Stress Vs Anxiety!

I tend to use these words interchangeably. 

But when speaking to medical professionals, they signal very different things.

It turns out, after gaining a better understanding of what these words mean to the medical field, I have rarely experienced true Anxiety. Most of my life I have experienced too frequent and much too high levels of unmanageable Stress, which Anti-Anxiety GABA boosting aids can relieve the biological response to, in order to think with clarity through a problem so to properly address it. Sometimes things will take a great deal of time to address. 

I have never really had Actual Depression, just normal ups and (severe) downs of being human with intense emotional responses to intense sense-perception or intense sensory assault. Every lack of motivation in my life has been the result of Being Overwhelmed and this is not true depression, which is an end-of-life acceptance 'deflation', allowing the human animal to return to dust (as it were). Numbness, Withdrawal, Apathy or just the "empty" feeling one has after crying your eyes out - none of these are depression but Survival modes, trauma responses or just normal cycles.

After decades of trying to work out what is happening in the world around me and inside me, I have found that much can be solved with clarity, knowledge, engaging with a problem rather than being afraid of working through it, approaching it. Add supplements for focus and gut-health, hydration and minerals, paying attention to botany. At 50, I am still uncovering how to eat properly for my being, and science is still discovering what our gut microbiota should look like, but worlds better today than I have been most of my life.

Please feel free to add to this conversation. It's painful to see how many Autistic kids are prescribed anti-depressants, when this can only make biological function and neurological function much worse, let alone other unnecessary stressors in modern life affecting Autistic and Divergent kids. x