Hello,
I know there are tons of articles and videos about this topic on the internet. But I think I need to interact with real people with similar struggles (feel free to share articles and videos that have helped you, though).
I’ve always had anxiety problems, even as a kid. I got diagnosed late (at 30) with ADHD, depression and social anxiety, and I started taking meds for those. The meds helped, but after a year or so I stopped taking them, mainly because I was feeling better and they were too expensive. Unfortunately the cheaper options gave me too many side effects.
I can function without the meds. But this year is being really hard on me and my wife, and my anxiety is starting to get out of control again. I’m getting some panic attacks and they make me feel like shit.
Can you share some tips on what works for you when you are feeling anxious?
Thanks a lot and wish you the best.
Honestly? I found being properly medicated for my ADHD got rid of most of my anxiety. Most of it was around executive functioning stuff - remembering the millions of day to day things. Work tomorrow, trash day, make that appointment, where’s my keys, did my alarm go off, where’s that sticky note, do the dishes, do I have a clean shirt for tomorrow, did I talk too much, did I not talk enough, do they hate me… It went on and on.
When I finally got on the correct meds, my husband pointed out that I was so much calmer. I was able to dismiss the anxiety easier when it appeared and could more easily find the root of it and see it for what it was, which made it dissipate quickly.
ADHD meds are usually inexpensive. I take a slow release in the morning and 5mg regular in the afternoon when it wears off. On weekends or days I don’t need to, I don’t take the afternoon meds.
Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth thinking about whether medicating one issue properly might have a cascading effect.
What works best for me when I’m in a panic is slow deep breaths in followed by a slow exhale. I always forgot about slowing down the exhale, but it’s really important. I started wearing a necklace that’s hollow like a straw to help when I’m too freaked out to force myself to do it.
Another tool I learned in counseling is going 5-4-3-2-1 through my senses. 5 things I can see, 4 things I can hear, 3 things I can touch, 2 things I can smell, 1 thing I can taste. You can mix up the senses if you want, and I don’t always get through the whole thing, but the act of looking for and naming things I can sense seems to help calm me down. It’s a pretty common grounding technique for disassociation.
I don’t take meds for anxiety and chiefly because the ones that aren’t controlled substances just do not work. I don’t cope well so I am the last person to have any advice. I try meditation but even that only gives me momentary relaxation. The root of the problem is honestly capitalism and the difficulty of living in a society where there is no safety net where most of us are one or two paychecks from being on the street. For people like myself that already suffer from mental illness, the present situation only makes things that much worse.
I agree 100% on capitalism being the root of the problem. Unfortunately, we live in this shitty system, so we need to adapt as best as we can. I never tried meditation, can you give me a tip on how to start? Do you use an app for it?
The guided meditations in the Headspace app are good… even just the free ones.
Sure! Check out Sarah Raymond on YouTube. She has some really good guided meditation. Here is a website that can help you find some apps. Guided meditation is much friendlier for the beginner because it is not easy. In order to have longer term positive effects it has to be done on an intense basis frequently and be mostly unguided. I used to be a member of a Zen temple when I lived in South Philly. We would do literally all day meditations once a month and 2x weekly evening meditation sessions. When I could do practice with a true Zen master was when I really felt the positive effects of it against my mental illness. It enabled me to cut back on a lot of medications to the point where I was down to only one low dose medicine called Clonodine which is a blood pressure med but also helps fight PTSD-related nightmares. I think if I had been able to continue practicing Zen long term, I would have eventually developed new pathways in the brain to at least dampen the PTSD nightmares to the point where they’re a minor bad dream.
If you find some benefit with guided meditation, then I would look to see if you have a Zen center near where you live. As an atheist, I generally appreciate Zen because it is animistic. The downside of Zen is that it is very dogmatic but it does not have beliefs in false gods. Rather Zen teaches you to embrace the impermanence of life rather than be fearful of it. The one nice thing about Zen is that it took my fear of death away and taught me to find some peace in the hear and now. I’d love to continue this discussion with you if you’d like.
While I certainly sympathize with the situation of having no safety nets, and can certainly see how that would cause additional worry… as someone who does have and rely on such safety nets, let me tell you it doesn’t magically fix anything. I’ve still had major issues for about 16 years. I know I’ll have money to live a decent but boring life and won’t end up on the streets, sure, but I can still be anxious about literally anything else.
