I made no attempt to change my thoughts but tried to welcome them as friends. Since I found it impossible to challenge my thoughts, I turned to challenging my behaviours. 'I made no attempt to change my thoughts but tried to welcome them as friends.'Ĭognitive Behavioural Therapy works on the principle that our thoughts, behaviours and feelings all influence each other and that feelings of anxiety or depression are caused by negative thinking and behavioural patterns. Any attempt I made to challenge my unhelpful thoughts simply led to me fighting with myself and my anxiety increasing. This was a problem because it meant that it was almost impossible to engage with one of the foundational concepts of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – the most consistent method of treating anxiety. This was something that I actually knew, but it was impossible to convince myself of it at the time because my thoughts were running too fast for me to think rationally and my baseline anxiety was simply too high. Indeed, depersonalisation is one of the most common mental health complaints. It was such a frightening and bizarre feeling that I began to fear that there was something physically wrong with my brain.ĭepersonalisation is not dangerous - for me it was merely a symptom of my anxiety (albeit an extremely distressing one). Not only that, they looked like frightening monsters of some kind. The people I loved and who were closest to me looked like total strangers. I could only describe the feeling as like acid flowing through my veins. I had a peculiar sense of hyper-reality, was constantly obsessed by existential questions and even the most mundane thoughts and objects could send a surge of anxiety through my body. It was almost impossible to believe anything other than the idea that I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life. I constantly tried to think my way out of these thoughts and feelings in order to make the panic stop. These thoughts would come and go at tremendous speed so that sometimes I could barely catch what they were. Floods of frightening thoughts would come into my head throughout the day and manifest as nightmares as I slept. Indeed, exhaustion was a key feature of the next four months. 'It was almost impossible to believe anything other than the idea that I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life.' I eventually fell asleep from exhaustion at 5 a.m.

I trembled in bed the whole of that night, sweating profusely. I went on a long walk, trying to rationalise with myself and to talk myself out of the panic, but to no avail. In that same moment a surge of panic overwhelmed me – a surge of panic which would remain for every waking moment over the next four months. I was sat on my sofa in my student house when I suddenly had the sense that I had lost my sense of self in an instant I felt like my ego was gone. I can remember the exact moment when my experience of it began. Depersonalisation is extremely alarming because the onset of it is so sudden.

Depersonalization recovery process