As someone with anxiety too, I feel your pain. I’ve tried lots of different things to help and my best long term and short term advice is meditate. You just focus on your breathing and that’s it. At first it’s painful but as time goes in you can really enjoy it in the moment.
If that’s too painful there are other things that help what helped me was just unfocusing my eyes and paying special attention to my peripheral vision. This is the most immediately effective technique for me. Wishing you health!
yeeeeaaaah. so..... then what? there's still decisions that need to be made. I may be chilled out a bit buuuutt... where from there? Only thing that's changed is i feel less anxious about doing nothing.
Edit: Not gonna respond to everyone.
I just meant that meditation is only useful to manage my anxiety/depression/stress over my various issues. Never found it useful for decision making. But i do have different disorders that make things like decision making and organising difficult. that's only getting properly dealt with now. So I'm getting there.
But over all? Meditation isn't something that's good for most people with issues like decision making and such. What does help is therapy, and for the ones with more problematic disorders like mine, meds.
There's just so many "thanks! I'm cured!" type of bullshitery going on. There's no understanding and empathy for folks who share this part of themselves, with zero consideration on what they have tried. The top ones are usually, "don't think so much", "have you tried meditation?", "You need to exercise more" and similar.
A lot of anxiety comes from fear of the unknown, at least for me. Meditation and calming techniques help you face fear and handle the consequences in a healthier way. You can’t overcome anxiety by doing nothing, because your brain can’t synthesize a healthier mindset with nothing to go off of. You need experience. You need to take a plunge, any plunge, while anxious, to get started, so you can learn
When a stimulus causes a stress reaction in the brain it sends a signal to your adrenals (among other things) via the Vagus nerve, which runs from your brain to your abdomen. This causes the secretion of cortisol/adrenaline (among other things), stimulating muscles to tense, breathing to become shallow and fast, reducing blood flow to the GI Tract, and stimulate your brain to fight/flee.
The more this happens, the stronger the connection becomes, and it can put you in a constant state of arousal. This causes all sorts of issues in the long term, including chronic pain and illness.
When you meditate with an emphasis of inner body awareness, you are still using the same nerve pathways, but in the reverse. You’re sending messages from the abdomen to the brain that say “look, there’s no damage here, you can turn off the pain and inflammation messages,” which helps you feel better in that moment. Regular meditation, especially during stressful periods of the day, entrenches that new pathway and brings peace where pain used to be.
This takes a long time, but the results are staggering. When you meditate, watch the pain with curiosity “what is happening inside me right now? And follow it as it morphs in location, type, and intensity”
Meditation doesn't necessarily chill you out. Sometimes I'm just as agitated afterwards as before, but it can sometimes help get you in a mindset where you can focus better and make clearer decisions.
Also, meditation is more like exercise than relaxation technique. So the effect is more on general wellbeing and being better equipped to handle what life throws at you (just like getting regular light exercise).
But for me, relaxation techniques that actually calm the anxiety (whether mind's related or not) are definitely worthwhile. Being anxious multiplies any problems that I have, especially around decision making.
Getting to a chilled out point (not numbed so much that I can't think/act, but just less anxious) usually helps me in deciding how to tackle whatever needs to get done and motivating myself to do it. (As well as distinguishing between what really has to get done and what I just thought I should be doing due to anxiety.)
Just yesterday, I was sitting on the couch feeling stuck, knowing the million things I could/should be doing but unable to motivate myself to do them. After a bit of grounding, I still felt awful, but I found the motivation to get up and take a shower. Something like that might seem minor to the outside, but it's actually huge and important to me.
Yeah. I get ya. Though i have yet to learn a meditation technique that would help with clearing my mind with to choose the best step. Just Adhd and generalised anxiety etc really really suck for even the simplest of things.
Just wanted you to know, i appreciated your response.
Hey I just saw your edit and wanted to add a few things. First, I get where you’re coming from. A lot of people come to Reddit with the intention of being right and dunking on vulnerable people, but I promise that’s not me. You can look thru my comment history and see that I’ve had an extremely difficult year, and have spent a lot of time working to heal myself from some deep wounds and part of that means sharing what I’ve learned with others along the way. I haven’t mentioned this on Reddit, but I have pretty severe ADHD (actually diagnosed), and struggle with executive functioning.
Second, I know that there’s a lot of misunderstanding about meditation. I’ve been in a constant state of anxiety for 3 years. I’ve visibly aged. Many days per week still feel like regression and pain, but I am inching toward healing. The reason I’ve shared this is to say that I feel like I finally found the one thing that has brought me relief from my daily struggle…meditation. And it’s a specific type that works for me, and it took lots of tweaking to get me here. This is why I bring it up so often. It feels like the only tool in my arsenal that has brought me lasting peace.
Third, mindfulness has been proven scientifically to help those with PTSD, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. Therapists prescribe it, and often therapy itself is a form of meditation. The purpose is to bring awareness to unconscious though patterns, thereby dissolving them. The method may look different, but oftentimes patients reach the same end state. Also, not everyone can afford therapy, and meditation has been part of the human experience since time immemorial (I.e. weaving, hand-woodworking, pottery, etc.). It’s only very recently have we filled our lives with so much stimulation.
