Scared of these strange confusing feelings

Mental health
1

I am a 16 year old male and for the past month I've been experiencing very odd, worrying mental feelings. When I wake up in the morning I have a pounding heart and I feel like I am going crazy, that I'll never be happy or normal again and that nothing I will do will make me happy like it used to, and this brings me to tears because my mind just races. When I get out of bed and move this feeling usually goes away, but I have a residual strange feeling for the rest of the day. It feels as though my mind is foggy, like I can't look forward to things, like I can't recollect past memories or feelings I had, and this makes me feel depressed like I'll never feel simple and happy again. I try to look forward to things that I can do but I always worry that I won't feel the same when I'm doing it. That's another major part, things and people around me, when I stop and think about it, feel different. Almost like I can't feel their company and life. Same goes for places, I feel as though they're just not the same, lacking something that I don't know. Sometimes I'll be doing something and then all of a sudden I'll have this weird realization of confusion, like "it doesn't feel like I just did that" or it feels like a lot of time passed when it was only a short time. I then get very worried that I am losing my mind and that I will be this dull way for the rest of my life. Everyday I look back to the previous day and I feel like everything was even different then, and now things feel unfamiliar and less comforting. At night when I am tired I usually feel almost normal, which leads me to believe it's just anxiety. But I get very worried about developing a permanent derealization disorder or something because I feel so strange and different. If anybody understands what I am talking about can you please inform me of what can cause this, or if it is normal? it makes me very worried. I feel lost and scared

Thank you

 

2

hi i am going through the very same thing at the moment i believe its called depersonalization where basically nothing around you feels real. its scary

3

talk to someone u trust preferably an adult or health care professional,i know it might be difficult but talking to someone who will understand wat ur going thru is the first step to getting better, trust me 

4

I'm sorry . Is it something treatable and temporary? 

5

i believe so im on anti depressants at the moment its still here i read it goes away when your not focusing on it. its hard not to

6

Hey man hang in there! I'm a 16 year old male too, and what your experiencing is derelazation, and it sucks trust me Ik it feels scary that you don't feel normal and it's scary to think you'll never feel normal again but honestly it will get better, when I was reading your post I couldn't believe how similar your story is to mine, I mean almost exactly, but I just couldn't take it anymore I just had to talk to my parents and they were very supportive, I went to a physiatrist and they gave me a medicine called Zoloft, I been on it for about 4 weeks and honestly the first couple weeks sucked, not knowing if I would get better, but I am slowly feeling back to normal, this is al from anxiety and honestly it is the worst feeling in the world, just try not to focus on it and if I was you I would try to seek help because it was the best thing I ever could do, I use to always think about how I felt and I always thought I would feel this strange way and I would never feel normal again, but just nj of anxiety like a cold or a flu eventually it has to pass and get better, just hang in there bro, if you need to talk just comment back, I'm here to talk, Ik how it feels

7

Thanks for the optimism I really appreciate it. I have been thinking it could be that, just all stemming from the anxiety, and it feels like I'm slipping away from what I knew each and every day. I have luckily never experienced the visual effect, like a pane of glass or living third person, but I still just don't feel myself. I would like to stay in touch with you since you have experience 

8

please keep in touch too im going into my 2nd week of zoloft while dealing with depersonalization;(

9

Is there another way to contact you?

10

u can direct message me on instagram my user is tammi.toxic

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or on kik user is radley.patient

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If you guys wanna kik me add me johnfeb12

13

Hey man. Sorry to jump in on this, but I've been having the same experience for the past couple months. I'm 16 too, and my anxiety started in small bouts, and it just kind of grew into a background sensation, unfortunately. Recently, though, it's become worse -- like there's a constant feeling of tightness in my chest, and I've started feeling derealization every now and then (I think). It's like I get all wrapped up in the idea that there's no way to really verify that anything is truly real, and then I imagine that everyone and everything (including sensations) are just .... I don't know, illusions? Then I start to feel kind of distant from everyone, like I mean if I can't know that they're real, then I mean how can you connect with them? I'm not trying to set you off or anything, I just want to share my experiences.

