Archana Puran Singh: I didn't have any help from anybody while dealing with my anxiety issues
Actor Archana Puran Singh opens up about dealing with anxiety in her latest Instagram post.
In her recent social media post, Archana Puran Singh, currently seen as a ‘permanent guest’ on The Great Indian Kapil Show, admitted that she dealt with anxiety at several stages of her life. The actor says it is only now that she has realised that the unsaid feeling of nervousness was actually her struggling with anxiety.
In the post, she stated, “Today they call it anxiety. Back in my day it was a normal state of being before an exam, an event, a date... Nobody asked us how we felt. We ourselves didn’t question the frequent knot in our stomachs!! We just soldiered on. It was just another day, and sometimes an almost constant state of being for long periods of time. I define my life as a very happy one... even through the tough times. You’ll be fine too”.
Opening up about the post, she tells us, “I was going through social media and reading so much about anxiety, people talking about panic attacks and anxiety attacks. That’s when I started introspection and realised that we all have dealt with it at some point of our life. It is just that we have given it a definition today. We all have gone through that feeling while growing up, be it before an exam, getting scolded by parents or anticipating a scolding. Nobody informed us that it is called anxiety”.
She asserts that for the longest time, it was just the normal state of being that you felt happy, you felt sad, you felt anxious. “It was self realisation that what I have experienced has also been anxiety, even though it was at a very mild level and there are people who are suffering from extreme anxiety. I have experienced it during my childhood, during my teenage years, during my college days, when my career was starting off, then when some project didn’t take off,” she says, adding, “We suffered silently for so many years. We did not have any help from anybody in dealing with anxiety, maximum our mother would come and hug us.”
Now, she is happy that people today are more openly discussing it.
“When I have anxious moments that I definitely focus on, it is ‘what are the good moments that I’ve had in a day’. I look at those good moments, and count those instead of the one bad moment,” shares the mother of two.
Here, she just wants people to not use the word casually as there are many people struggling with extreme situations.
“What I call anxiety, maybe is nothing compared to the person who’s suffering from crippling anxiety. I have a cousin and he suffers from such crippling anxiety that he only then stays in his room. When I talk to him, he tells me that his good days means he can come out of my room. Now, that is a level of anxiety that I have never experienced. I have no knowledge about. I am not making light of the people who are dealing with extreme levels of anxiety. But we need to be cautious while dealing with the word,” she ends