Anxiety Forum

[Tia]

Just been reading some of the postings and think that whilst I only have mild symptoms compared to some people, it is still affecting my life greatly and I was hoping for some tips on how to deal with this curse! I started having panic attacks after an attempt at scuba diving. I was at 15 metres and had this overwhelming urge to get out. Heart was thumping, couldnt breathe (even though I had plenty of air) and I bolted for the surface. Anyone who dives will know this is not a good idea. After this incident I had several more attacks on dry land but this time they were brought on in rooms full of people. I was at my sons school at his options evening held in the school hall. I started sweating, feeling sick and like I am about to faint if I dont get out. The lights seem extra bright and I cant stare at the speaker as his face has gone all blurry. I have to leave for fear of passing out. Same thing in a meeting room at work the other day. We were having a money laundering presentation which I had to watch but all the time I had to keep pinching myself and fidgeting to keep myself from fainting. I kept looking at the door and thinking about what excuse I could make to go outside. I am off on holiday soon and just the thought of being on the plane makes me sick. I dont know what to do. These events are getting more and more frequent and getting worse. I have not had any specialist help yet but hoping that some of you out there who have experienced the same feelings have found a way to lessen the symptoms. Any help very much appreciated. Thanks

[matthewjames]

ok, first of all its important not to shy away from doing things if possible, the basics are that a part of you brain is over reacting to fear when it shouldnt, this can be for various reasons, without going into your personal history it might be that your brain is remembering an incident where you felt scared in an inclosed public place or something along those lines, there are many things you can try, cbt therapy, hypnotherepy, counciling, drugs, emotional freedom teknique and more, you can check them out on the net, i find exersize always helps with generally feeling happier, but everyone is differant you just have to open yourself to the possibilities and know there are many others with the same problems. hope that is some help
_________________
the dream of paris

[Tia]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. I am going to try and do more exercise and see if this helps - anything is worth a try. I will look into some of the other ideas also on the net.

[Just me]

I have just signed up for this forum tonight. My friend thought it might be good for me to try the internet since it is difficult for me to get therapy right now.
I have agoraphobia that my dr and I are trying different ways to treat. The thing is that I don't think anything is working. My husband says that it is, but to me, I feel the same. There is plenty going on in my life right now and my doctor says that anyone would feel anxiety and depression with all that is going on, but I really did not think that it would make the agoraphobia worse!
Anyone out there with insight, chime in at any time!
Right now, I only leave the house to go to work and to the market...and going to the market is not easy. I try to put it off as long as I can so that my husband can go with me. If he is with me, I can go most places.
I guess I am here to talk with other people who have this same problem. To let me know that I am not the only one who feels this way.
So, this is me...39 years old...married with 2 children...one daughter, one step daughter both the same age. One lives with us, one lives with her dad. Recently relocated to a small town to make life easier--I love it here. I am now taking Paxil (Just started tonight, switched from Celexa. I take xanax one time only at night because I am afraid of becoming hooked on it. It's only .25mg...label says to take every 6 hours but I just think that will be too much. Thats me. Nice to meet you...

[squirt]

I was in a cbt group and it has helped me immensely. If you can join one I would highly recommend it. If not there are lots of good books on cbt you could get. One of the ones we used in my group has a really good introduction to the whole process called Been there, done that? do this! by sam obitz. The tea form exercise in that book has helped me a ton and I still do them all the time when I get upset or anxious. Best of luck to you and try cbt one way or the other smile

[sameBoat]

i agree with mathewjames, that you shouldnt shy away from things. I find that if i dont do something by giving in to the fear, then it will be twice as bad next time because you build up an association based on your fear of it. the fear is not real, but the association you create of not doing something because you are 'scared' means your brain remembers and tries to adjust by making you scared to do it thinking that it is helping you remember not to do it for some reason. wierd hey.

