Quick Fixes

{Michelle Valiukenas} Drink this and lose weight without changing anything else.  Take this pill and feel so much better, no extra work needed.  I’m sure we’ve all heard some version of these kinds of claims.  We live in a culture that wants that quick fix, that one thing that magically solves all of our problems, and these claims sound so good, so easy that it’s no wonder so many of us fall for it.

But, the truth of the matter is that there are no quick fixes, as much as we wish there were.  Things like losing weight, curing chronic illnesses or at least vastly improving them, erasing mental health issues, and so on take time and often are long-lasting issues we have to navigate.  

Recently, I was struck by a bout of anxiety that lasted for weeks.  I felt like I was on the verge of having a panic attack and yet I could not get out of it or let myself fall into the panic and emerge on the other side.  It was awful, living in this unknown, very uncomfortable stage and trying all the tools I have used in the past to manage this lifelong condition, yet not being able to break past it.  The longer it went on, the more useless any of the tools felt.  I even tried some of those quick fixes—the essential oils that would make medication unnecessary, the one bodywork move that would erase all the trauma and anxiety from my life.  Ultimately, it took going back to my psychiatrist and saying, I need help before things changed.  She added in some additional medications to combat the backlog of anxiety that seemed to be stored up and yet more kept coming rendering any storage space insufficient for containing the anxiety.  Within a few days, I started to feel so much better, but that was not a quick fix.  It took the medication and playing around with dosages to release anxiety and sleep better.  But, just as the medication that I took for years prior to this particular incident felt like it worked, it also needed to be adjusted and modified over the years, similar to the way the tools I discussed also needed to be adjusted and modified.

So when I started to share my story and received a message from a colleague stating that she could help me break through this so that I didn’t have to deal with anxiety anymore, I was angry.  In 40 years, I have had ups and downs with anxiety, but the one thing I have learned as that even when it is well managed, it still resides in me as my little buddy, waiting for a time to overpower me, and I have to be aware of the shifts and changes I feel and experience to be prepared to make changes if necessary.  I wanted to scream back to her and tell her that I know myself and I know my anxiety better than she does and tell her not to promise me or anyone else some sort of quick fix just to sell your product or services.  I didn’t do so and perhaps this is a bit of that feeling, that reminder that we don’t need quick fixes and even more importantly, that some things are not “fixable,” but are manageable.  And figuring out how to manage these things is the important work we need to be doing.