Anxiety...anyone got any tips or want to chat ..

[Pringlemonster]

It’s utterly ruining my life ,I constantly feel like I have a dentist appointment every single day ,nerves and feelings of dread off the scale.
I’m taking all kinds of vitamins ,htp5 ,omegas ,and batch rescue remedy.
Nothing is touching it
I’m currently having counselling,and the counsellor seems determined to get me to agree I was abused as a child...I don’t feel I was ,I feel it was just 1970s shit parenting ,which you can’t judge by today’s standards.
She feels my anxiety steams from that.
I’ve had it my whole life ,and it just won’t fuck of.
It can’t be normal to feel like this all the time.
I’m pretty sure I have ASD and anxiety is listed as one of the main symptoms of that...But thinking that doesn’t help ,or change the situation,I’m still left with bad anxiety weather it’s from autism or a shite childhood .
Every little thing feels like a mountain to climb .
Has anyone successfully dealt with this ,I can’t find anything that helps

Hi @Pringlemonster, I understand how you are feeling, have suffered badly with my mental health pretty much since childhood.

I know that taking medication feels like defeat, I hate the fact that I have to take medication just to be able to function as a normal person, but honestly you just have to think that we have an illness and this helps and you wouldn’t admit defeat by taking painkillers if you had a chronic pain disorder for example so we really shouldn’t be beating ourselves up about it.

I’m on citalapram which I find really helps but definitely talk to your gp, there’s lots of different medications and they will help you find the right one for you.

Things that help me are when I’m feeling particularly anxious I listen to an audiobook or music, it just helps give my brain something else to focus on that tv or physically reading just doesn’t do. Taking regular walks helps me as well.

Hopefully you will find something from all these suggestions that works for you.

I havent read the full thread so I'm sure there have been some good posts with good advice but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

I suffer from anxiety and am towards the end of having a series of therapy sessions for it.

I'm usually (when not feeling too anxious) quite a logical person, so what's helped me is:

• when feeling anxious, note it in a worry diary. Either a physical diary or a note in your phone. Note down what you're anxious about, what you were doing at the time, what time and day it is, a mark out of 10 for how anxious you feel, and whether it's a hypothetical worry (something that may never happen) or a practical worry (something that is actually happening)
• Use a grounding technique to try and calm yourself down a bit til you're at a point where you can breathe easier and think straight. There are lots of different ways to do this that you can google but I like the 5 things technique and if it's the weekend or I'm not at work, doing something to distract myself
• if it's a hypothetical worry, tell yourself that you will not worry about that now but that you have made a note of your worry and that later on (at a time of your choosing, eg 6pm straight after work) you will set aside time to worry about it then
• if it's a practical worry and you have time to sort it now, split it out into bite size chunks with small step by step things you can do to solve the problem. If you dont have time to sort it now as it can wait, make a note to think about it later during your "worry time"
• when you get to your time you have set aside for worrying, sit somewhere quiet, by yourself, away from places you would to relax. So eg dont sit on your sofa or in your bed, sit at the dining room table for example. Get out your worry diary and go through your list of worries. You'll probably find that a lot of the things have melted away and you're not worried about them anymore and the ones that are left are practical so you can work on making plans to tackle them. Try not to spend more than 10-15 mins on this, but do it every day if you need to so that your brain knows that every day it has a set time to deal with your worries and anxieties.

Obviously we have had completely different experiences in life and will have anxieties about different things, so this may not help you at all but I hope you're able to take something from it

I found Sertraline helped my anxiety, which was through the roof earlier this year to the extent it was making me hyper-vigilant and pacing up and down like a caged tiger.
Having a bath and going for walks helped aswell. Hope you are having a good day today. Look after yourself X