Hi everybody! So I am 23 years old, and I dealt with anxiety starting at 5 years old, got on Zoloft at age 10 for extreme OCD and anxiety and wanting to die because it was so bad. It helped. I started smoking weed when I was 17. Tried mushrooms 3 times when I was 19, the first time I had an extreme realization of being alive and just how amazing everything is. I started to try to ween myself off of Zoloft, which I did over the course of about 6 months. During that time a lot of anxiety came back. I then tried a mild form of a hallucinogen called 5-meO-DMT, which is that first time I experienced a sense of depersonalization or derealizarion. It was a feeling of hyper-awareness of how your body is commanded by your brain without you actually having to make yourself move, and also a feeling of lagging in mental response time. Any way, after I did that, I couldn’t smoke weed anymore because it caused me to have a lot of anxiety.
The hallucinogens I have tried have caused feelings in me I had never felt before, most of them were unpleasant, and I still feel them sometimes. After I tried DMT (at age 20), I ended up taking Effexor for about 5 months, in combination with Abilify for about the first 2 months, but now I don’t take anything and I honestly have moments that I’ve never felt better than ever. I also felt pretty great my first 2-4 years of taking Zoloft.
I tried smoking weed again for a while but had to stop due to it causing me to have paranoid thoughts, mostly dissociative feelings, or derealization. I honestly cannot explain how it made me feel. I guess you can say it was depersonalization but not really. I just felt or maybe had the thought even that nothing around me is real, it just feels like a dream that doesn’t feel real in a way. But during those moments I can also have extreme realizations about reality.
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So the point of this post is that sometimes, my anxiety gets so low in a way (I say this because it seems as though sometimes my anxiety levels get so low, that I start to have anxiety in a different way because I’m not used to not having anxiety, so feeling different scares me). It’s like everything starts to feel so real that it starts to feel unreal. It’s like I’m having a new perspective that I don’t know how to interpret. I start to literally feel like this isn’t real, everything is not actually existing just a projection, or something like that. It’s weird because in a way I feel like I almost always have some for of dissociation, but just from general stress or anxiety. It’s like when you’re stressing out in your head, you’re not totally emotionally or mentally engaged in what’s going on around you, and you don’t feel as connected as you want to. But it’s not that things feel unreal in a sense as they do when you’re having a derealization attack. I really need help, advice, maybe something to help myself or say to myself. I tell myself, “everything is real. It’s okay. Relax. You’ll be okay.” And I pray a lot. It ends up going away. But can anyone explain this? Or help me to feel better about it or have any tips to cure that? I honestly do not want to take artificial medication.
Thank you so much.