Has the Zoloft helped the derealization at all?

14

Hi Zoloft is working pretty good tbh, kik me at johnreich12 if you need to talk

15

i feel the same way it sucks im on the 11th day of taking sertraline which is generic for zoloft and im hoping itll kick in soon

16

Alright so in all my worrying I found two ways of approaching this problem that made me feel a little better.

The first was to approach the philosophical problem itself. Basically, my biggest fear was that everything could be an illusion (aka nothing’s real or that it’s all made up of my brain). But what’s an illusion? It’s something that appears real, but has no real substance/meaning behind it. Let’s assume for a minute that this idea is true, that indeed everything is really just an illusion created by my brain. If you go by this philosophy, there’s nowhere left to go after establishing that it’s true -- if everything’s an illusion, then you can’t truly know anything, there can’t be wrong or right; in other words, nothing else follows. The most logical conclusion? This philosophy (that everything could be imaginary) has no real substance/meaning (as it doesn’t really get you anywhere), and is in of itself not real (although it appears that way) -- thus, the illusion isn’t life, but the philosophy itself.

The above is really only a temporary solution, though (at least in my case). Just bear with me and see if the following describes you. Even after I seemingly find a solution, my brain will keep turning over stones to try and find some hole to poke in the theory, or keep going so I can be 100% sure. A lot of these times, these thoughts will pop in out of nowhere, and when they do, the anxiety comes roaring back. These thoughts have been about all kinds of things: being gay, not choosing the right career (and thus being unhappy for the rest of my life), getting cancer, being impotent, none of my friends liking me. And I always knew these thoughts were irrational, or at the very least unproductive, but my brain would always doubt it with a “what if”. Like I knew I wasn’t gay, but what if I overlooked something and really was? How could I be sure? This would lead me to spend tons of time online researching these issues (whatever they were) or journaling to try and get to the bottom of them, or just turning them over again and again, but enough would never be enough. I’d even start working out a lot as a way to cope and just escape from the thinking for a little. But nothing would ever be enough -- I’d feel the need to keep researching and doing things to try and resolve whatever problem I had latched onto (be it how to lower cancer risks, or make sure I wasn’t gay, or finding philosophical loopholes to prove that reality is, in fact, real).

Now let’s say I latched onto the thought where I was going to get AIDS on my hands, and instead of researching ways to boost immunity I started washing my hands all the time to avoid getting AIDS, even if I knew the thought wasn’t rational (this is hypothetical BTW; I don’t do this). Starts to look like a disorder that’s a bit more familiar, right? It turns out that what I described (in the paragraph above -- not the hand washing) looks a lot like something called pure OCD, where you have obsessive thoughts, but no really outward compulsion. Instead, they’re more mental (such as doing tons of research or constantly ruminating), but the sufferer still doesn’t really have any control over it. Derealization is even a symptom of anxiety (which OCD can definitely bring on). And it makes sense to me, too; my dad has an anxious/compulsive personality, as does his mom.

So I don’t know if this is at all enlightening to anyone, but I just wanted to put out there what I found. Maybe it'll help someone.

17

thank you its just hard trying to get rid of the feeling of strangeness :\

18

Very true. I'll often be sitting there forgetting about it all, and then one second I'll remind myself of it and start obsessing over the feeling again. I have been scared of irrational things, in the past month I've been scared I will develop schizophrenia, or I'll be scared I will get into a severe depression, and forget about he current situation, the present, where I'm not actually like that. My mind wanders and tries to answer these questions rather than let them go. 

19

alot of wat ur describing here is wat here is wat i went thru when i was growing up ,i was lucky or unlucky maybe google was'nt around

20

Did you get rough it Declan? It might all just be a part of adolescence for me