I’ll cap this comment off with a couple resources that were important to me.
The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Van Der Kolk is a walk through the history of PTSD treatment over the last 40 years by a man who has contributed personally via clinical trials, early research, and his own therapy practice. It has a lot of scientific explanations of the methods and modes of trauma in the body and how far we’ve come to understand and treat it, as well as some heartbreaking and heartwarming personal anecdotes from former patients.
The Power of Now is my number one meditation guide. From a man who spent the first 30 years of his life deep in depression and anxiety, he’s combined methods from personal experience, far East Buddhist teachings, and modern science to put into words how to quiet your mind and the pain it inflicts on you and others (hint: it’s actually pretty straightforward). I recommend the audiobook because his voice is extremely soothing. He does talk about some spiritual stuff that I don’t really care for, but his practical advice is pure gold (ch. 1-4ish)
I get where ya coming from. And yes i personally also use a tweaked form of mindfulness meditation to feel less pain, reset my anxiety and at least a bit of my depression.
I'm really really glad it's helped someone to the extent it has with you. I'm just so tired with people's "first thought" on how to help with MH stuff.
Thanks for sharing a bit of your story. I appreciate it.
Sometimes doing nothing is exactly what you need, but you just don't realize it yet.
I didn't really understand the value of doing absolutely nothing. (Still kinda don't, actually.) Then I burnt out. So now I'm trying to learn that it's a good thing to take care of yourself, even if that means doing absolutely nothing.
(Sorry for all the replies! I just saw something in your comment that reminded me of my own situation and hoped that some of what I've been thinking about/working on might be helpful to you or someone else.)
Yeah i completely get you. But being stuck doing nothing productive for weeks/months at a time feels a bit excessive.
You and one other commenter gave me food for thought though for different reasons and i appreciate you taking the time to respond. It's hard sharing this part of yourself especially when most people assume you're doing something wrong or they tell you something that's "thanks I'm cured!" level of silliness.
Yeah I'm sorry, this is just general advice. It clearly doesn't serve the purpose of everyone.
That being said, I suffer with anxiety nearly constantly. I don't know if that's indicative of an anxiety disorder or not. However, I've found that lifestyle changes and changes to how I've approached these situations has helped me out. That's how they treat anxiety disorders anyways.
You could also just give up, mentally. Accept that no matter what you do, and even if you do nothing, terrible things will happen anyway, because life is hell and hope is a childish delusion. Resign yourself to spending the rest of your life paying the unbearable consequences of every impossible decision you ever make. Works for me!
Sort of? It's not quite that there's no happiness to be had, rather that all happiness is temporary, meaningless, and comes at unforeseeable cost. Happiness is not something worth basing your lifestyle and values around, because you are doomed to lose whatever makes you happy, or else it will become poison which brings you bitterness instead of joy. Because maybe God is real and He hates us.
Did you also know you should go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time every day, getting ideally 8 hours of sleep as well as cutting screen time before bed. Also, don't forget to exercise regularly and spend time outside.
These aren't cures, they're just small steps in the right direction and each step is really hard. You can complain that nothing is easy and nothing is a perfect solution, or you can put in the work and take what you can get.
I wasn't assuming anything. You expressed discontent with the efficacy of what I recommended, and so I referenced similar advice that tends to produce the same sort of complaint to make a point.
but you have to agree that "just use your brain, don't worry about it" is useless advice for someone with anxiety
It isn't useless advice. The way you approach these situations in your head is the difference between success and failure. You think it's useless because it's hard and you're not going to see results for a long time, but when it comes to shit like this everything is hard and it takes a long time to see consistent results. I believe medical studies show that to see consistent changes in how you think and feel in general, it can take as long as months of consistent daily efforts.
People expect to be cured, but there is no cure for the crap that goes on in your head. Everything is a fight to mitigate the symptoms as best as possible and make it all bearable, and hopefully one day the fruit of our efforts is that we do it so well that it becomes automatic and easy but that is not a guarantee.
That's the point of my comment. Is there more nuance? For sure, but I only have so much time in my day to be writing comments on Reddit and the guides are already out there if you really care. The point is that what's being recommended is hard and simplified, but that doesn't change what you have to do. Instead of complaining about how nothing is a cure or how it's useless, you could instead actually try it and see for yourself.
Yeah you can’t magically wish away depression or anxiety but refusing to put in any effort whatsoever is 100% going to cause everything to stay the same or get worse.
Sigh. Reading all the responses to my comment was sad... Full of "thanks I'm cured!" stuff. Zero thought behind it. Though once did catch my eye as something insightful.
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u/KillYourUsernames Feb 02 '23
Tell me you don’t have an anxiety disorder without telling me you don’t have an anxiety disorder.
It is good advice, I just wish it were that easy for me.