A lot happens to you when you have an anxiety disorder. Beyond the usual symptoms that we all know such as hyperventilation, tachycardia, dizziness or nausea, there is a most terrifying symptom that is depersonalization. It’s terrifying because it’s a strange experience that seems to border on the supernatural, and because the feeling varies from being afraid of going crazy to being very sure you’re going to die. We make it clear to you: you are not going to die from suffering from anxiety depersonalization, but you may be interested in knowing what it is and how to return to reality immediately.
What is depersonalization or decreolization?
The terms depersonalization, dissociation, and decreolization are used interchangeably to talk about this phenomenon, which is both a symptom and. It is an unconscious mechanism, an anxiety response that implies a kind of mental detachment or a disconnection between body and mind. Feeling that you are in a dream state and that reality is far away or even being able to observe yourself from the outside.
Without a doubt, it is a terrifying experience because the first thing you. Then, when the depersonalization advances and you see yourself as unfolded looking at your body from the outside, you are convinced that either you are about to die or you have already died. It is very difficult to explain what happens in a depersonalization and people who have experienced it once are often obsessed with the fear that it will happen again.
Depersonalization disconnects you from your body, or rather, disconnects your body from your mind. Reality becomes confused, blurry and far away, as if it were not with you. You feel strange to yourself, unfolded and in the most intense cases you can disconnect so much that you don’t know who you are or where you are. Sounds terrible, right? Well it happens. And it or a panic attack.
What causes depersonalization?
This depersonalization is so strange that we insist on looking for a cause to understand it better. Logically, at the base is anxiety. It is anxiety itself that causes depersonalization and, therefore, it can happen to you when you are in the middle of an anxiety attack or when an event is happening to you that you consider dangerous and that over time will become traumatic.
But it can also happen to you for no apparent reason when you are at the movies with your partner, on the way to work or having a coffee with friends. Depersonalization comes when anxiety (even if you don’t notice it at the time) has overflowed and your body needs to disconnect. This may give you a clue as to why this disturbing phenomenon occurs, but we explain it more clearly in the next section.
We continue looking for the causes of depersonalization or what causes this dissociation between body and mind or this distance from reality. We can find these other causes in a significant lack of sleep, in a state of high nervousness, in a moment of emotional tension or it can even be caused by the.
The message that depersonalization brings
As you can see, all the causes are related to anxiety. And indeed, anxiety manifests itself through depersonalization in an exaggerated attempt to get your attention. Here we come to why it happens and the important message that this experience brings.
If depersonalization is a kind of forced disconnection, we can understand that this is precisely what your mind and also your body is asking for. Disconnect but to reconnect with you. It is like anxiety, which always comes to tell you something, so that you pay attention to everything that you are avoiding in your life. The most important message of depersonalization is that you are so mentally or physically tired that you need to unplug.
Because the ultimate goal is to reconnect with yourself, with your essence, with your authenticity, with your life and with your vital purpose. People who are undergoing psychological will confirm that learning is most valuable and that they now have a better quality of life.
It is true that sometimes depersonalization and anxiety problems come from a specific traumatic experience that you have not overcome, but most of the time it is due to the fact that you have spent a long time avoiding facing yourself, your problems, and your own life. And anxiety comes to tell you: for a moment, you can’t go on like this.
Effective techniques to return to reality
Even though the experience of depersonalization is terrifying and you think you’re not going to get out of it, it passes by itself. It is not much consolation because the feelings of panic remain afterwards, when everything has already happened and they return to your mind over and over again for years… If you cannot understand why and why this has happened to you.
There is no magic trick that will stop depersonalization once it is happening to you. But it can help you to know that, as with anxiety attacks and panic, they pass on their own. And there is also a trick that you must practice from now on so that the depersonalization does not feel so intense. At this time we have to talk about care.
Depersonalization and the rest of the anxiety symptoms are a call for attention. You have to pay attention to these symptoms to realize that there is something you must change in your life, be it behavior or perspective. But be careful, because it is one thing to pay attention to anxiety and another thing to obsess over it. Quite an exercise in balance or in search of the midpoint that will take you a while to achieve.
What depersonalization really asks of you is that you pay attention to it. Very good, pay attention to it, become aware of what is happening in your life and the reasons why you have anxiety. And once you’ve realized it, take care of resolving everything you should but without obsessing, without giving so much importance to the symptoms. Because what really matters is the content.
Thus, we recommend that after the first experience of depersonalization you clarify to yourself that it is not so terrible, that it’s, that you have already verified that it goes away on its own. And of course, you don’t want it to happen to you again, but don’t be obsessed with the idea, play it down because if you’ve gone out once, you’ll go out as many times as necessary. In fact, downplaying anxiety in the sense not of ignoring it, but of not fearing it, is the best remedy to reduce the intensity of the symptoms.
As we say, we do not have an exercise or a technique that stops depersonalization suddenly. This is a long process of understanding anxiety, living with its discomfort for a while and understanding its message, which is different for each person. Perhaps he is asking you to rest, not, take care of yourself more, discover what life you want to lead, or simply get to know yourself better and accept yourself as you are.
