Meet the Other Phone. Child-safe in minutes.

Meet the Other Phone.
Child-safe in minutes.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To ask if you found have found a way of stopping anxiety?

24 replies

Daisywishes · 14/07/2023 22:12

I suspect I am neurodiverse and have always worried from being a very young child and felt the need to make lists as I was anxious mainly about forgetting things

In adulthood this anxiety has swapped to social anxiety, worrying about the my health and the health of others. I worry about bad things happening to those around me, I worry about money without cause to, I worry about worrying and always have. It comes and goes and is worse in times of stress. Anxiety runs heavily in my family and my mum feels guilty (and anxious) that I worry, as if she is somehow to blame for passing the worry gene on! Point proven… ha ha

I haven’t self referred for CBT as I have read it can be counterproductive and harmful for autistic individuals, plus I am not sure what kind of an impact it would have. I know rationally that worrying is a waste of energy, the future is unknown etc. Did you ever fully move past anxiety somehow (please share how!) or does it always stay with you a bit?

OP posts:
JayJayj · 14/07/2023 22:28

I found CBT therapy really helpful. It helps you to understand the type of anxiety as well as methods to help control it. My anxiety hasn’t gone away but it is so much more manageable and no longer has a massive impact on my life.
I also had 1-1 therapy after as it hadn’t helped all. They do an assessment to hopefully give you the best treatment for you.
The service I used was free, I’m sure there will be one in your area. I’d definitely say to call/email and hopefully they can help you.

PawsAndReflection · 14/07/2023 22:35

Beta-blockers- speak to your GP

clpsmum · 14/07/2023 22:36

Do you take any medication OP? You sound very very similar to me. I try to follow an anxiety friendly diet if you can call it that, ie I've cut out foods that don't help anxiety, I find the outdoors and walking and exercise really helps and propranolol as an when I need it. I think setraline is also prescribed for anxiety

midsomermurderess · 14/07/2023 22:38

Propranolol. It doesn't fix underlying issues, but it helps with the symptoms of anxiety. It's not habit forming and acts quickly. It could create space for you to get help with the source of your anxiety.

off · 14/07/2023 22:42

Depends on the type of anxiety.

For anxiety about a specific activity, task, situation, object, etc., then CBT — specifically, the more behavioural end of CBT, involving techniques like graded exposure — can work well for me, depending how specific it is. Hard work, though.

The more cognitive side of CBT, involving recording, analysing, and challenging thoughts, drawing diagrams of the purported interactions of emotions and thoughts and actions and core beliefs, and all that jazz, is, for me, at best a waste of time, and at worst pretty counterproductive, so I don't find that CBT works well for me for more general, pervasive anxiety of the kind that latches onto whatever it can, or for things like social anxiety.

For that kind of anxiety, I use drugs. Currently, lithium seems to be preventing any anxiety bubbling up, but I've used a lot of other things in the past with varying degrees of success.

I have current diagnoses of ASD, bipolar disorder, and ADHD, FWIW.

DoAhhDiddy · 14/07/2023 22:47

Citalopram

Backhometothenorth · 14/07/2023 22:51

Cutting out all food additives really helps but hard to do. Particularly E100 food dyes, MSG, vanilla extract for me.

Unexpectedlysinglemum · 14/07/2023 22:51

Why do you think cbt is harmful for autistic people? There's a lot of evidence that it works as so many autistic people are over thinkers or misinterpret what others say or do, it's a good opportunity to explore these thought traps that could be leading to too much anxiousness. I would give it a try but be open about your concerns with the practitioner.

Other tips - keep a note of your health, sleep, good diet, exercise etc. pay attention to how you feel around people only spend time with those who make you feel good not those who drain you.

ScaleAndPolish · 14/07/2023 22:52

Sertraline and psychotherapy.

CuriousMoe · 14/07/2023 22:58

As others have mentioned above Propanalol helped immediately with my anxiety symptoms. I also had therapy for a more long term fix to provide coping mechanisms. I was told by my doctor to take propanalol when I either knew I was about to enter a situation that made me anxious like a job interview or social situation or when I feel a panic attack coming on and it seemed to do the trick. I stopped taking it when I got pregnant and haven’t needed it since. I use mindfulness techniques at night when I can’t sleep.

off · 15/07/2023 01:29

Unexpectedlysinglemum · 14/07/2023 22:51

Why do you think cbt is harmful for autistic people? There's a lot of evidence that it works as so many autistic people are over thinkers or misinterpret what others say or do, it's a good opportunity to explore these thought traps that could be leading to too much anxiousness. I would give it a try but be open about your concerns with the practitioner.

Other tips - keep a note of your health, sleep, good diet, exercise etc. pay attention to how you feel around people only spend time with those who make you feel good not those who drain you.

My experience(s) of CBT would suggest that certain techniques used in CBT can be… not necessarily the most helpful tool, always, for a certain type of over-thinker.

One way it can be unhelpful is this sort of thing: for me, some aspects of CBT led to prolonged mental arguments in my head between the "original" thought (e.g. "I am a burden on society who has never contributed anything, only consumed other people's energy and resources") and the "new, improved" thought I was meant to replace it with (e.g. "It's not necessarily important to contribute, and maybe I've contributed without realising, and maybe I haven't contributed much of tangible benefit to society yet, but I can work on that in future 🙂🙂🙂". These arguments between my original thought and the replacement thought usually ended up encouraging my brain to sharpen and hone its arguments for the original thought, strengthen and bolster the original thoughts with better, tighter arguments against the therapised, CBT -approved thoughts.