BUt please dont take drugs. i think it is a real last resort. i have had major anxiety for 15 years and i have controlled it well on and off ov erthat time and mainly i have controlled it.

i went to a cognitive behaviour specialist. dont see your doctor over a therapist. doctors dont really know how to treat it and prescribe drugs almost every time and its all money for them. go see a anxiety therapist (same cost) and get some cognitive therapy and talk to them about all your symptoms. the other way ideal with the fear is to ride it out and to say "bring it on!" and become friends with the fear. basically you are afraid of dying. all fear is based on that (i believe). cos whats the worst that can happen ? you can die..right? so if you try and focus on becoming ok with dying as you will have to throughout your life anyway, you may be ok with fear.

fear is not the opposite to calmness as some religious people believe there is god on one side and the devil on the other ( i know a lot of people like this, the religion will go nameless for respect for them) but it is not black and white and nor should you decide this. fear is your friend. it is your brain trying to help you. you just have to decide to accept the fear, accept the symptoms and every time you do your activity, have the symptos, hold on tight and walk with them til they subside, it gets easier everytime and dramatically too, luckily. sometimes you only haev to do the activity once and you are cured. but you'll never get to that if you do it

1. on drugs
2. by backing out

i understand backing out cos i was the king of that, so, no offence, but in time, train yourself to go and befriend your fear. it is not a dark creature, it is your stupid little friend.

and another thing, when you beat one type of fear it kind of kills all the rest cos they are all one fear that shapechange into others. so a fear of heights is the same as a fear of crowds. same origin, different face.

i advised not to use drugs because they dont help your thoughts and triggers, they only mask the symptoms. it seems that everyone on these forums from america immediately tell each other what drugs are best ..but you know, everyone writes back depressed cos they drugs give them side effects or make the anxiety worse.

bottom line is that the fear stems from your thoughts and them becomes physical. the best way to combat it is to :

1. accept it
2 befriend it
3. use cognitive skills (natural)
4. do the things you fear and feel the symptoms
5. practice emptying your mind by putting your thoughts on an elevator and pushing them through the top of your head every breath out.

good luck, sorry this post is harsh but it is real and true.

- sameBoat

[squirt]

Good advice sameboat. Tia I hope you are giving cbt a try!

[conceptcanibal]

Yes yes yes! CBT is the main main main thing that will help you! If you don't have to be on drugs, don't do it. If you do need drugs, don't do it unless you're doing the therapy. There is no real reasoning behind just taking drugs and hoping they will make you better. I currently am taking a mild antidepresent, but going to very intense therapy treatments. I don't think drugs are ever the answer, ESPECIALLY the ones that are basically tranquilzers for anxiety. Whomever said that drugs mask the pain ( I believe it was sameboat) was completely right on. I take the anti depressant for depression, not for anxiety. The anxiety is a completely separate topic, and yes it causes me to be depressed... but the anti-depressants aren't the cure. they only make me alittle more hopeful, and therefore more apt to go outside and conqure the anxiety with coping mechanisms that I've learned through CBT (such as accepting the fear, another sameboat quote) and learning to befriend it instead of pushing it away.

[sameBoat]

The last two posts had some useful and insightful comments. Looking back on my post I realised I was being a bit too judgemental about drugs as a therapy, and I guess if I could re-phrase what I said, I would say, that drugs are fine to start out with as an interim therapy measure but it would be more beneficial to switch to natural therapies asap. Natural therapies last longer, are more strong in results and have no side effects. They get right to the heart of the problem and replace it with real life skills that are easily applied to combat any level of anxiety.

In case anyone is reading this without knowing what CBT stands for, it is "Cognitive Behaviour Therapy"

If anyone is looking for an amazing cognitive therapist in Perth, Western Australia, then I can give you her name and contact details.

Conceptcanibal, although I feel for you having to deal with anxiety and depression, it sounds like you have all that it takes to beat them both as you sound very open minded and positive towards natural healing therapy. Two of the best attitudes to combatting the symptoms. I dont know much about depression so I cant comment on drugs realted to depression. My friend suffers from it and is on medication and is a lot better off too. I think the way you are going about your therapy and medication combination is a great idea and I admire you for dealing with it all so well.

[squirt]

[sameBoat]

test

[sameBoat]

Hi again,

I just came back from a plane trip across to the east coast of Australia (I live on the west coast), and I thought I'd write about the 3 ways I can think of dealing with anxiety and also quickly describe my experience.

The first thing I want to point out is that, before anyone thinks 'oh I wish I could go on a plane and be able to do what he has done' I need to point out that I have been dealing with my anxiety for about 13 years now. I have had major setbacks and some major accomplishments. I have found that on the whole, life has been very difficult as you can imagine but from time to time I get so sick of being controlled by fear and anxiety that I get angry and go and do something that normally would make me feel anxious just to feel like I am still alive and not a broken puppet on a string. I love my freedom and I despise being controlled and manipulated especially by things that don't make sense like anxiety, fear, agrophobia etc (all things that I suffer from).

