper was fine and needed no changing, I drove myself into mindless state of panic and anxiety. I could not sleep or eat. I tried so hard to control the situation and to calm myself, instead of accepting how I felt and instead of dealing with myself, I drove myself insane, thus creating more anxiety. My weight plummeted and I left for Australia in a state of jumbled nerves and very low self esteem, thus setting my body up to be anxious on arrival.
Do you know what is really sad about Eating Disorder and Anxiety? How one becomes so fatalistic. It was then that my Friend Nafisa gave me a prayer to read and like a dying person, I clung to this prayer for dear life.

 

The Prayer of Prophet Musa (Quran 20:25-28; Surat Taha)

 

Someone said to me it is not the idea of speaking in front of hundreds of people that makes you feel worse, it is your thought pattern and fears working together.

So while on the long flight from London Heathrow to Hong Kong, I recited a full tasbeeh of this prayer. In Sydney, I turned to this prayer, and I turned to God and Indeed God helps.

Turn each anxiety, each fear and each concern into a Dua (supplication). Allah wants you to be specific. The Prophet advised us to ask Allah for exactly what we want instead of making vague Duas. Dua is the essence of worship (the Prophet as quoted in Tirmidhi).***
“Call on your Lord with humility and in private: for Allah loveth not those who trespass beyond bounds. Do not make mischief on the earth, after it hath been set in order, but call on Him with fear. And longing (in your hearts): for the mercy of Allah is (always) near to those who do good” (Quran 7:55-56).***
Over the time I have come to realise that these feeling soon pass once we learn to accept how we feel and try not to control the situation. I have learned that it’s OK to feel apprehensive, to feel panicked; after all, I am a human. If you truly accept how you feel you will come to learn that nothing bad really happens to you and in time your reactions lessen until you feel more able to cope, day by day. Anxiety loves Avoidance. The Key is to accept yourself and love yourself. My friend Dina said to me yesterday that facing your fears is far better than hiding from them.

Treatment- there is a cure

Illnesses weaken the body and diminish a person’s abilities. The Prophet (peace be upon him) replied: “Seek medical treatment, for truly Allah as not send down a disease without sending down a cure for it. Those who have knowledge of the cure know it, and those who are ignorant of it do not.” [Musnad Ahmad (18456) ]

Please seek help. Recovery from one disorder does not ensure recovery from another, but it is necessary to seek help for both.

I hope you will find a list of resources below helpful. I love all of them and they all are brilliant and cost-free. 

Turn 2 me.org A Free Weekly Online Anxiety Group Support.- Book You Place now:

https://www.turn2me.org/index.php/group support?gclid=CIOQjdT1qL4CFaMSwwode2IArA

Anxieties.com- Helping People Who Suffer From Anxieties

http://www.anxieties.com/1/free#.U3IS4XbRVK0

NHS- Free Self-Help Therapies

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/Pages/self-help-therapies.aspx

 

 

http://www.anxietynomore.co.uk/

 

Show Your Support- Do A good Deed- Indeed Reward is with Almighty Allah

Do something to mark the Mental Health Awareness Week.

Support Mental Health Awareness Week online by raising awareness of anxiety through your facebook page and twitter account.  Show the world that you’re supporting Mental Health Awareness Week 2014 by featuring this banner on your website on your facebook page (simply right click on the photo, choose ‘save image as’, save to your computer and upload to your website, linking to mentalhealth.org.uk/mhaw). 

 

 

Sources:

*** http://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/related-illnesses/eating-disorders

***http://www.soundvision.com/info/peace/stresstips.asp