And, particularly if you're seeing someone with a fairly basic level of CBT training without much other psychological background, or who hasn't worked with many autistic people, or if you're working by yourself from a workbook or a computer programme, CBT often works on certain assumptions as to how human beings think, which may not work well for anyone who doesn't fit those assumptions, including autistic people (this can also cause problems where there are cultural differences).

I found the CBT model of the human mind — at least, the more cognitively-oriented part — fairly unrelatable. The diagrams showing the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and actions didn't make sense of what was going on in my head, no matter how long I tried. People with ASD have minds that work differently, but also may have different levels of access to their own emotions — alexithymia, or difficulty understanding/describing what you're feeling, is common in people with ASD.

Some of my inability to relate to the thoughts-cause-feelings model that the most basic versions of CBT tend to include may have been related to my bipolar disorder, rather than my ASD, though. CBT assumes that your feelings of depression or anxiety are a result of your thoughts. My subjective experience of my bipolar disorder is that the mood state hits first, hard and fast, along with the associated physical feelings, vegetative symptoms (eating, sleeping) and so on, and the relevant thoughts follow afterwards. One of the types of anxiety I experience is much the same. I get a feeling of continuous anxiety, which is intense and lasts a few weeks. It's only then, shortly after it hits, that my mind generates thoughts in an attempt to explain why I'm feeling so anxious.

The other thing is that a lot of CBT, at least in the simpler self-help, IAPT or short-course CMHT versions, is essentially "change how you think to change how you feel". For people with ASD, changing how we think can be really, really difficult. People tend to use words like "cognitive rigidity", but I believe it's more complex than just stubborn inflexibility. Either way, once someone with ASD has a certain belief about the way things are, for example that they're unlikeable (a belief that's easy to acquire going through the ability system as an autistic person), CBTing that away may take a lot more work and a lot more time than IAPT (or NHS Talking Therapies, or whatever it's called now) and therapists are used to it taking, and that clients may be led to expect.

Marie2023 · 15/07/2023 01:31

Escitalopram. A miracle drug. After a lifetime of severe anxiety, I am free. I am still myself, but without the anxiety. I can’t tell you how life-changing it’s been.

off · 15/07/2023 01:36

(a belief that's easy to acquire going through the ability system as an autistic person)

*going through the school system!

Tho that's an interesting autocorrect my phone inserted there 😅

Unexpectedlysinglemum · 15/07/2023 08:28

Thank you op for that I testing answer to my question I have learned a lot. Sorry if I did the NT to ND version of mansplaining!

LaDeeDa123 · 15/07/2023 08:30

Gardening. It works.

B0nMaman · 15/07/2023 08:37

I have autism.

For day to day anxiety I find box breathing, baths, gardening, puzzles, cross stitch, reading helps manage it. I’ve learnt you have to build it in whatever to get used to a state of calm and to self sooth.

Dealing with fight/ flight, 0-60 over thinking with the genuine big stuff is a work in progress.

Cinai · 15/07/2023 08:38

I find exercise helpful against anxiety.

Tecksupport · 15/07/2023 08:39

Medication! Once I found the right one it was life changing.

I have tried CBT several times and it just didn't seem to work for me. I now suspect I may have undiagnosed ASD.

Oblomov23 · 15/07/2023 09:44

Interesting. My friends dd has anxiety.

Sausagenbacon · 15/07/2023 09:46

I don't know about medication, but being outside, ideally walking, helps me a lot.

LMNT · 15/07/2023 09:49

When I went keto for weight loss it had the happy side effect of getting me off SSRIs. I was housebound with it and had panic attacks every time I tried to leave the house. It gave me my life back.

NewName122 · 15/07/2023 09:49

Sertraline

Eyesopenwideawake · 15/07/2023 09:59

Firstly there is no known gene for anxiety but if anxiety runs heavily in your family then it's going to be your default position - it's what you accepted as natural and normal when you were growing up so how could it be otherwise?

We often get locked in states of high anxiety due to a build up of circumstances, experiences or learnings - in your case your upbringing (with no disrespect to your mother, I would bet her mother was the same and learnt it in turn from her grandparents). Whilst the circumstances or situations that caused us to feel anxious might eventually pass, if we have now come to regard any feelings of anxiety as an indicator of illness, this will potentially lock us into our high anxiety response.

As soon as we feel ANY anxiety (as we inevitably do from day to day) this causes us to get anxious about the feeling of our anxiety disorder flaring up or our illness becoming worse. Even when we are on the other side of our anxiety issue, if we continue to regard any feelings of anxiety as an indicator of illness, we will remain vulnerable to relapse should life throw us any difficult or challenging situations in the future.

What you need to realise is that anxiety is a natural feeling that we all need to feel on pretty much a daily basis - it tells us that important things are approaching and enables us to prioritise the important from the trivial. We need to feel it otherwise we wouldn't regard anything - from passing an exam to taking vital medication for our health - as important.

As soon as we stop fearing the feeling, we stop amplifying it and can get used to the low levels of functional anxiety that enhance rather than destroy our life.

HTH.

Freshair1 · 15/07/2023 10:02

50mg sertraline completely stopped my relentless chest pain, overthinking and panic. Life changing.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page