Please read, my take on anxiety and how to deal with it successfully

I want to explain how I out thought anxiety. I want to help people with anxiety because I know how ****ing bad it can get.


First off what is anxiety? What can it do to you?


Anxiety is an evolutionary reflex to danger. You feel you are in danger, you feel anxiety. This system can be triggered without warning and without any real danger in someone with an anxiety issue. Some people can't recognize they have a panic disorder, so realizing this is very important.


The opposite of fight or flight (anxiety) is rest and digest. There are most definitely ways to get your brain back into the rest and digest mindset.


The trick is discovering the opposite of anxiety. Pleasure, calmness, enjoyment. These things completely die off when you are anxious. Find triggers for these things, practice feeling good. It takes a lot of work but it isnt impossible. Gather together as many memories about feeling these things, and practice remembering them. It's best to look inwards rather than outwards, meaning you're not relying on anything external to feel better, but rather internal mechanisms as they will always be there. Eventually (unfortunately at least months at LEAST, maybe even years) these mechanisms will kick in automatically. This is called mindfulness, but it's my personal take on it. Being in the moment is another term. Anxiety is about worrying about the past or future typically, but it can come on without any clear thought patterns.


There's also "over the hump" mentality. Recognizing when you're at peak anxiety and realizing that you are already over the worst of it helps too. Recognizing you are almost over it helps you calm down and you can shorten your attacks this way. You can bring back the attack duration by bringing the anxiety to a peak and then saying to yourself that that peak has been reached and there's nothing but going back to normality now. I'm not saying you increase your anxiety during your attack, but allowing yourself to feel anxiety at it's peak and then bringing it back down.


Health anxiety is a bitch (worrying about disease/cancer/heart probs etc) because it makes everything an emergency. You have to train yourself you are not ill, and that anxiety can cause these symptoms in of itself. I cannot fully articulate how I handled this however, but I will try to (if I wrote a book).