a right dose of anxiety....advice on recovery please.

[ListenICanSmellSomething]

I'm currently in the throws of a good dose of bad nerves. I'm a single parent of an 11 year old and a nine year old and i normally work full time in a stressful but rewarding job supporting homeless people.

I've been going downhill on an anxiety spiral for about 4 months and started to get a fear of what if i get so ill I can't work therefore can't pay the mortgage and we lose our home and how this would affect the kids (ironic when I work to stop this happening to people, though they are always in rented accom).

I have been here before with this illness, but i was with my husband then, so I wasn't under the same pressures. Ten days ago it all got to much....shaking, panics, couldn't concentrate, weeks of hardly eating and poor sleep, struggling to meet kids needs....so i went to docs, got some tablets and told work I needed some time off. they understood as they'd seen me doing my job fine, but struggling so hard with what I once found second nature.

I'm doing all I can to get better, but i wonder if any of you out there are suffering in the same way and what I really want to is what is helping you so I can see if it might work for me??

ive been taking 10mg of citalopram for a month now, and its really helped. I still get a nit anxious from time to time, but i can function now so thats great!
have you spoken to your doctor about it?

yes i saw him last Friday, he gave me some Pregabalin tablets which seem to be helping. Its great that youre only anxious from time to time now, that would make me very happy! Did you do anything besides taking th tabs to achieve the improvement?

no, just the tablets. I was offered councelling, but didnt take the offer. Im going to start heathy eating tomorrow in the hopes that it may help me imporve, going to cut down on caffine too.

Hi, sorry you're feeling like this, but if you want to join our support group, we're all in the same boat and have all started taking various meds recently.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/feeling_depressed/1440266-Sertraline-and-any-other-ADs-support-thread

Hi Listen I'm on the thread that deleting has linked to - I've found it very supportive and a big help - but I also wanted to chip in with my experiences with anxiety and panic.

What is happening to you sounds very much like panic attacks and if they are recurring and disabling you - and it very much sounds like they are - then its great that you've got help. I've recently been diagnosed with Panic Disorder and have just started taking meds to help with that. I'm finding the side effects very difficult to cope with but hoping the Long Term Gain outweighs the short term effects. As for other ways to help you cope I can thoroughly recommend CBT as a brilliant tool for turning your negative and unhelpful thought patterns around. Your GP should be able to refer you for it, and I have found it really helpful in coping and managing panic.

I also tried hypnotherapy and found it very calming and grounding - it also helped me untangle a lot of mental knots when I was in a state of heightened anxiety and could barely leave the house - its not for everyone but it certainly helped me relax. Also look into Mindfulness Meditation which sounds a bit woo but is brilliant for living in the Now and also for distracting against harmful thoughts. Finally the MoodGym website comes highly recommended, its good for brain training exercises in a CBT stylee. Hope all this makes sense, I know exactly where you're coming from and it is a shit place to be. Hope you're feeling better. :)

I am currently off work with exhaustion / anxiety and taking 25mg of citalopram daily which at least allows me to function effectively for my dc! I've recently been to a reiki practitioner which, despite my initial scepticism, really seems to help! My anxiety remains (lots of family problems and a new boss who's constant bullying has put my job under threat), but am at least able to smile and see more positives as a result of the medication / reiki combo!

I would second asking the dr about cbt.

It very much helped me with PTSD. I only had about 6 sessions and the exercises she gave me to do helped so much. I still sometimes have these horrible thoughts but I am able to stop them before they spiral into a panic episode.

Please ask your dr to refer you ASAP as there is often a waiting list.

Echo the CBT advice, I work in a high stress enviroment and had a serious mental health problem which included anxiety etc and I found that taking the Cita helped me get out of the hole, but it was the CBT that got me back into a position to work again. I was lucky that my work paid for the CBT (terrified I would take legal action over the causes) but it is excellent and well worth going into with an open mind. Having the ability to talk things through in an enviroment away from your usual life is very important I think.

thankyou very much everyone. I keep going with the anxiety, doing things all the time to occupy me and just try to drift along with it and accept how i am rather than stress about it. Who did you all do cbt through?

it feels such a daft state to have got into, but when youre in it you cant see the wood for the trees

Listen I got CBT through my Dr. I was given a questionaire by her, which I took home, filled in and then posted to the area Mental Health team.

I heard from them pretty quickly and was told I would be put on the waiting list and sent an appointment asap. In the end I only had to wait about 4 weeks, but it may be different in other areas.

Good luck

Also re your second post, one of the very first things I was told during CBT was that what I was feeling was totally understandable. That had a huge effect on me as I realised I wasn't being over the top/daft/attention seeking.

You have a lot on your plate and your thoughts are spiralling out of control and making you anxious. My Dr explained that some people get a bit "stuck" and the CBT just gives you a way of "helping to move things along".

I would also recommend CBT.

CBT empowers you to challenge your anxiety and negative thoughts and develop strategies for coping when things get too much. The great thing is, that once you have those strategies, you can use them throughout your life, whenever you need to.

If you do have to wait for CBT via the GP, do ask about basic counselling in the meantime, as sometimes just having someone to talk to, who will listen and not be judgemental really helps as well.

thankyou for the cbt advice girls, we have something roound here called open minds which does that sort of thing. Usually its me taking my clients there, but its me who needs it now. im going to go in tomorrow and get myself on their waiting list. Im so tense when i go out and some times i have panics though i have to say my medication has lessened these to a very mild intensity, but it still bothers me. The problem is i then just keep thinking about it. Any advice girls? I need to say 'so what?' and that its just a phase and not buy into the days proceedings. I need to train my mind not to bother or fester on it. All tips welcome!!

A tip I use for anxiety and just in general is to remember a time that I did whatever it was without a problem and then visualise myself going through that again. The memory and positive emotion of remembering doing something successfully reduces the stress levels

The one thing that cbt did which I found most helpful was to have a "worry time" when I wrote down everything which was making me anxious. So you choose a time in the day, mine was in hte evening, where you write these things down . So during the day if you begin to worry about something you say to yourself "I will think about this later, when I can write it down"

I found this would make the anxiety go from my mind and I carried on with my day. By the time it came to the evening I had forgotten some of the things I'd been anxious about. The ones I hadn't forgotten had to be put into 3 lists.

1. Things I can sort out myself

1. Things which are someone else's responsibility

3.Things I have little control over

For things in lists 1 and 2 you must make a date to sort out or give to someone else to sort out. So you can effectively cross them off and you don't have to think about them anymore.

List 3 is the hardest to come to terms with, but over a few weeks the counsellor was able to make me see that if I had done everything in my power to a reasonable level, I had to let those worries go. The chances of awful things happening are few and far between, so what is the point of worrying?

thankyou unadulterated and quick. i have actually thought that about the house. I will do that with positive thought too, i am going away for the day with friends and kids tomo and im trying not to stress that i will be anxious. just trying to go with it and think positive about it (get anxious doing stuff!). i went to register for cbt today and had a positive first meeting and i really think its going to be a good move for me, so thankyou everyone for encouraging me to get cbt. Its a 6 week waiting list, but im hoping it might happen quicker. my sister is being brilliant too.... i know she will read this so thank you my precious sister. I saw the dr today and he has signed me off for a month. i wonder when i will be up to the job again.

Also Quick, that idea about delaying worrying is good.