I went the unmedicated route. I read a book that changed everything for me and taught me to think differently about my anxiety. It basically destigmatizes the idea that anxiety is a bad thing which actually made my anxiety return to manageable levels. Eventually I stopped worrying about my anxiety and things just kept getting better and better. Every now and then I’ll have a bout where I’m more anxious but I’ll just remember that it’s normal and it never escalates beyond that. I feel like I have a healthy perspective about anxiety now.
Check out the book Dare and see if it clicks with you.
I have very bad anxiety as well, and I can’t take the most common medications for it due to problems with benzo addiction. For the most part I can manage it without meds but when it becomes overwhelming what I do is cancel any plans and gtfo of where I am, and go to the gym and do strength training until my body and mind are too fatigued for me to continue worrying about nothing. This will put me in a more relaxed mood for the entire rest of the day.
I know a lot of people struggle to find the motivation to get to the gym. For me I try to see it as me owing myself the peace of mind it gives me. I don’t work out to get jacked or be healthy. I work out because it’s one of the few things that can slow my brain down.
I also have ADHD and it contributes to my anxiety when I feel like I can’t focus or be productive in the areas I need to be. I know you said “without meds” but I would consider medicating just the ADHD if you can afford it. And personally, Concerta, Ritalin and Adderall all made my anxiety worse. Vyvanse is the only medication that makes me focus without making me more anxious.
Other than that, my last and most controversial mention would be smoking marijuana or even just getting some kind of CBD if you’re particularly anxious some nights. This isn’t for everyone, and if you have problems with addiction you need to be very careful. But personally I need to be able to sometimes forcefully tell my brain “okay worry time is done now” and weed works well for that, especially if I have been to the gym earlier.
Hope you survive alright my friend.
Yeah, I need to hit the gym more. This week I managed to go only 2 times. But I agree that it helps a lot, it’s just hard to have enough energy left to go after a full day of work.
AHDH caused me a lot of trouble in the past. I blamed myself too much. Now I deal with it a lot better, knowing that it isn’t my fault, that I’m not just lazy.
Now I think my anxiety is being caused mainly from the lack of financial stability. For example, we just had a damn hurricane here in my city and the roof of my house almost went flying. I would have to sell my car to repair it. Maybe I will have to, because the climate is surely not getting better. Thoughts like this keep buzzing in my head all the time.
It sucks, there’s far too many things that are out of my control. I just need to improve my ability of dealing with them. Smoking weed helps me to forget about problems for a while, but I still need to deal with them somehow.
Man, it feels like I’m talking to myself. When I’m having a heavy work week I also tend to only go twice. I’ll tell you what I tell myself though, twice is plenty if I pick up the pace again in a week or two. And it is geniunely hard to get to the gym if you work, much harder than it is to actually do the exercises. No use beating yourself up about doing more than most people do anyway.
I’m lucky to finally be at a place where my ADHD feels truly under control, but I still get really pissed off if anyone insinuates I’m lazy or not committed to something, because like you that’s what I internalised years ago and I literally had to stop thinking that way to become productive. People throw the word lazy around too easily.
And lastly I relate so much to your anxiety. I live in Africa and I have this consistent underlying fear that something completely out of my control could kill me or rob me of my dignity. Especially with climate change becoming more serious now like you said. Obviously there’s always the risk of death anyway but I don’t want to die because of a fucking flood or a drought. And beyond that I’m really worried about stuff like my pension even though I’m fucking 24 lol. If everything goes ass up what the hell happens to my money?
It sucks man, and the common advice of “don’t worry about things out of your control” seems so cheap when these things could kill us or put us on the streets. I don’t know where to go with any of it yet, still trying to find a way to make peace with the state of things. But I will say I’m not sure if the answer is just dealing with it better, because that kind of implies that at the moment you aren’t trying hard enough, when to be frank everything might be so messed up that this state of anxiety is just normal regardless of how hard you try to deal with it. Shit is complex
My father left this city 7 years ago, because he was having constant panic attacks after some thugs tried to rob us a few times. He went to live in a small, almost dead town, where sometimes he needs to hunt and fish to have something to eat.
So I agree, this anxiety is just my body telling me I should get the fuck out of here too. But I don’t want to throw my whole life away, so I’ll keep going, one day at a time.
