Strange thoughts, feeling unreal, questioning reality.

[iperry]

Hey everyone! I have visited this site many times and have found comfort in times of high anxiety so I thought I would post about my condition.  Lately, I have been struggling with the following fear: maybe everyone I interact with knows I have an illness of some sort (when I really don't) and they pretend to teat me like I don't have one and kinda protect me by not bringing it up and just keep it in the back of their mind.  What is that all about? lol seriously so weird.  The fact that I will never know if they are hiding it or not drives my anxiety. I kinda just have to trust that I'm normal and trust they know I am.  I also feel depersonalized all the time, and I constantly question everything, like life, death and why life is the way it is and not something different.  Not knowing the answers really drives me crazy!  I feel unreal, like who am I? Am I a person like everyone else? Does everyone else see everything the same way I do? I feel like I'm the only real person and maybe everyone and everything is just a figment of my imagination or pre-formed images in my mind that I'm just watching lol. Are others real, how do we prove this? This drives further philosophical existential anxiety. Ugh so distressing! I wanna feel normal again and not so intrusive and neurotic haha.

[pauly j]

You must change your thoughts!  Changing your thoughts change how you feel!  To change your thoughts, you need to change the questions that you ask!  You are asking questions that are disempowering you!  The questions you ask causes you to ponder thoughts that make you feel disempowered!  If you can ask yourself better question, you will start to feel much better!  The habit that you have created may be hard to change, but practice, and persistence will make better, and once you make asking better questions a new habit, you will then experience more peace and joy!   Ask yourself questions such as, "Who loves me, and who do I love?"  "Why am I so lucky?" What am I happy for in my life?"  "Why do good things always come my way?"  By asking this type of questions, you mind has to eventually find the answers!  Ask a good question, get a good answer!   Ask a bad question, get a bad answer!   Start with this, and notice how you feel.  From here, you can further improve things utilizing other strategies in helping you to change things for the better!

pauly j

[mike_o]

iperry, you sound EXACTLY like I did just a few weeks ago. Is life real? Am I real? Are you real? Is anything real? Am I really me? I think I am but how do I prove it? Those are some of the thoughts I was having. I'm no professional but If I could recommend something it'd be to seek cognitive behavioural therapy to help you get your thoughts straight (I myself have received CBT and it took a while for me to actually get a grasp on it but when I finally did things started to make sense again). We feel like this because of anxiety. I have been blessed enough that I got a grip on my anxiety in the past two weeks, I can now say that life is returning to me, I know I'm real, life is real, I FEEL real, I woke up yesterday, I will wake up tomorrow (Lord willing). The more days that pass the more life returns to the way I knew it way back when. Seek a professional to help you with anxiety, once you get a grip you too will begin to return to life. It won't happen overnight, but it will change slowly every day until one day you wake up and just live life without questioning, as it should be. Somewhere along the line we just forgot how to do this.

Michael