My Struggle With Anxiety and Hypertension

Fr. Dale Matson

When I add all the anxious times in my life together they make up a large slice of my life. God only knows to what extent my genetics destined me to live life with the sympathetic nervous system in charge most of the time.

In terms of family, my dad was the emotionally cool pipe smoking fisherman type. My mother, on the other hand had the hot blood of the highlander Scots. She suffered from depression and alcoholism.

It seems I adopted a cognitive strategy early in life that awfulizing about a situation was the best policy until the situation was resolved. While I was a Christian from childhood, I’m not sure I trusted a loving God. I saw God as a righteous God who punished sinners. In a sense, I was always looking over my shoulder, waiting for the hammer to fall.

All of these factors, the genetic, familial, cognitive and spiritual, led to a life where I wanted no surprises and sought no adventures. My fears and anxieties controlled my life and my life was designed to minimize these issues. I did a great deal of negative futurizing and not living in the “now”.

When I was young and in robust physical health, I used alcohol every night to put out the fires of anxiety. My drunk self-became my calm, normal self. After years of this, I began to have anxiety attacks in the morning at work.

With God’s help, I was able to give up cigarettes and alcohol. I became a jogger, runner and then ultra-runner. Running was my new drug of choice and after a morning 10K run, I was calm and ready for the day. I am still active and bike, swim, hike and walk but no longer run.

Two more factors are now a part of my life situation. I (gradually) became elderly. I will be 75 in two months. Aging is a difficult life adjustment for active folks in denial. When one ages, the body is less resilient and the mind is less certain. The “senior moments” were probably always there but when you are a senior, it is a different matter. You tend to dwell on your chronic infirmities and pain is a continual reminder that you are dying in bits and pieces. The tendency is to withdraw, to hyper-reflect. The treatment, of course, is to think of others who are worse off, to help others who are isolated by their infirmities.

My mother had and my older sister has Alzheimer’s. This past week, I was driving in a familiar area of the city and made a wrong turn. I began to feel uncomfortable because my thoughts immediately considered my possible future fate of dementia. Was the wrong turn another piece of evidence of my own decline? Ten years ago, I would not have even considered the idea when I made a wrong turn.

When I got home, I sensed my blood pressure increasing and of course this is a problem that feeds on itself. Just putting on the blood pressure cuff probably raised my blood pressure. After being hospitalized for high blood pressure this year, life has not been the same. And that is the point at which these two problems intersect and plague me. My blood pressure is usually in the normal range but when my anxieties kick in, my blood pressure can raise to dangerous levels. For example, the morning of the wrong turn, my systolic blood pressure was 124. When I got back home suffering from anxiety, my blood pressure was 170.

I took a tranquilizer but immediately realized that this was another example of an anxiety driven high blood pressure reading. Only three minutes later my systolic pressure was down to 140. If only I hadn’t reflexively reached for the tranquilizer, my blood pressure would probably returned to normal on its own without the tranquilizer. If only I could internalize “Be anxious for nothing but by prayer and supplication lets your requests be known to God”.

Why do I discuss these personal struggles? Many older folks suffer from these same issues and more. I hope many of you who read or hear this will be encouraged to include your infirmities in your prayers of petition to God who knows before we ask.