This leads me to my 4 ways to deal with anxiety. This is only my opinion btw.

1/ CBT - Cognitive Behaviour Therapy : I got this type of therapy from an anxiety therapist and it works very very well. It is simple in that it is a way of planning out on paper and in your mind what could go wrong, how you feel about it, and when you finally do it, you write down what actually happened and you often find that you were over exaggerating and fearing an outcome that never arose. There is more to CBT as it can also branch into REM Rapid Eye Movement therapy and Event Emotion Analysis.

2/ Meditation : This is kickass. If you learn to meditate, you will not only increase your chance of controlling your anxiety by a huge amount, but the rest of your life will be a breeze too. I am really bad with routine, so I lapse from practicing meditation every morning but when I do it, that whole day is easy and calm and good things always come to me. If bad things arise, they just seem trivial and it seems easy to find a good solution. I believe meditation is always going to be the one thing that saves the world. If all the people in power practiced it, we would never have any problems. Daily meditation makes you think slowly and clearly and disolves the need for greed and ego inflation because it aligns you with the spirit and not the mind.

Meditation calms the mind which stops the immediate flow of adrenaline and anxiety that we normally feel as agoraphics. So, before I get on a plane or go into a crowd or whatever makes me panic, I do 5 mins of meditation and I can deal with any situation. I recomend learning it as the first way to combat anxiety. It will be the one skill you can rely on everytime to help you through. Meditation is not just crossing your legs awkardly and repeating strange mantras. That is the entertainment industry mocking the one thing that can stop you using your destructive mind and using your calming all-knowing spirit. If people used their instinct and spirit in their daily lives and not their minds, then there would be less mass consumers and ego and the whole economic structure would come tumbling down as people became self enpowering and free. Corporations and industries can't allow this, so they mock meditation by making it look unaccessible to average joes like me and you. They make it look like it is only for monks and rich people in white on the beach. NOT TRUE. It is as simple as quietening the mind for 20 mins every day. That's it !! So i recommend learning and also reading Eckhart Tolle's books on the power of now. It is spot on with how to quieten the mind (which is an anxiety ridden persons main problem).

3/ Doing it : This means, to get out there and do whatever scares you. Then you might think 'but it scares me and makes me feel wierd and I feel like I am going to die and my head is spinning etc etc'. Yes true, but at the end of the day, what are you scared of ? I reckon that it is the fear of dying that scares us. Becasue what is the end result? Death. So, for me, whenever I am on a plane or away from home and I start getting symptoms, I just replace my stupid questioning, scared, 100 miles and hour thinking bad thoughts mind, with nothing (by meditating or thinking of nothing) and then when I am not thinking, I think to myself 'I would rather be dead than to have to put up with being a slave to my anxiety anyway, so what is the worst that can happen? If I live in anxiety, then I am not living any sort of quality of life and if I go and do the things I fear, then I am atleast going to die with my boots on.

And you know what? You can't die from anxiety. It's impossible. No one ever has. Maybe they have from depression of it but never from an attack of anxiety. So, when I was on the East Coast and I felt my symptoms coming on, I stopped (i was in a car on a mountain drive), closed my eyes, relaxed (using meditation techniques) and everytime a thought came into my mind I put it on an elevator in my mind and sent it through the top of my head and out into the air so it can go away to a higher place to become love or whatever, then i did this for 30 seconds, then I thought "man, i am so far from home BUT this is only a fact, it doesn't need to be a stimulus for anxiety. so what if i am far from home. what is home?

if i move house i feel comfortable in the new home after a week or so and i forget that the other home that i left was my safe place. so that means that it is not the house that is my comfort zone, it is my mind. so in fact, my comfort place is where ever i am right now. it doesnt feel that way right now but neither did my new house until after about a few days or a week. i need time to settle into this new place. but i have been in my mind for 34 years. that is long enough to feel comfortable in. so i call my mind my safe place now." then i think, "so what if i feel uncomforatble and panicy right now.

it can't alst forever. even if i get the full blown effect of it and i feel flippn horrible for the next however long, it will be replaced by calmness soon as my mind gives my ceratonin." the brain can't endure long periods of anxiety at a high level, so i know that i will calm down naturally soon enough. then i think, "my main feeling is that i have to get somewhere comfortable but that pace is 3500 km's away west. how can i do that? oh no i'll never get there in the next few minutes. oh no panic i need to get to my safe place at home. but it is too far, oh no.......etc STOP ! wrong. the safe place is an illusion. a pysical place can't make you safe. it may FEEL that way, but it is ultimately your mind that is making you feel safe in that place due to association that you give it.

You spend most of your time at home and all your things are there and you are not looked at by the public in there, so you naturally associate it as a home base or safety zone. i mean, to your mind, it is much more acceptable to die at home than in a town square with people watching you as you make funny faces and pee your pants. And that is what the mind fears believe it or not. So, anyway, I think to myself (while i am on the mountain drive) my safe place is in my head and if i die right here right now, then that is ok. it is not my fault if i die. i died trying to free myself from anxiety and that is honerable and human. and if i am too scared to get down from this mountain, then i will sleep here and live here til i feel comfortable enough to come down. and by the way, i would rather die than have to be a slave to my anxiety anyway, so lets do it.

Then i think about how it doesnt matter where i am on the planet anyway because if you look at the world from outter space the distance between my house on the west and where i am now is nothing compared to the distance from outter space to the earth. and if you look at the world from way way way outter space, then the world is a pin prick and you cant even distinguish the distance between my home on the west and where i am on the east anyway. so distance is relative. and relativity is a concept of the mind. so it all comes down to my mind and how i wish to use it.

4/ drugs: i dont use drugs and never have. i have my own valid reasons for not using them but they don't need to be discussed here. I won't comment on drugs as a medication because i know they help some people get by when all else fails. i would like to say, though, that meditation and just giving in to the fear and letting life do as it will to you without your resistance is the ultimate weapon against anxiety. non-resistance and acceptance and calmness and confrontation is a sure fire way to walk hand in hand with anxiety. If a person hates you and you hate them back, you will have an on going war with them for all of time. If someone hates you and you talk to them, work out what is the problem, relate to them, understand them, be compassionate for them and their response to hate, then you wil befriend them and form an awesome power together as a connected entity that went from evil to light and goodness.

Thats my comments on my vaction and I hope it helps someone. It helps me to write about it, so thank you for this forum.

We are all doing very well in our own way and anxiety is a massive burdon to carry. I feel for everyone with this condition and know that the only way through it is to have positive outcomes from success. so: give in to it and let it take you where it must. life is giving you anxiety to teach you about yourself in a way you never would have found. let it do it's job. it will NOT kill you, i promise. don't resisit. give up your life for it and be willing to let it take you whereever it wants. become its friend by giving in to it. it will lead you to a better place you never would have got to before.

Believe it or not we are given a gift that, when befriended and confronted, can make us more successful and alive than anyone without anxiety issues. Big burden if not dealt with, but a massive reward when accepted. Its like going to the casino. Most people are restricted to the small betting table. They bet and make 100 dollars at the end of the night. Us anxiety people are allowed to bet on the high stakes table (big burden) and at the end of the night, if we risk our money, we can walk away with 100,000 dollars (bigger reward). But if we don’t risk and we stay a victim to the fear by not befriending it, we will never see the reward.


x sameboat

[Suz]

[sameBoat]

Thanks SUZ,

When I read back on my posts I always feel like they read a little full-on, and i chuckle because of their intensity. But when writing them, I get carried away with wanting to tell everyone everthing I know about anxiety and try to explain every detail so that someone might pick up a part of it and use that part to help themselves. I haven't completely overcome my anxiety yet, and I wish we could all form a big group and overcome it as a whole. I hate to think there are other people out there feeling miserable or restricted.
I think one day, I'd love to do a test where someone from either my country (Australia) or another country, meet me half way at a place in the world where we have a holiday and overcome the anxiety together as a team. I think that would be awesome. Kind of like 2 superheroes risking everything to stop anxiety once and for all. haha.

anyway, thanks for your reply SUZ.

p.s. My brother is a meditation teacher in Los Angeles. I can give you his contact if you want, if anyone is in that area and needs to learn from a young australian/american who understands my anxiety and is very compassionate and skilled.

Thanks,

James

[squirt]