General advice
I’m not sure if my definition of general anxiety is in line with the scientific one, but what I mean here is when you feel constantly anxious, even when you are not doing anything extraordinary. You might be just sitting on your bed or cooking or carrying out your usual duties at work or anything else. The point is that you know there is no reason to feel anxious, there are no stressors around, but still, you feel that your stomach is trembling, that your legs are not strong enough to keep you on your feet and that you only want to lie down in your bed, however, you know that even there you’d be facing the same uncomfortable feeling. It’s kind of a very intense feeling of stress, which becomes scary because it causes you physiological symptoms and you start questioning whether you are ok. This gives you a sense of uncertainty making you worried about your health, your future, your existence..
My experience is that these periods are usually signs of having gone through an (emotionally) intense period. This is how your body signals that you’ve reached your limits, time to sit back, evaluate the situation and change whatever needs to be changed in you or in your life.
Here are some tips on how to make these periods occur less often, or when they do, how to make them seem less scary and use them to develop yourself instead of letting them set you back.
Get stronger!
Exercise
Choose a type of sports which gives you satisfaction and do it regularly.
For me running is the one to make me feel strong and free and which gives me this heroic feeling of being able to achieve anything. Exactly the thing panic doesn’t coexist with.
I also do krav maga, which I love because being able to protect myself makes me more confident, plus it gives me the sense of belonging to a community. Also, hitting and kicking and fighting is a great way to release stress.
Find the type of sports you like doing and stick to it!
Attend therapy
Find a therapist whom you really trust and let him/her help you to deal with whatever you have to deal with.
I attend therapy every 2-3 weeks depending on the amount of thoughts accumulated in my mind. For every occasion I try to make sure I go prepared. Sometimes I collect questions I’d like to discuss, sometimes I have some new or old but weird ideas I want to talk about. And sometimes I tell my therapist in advance that this or that has been the problem lately so let’s figure out a way together how to deal with these.
For me it is absolutely vital that I trust my therapist a hundred percent. To me this means that during therapy I can say as awkward / terrible / disgusting things as I need to without being ashamed. Therapy is an occasion when I can verbalize and structure all the thoughts and emotions that affect my life at a given time and it’s immensely helpful in order to keep confusion away from my mind and my soul.
I know therapy is expensive and it requires time and effort, but believe me I would be having a very hard time if I had to think about a more useful way I could have spent that money… same for time. Nothing is as precious as a clear mind.
Dedicate time for yourself
Dedicating 5 minutes for yourself twice a day can do miracles. No fancy meditation techniques or 100% silence or empty dark rooms are needed, don’t worry. This rather means to just sit back a bit, preferably with as few distractions as possible and give yourself some time to experience how you feel, let the thousand thoughts running through your mind pass a bit, breath and acknowledge that everything’s alright.
I know it’s easy to find excuses why this is not doable, but give it a try, you might be surprised how beneficial this could be in order to keep stress out of your body and your mind.
Educate yourself about your problems
By knowing exactly what you are dealing with, what you can expect and how you can get better you’ll take back the control over your mind.
Reading psychology books has been extremely helpful for me. At the beginning I read more of those scientific textbooks to learn what I was dealing with. Even if a bit boring compared to a novel, it was really helpful to start studying my condition. This was actually the point when I realised that my condition is not just some random craziness in my mind. It has a name, lots of others have it as well, it’s been researched and there’s help. Wow, sounds way less scary than thinking things like ‘something very bad is happening to my mind’.
Read self-help books
After I felt educated enough about my condition (meaning when I got bored reading the textbooks), I started reading more of those popular self-help books with stories and different theories on how your childhood affects your behaviour, how you can change your habits, how you can live a more satisfying life… I know I know, some of these are really cheesy and have very little intellectual background. The point however is not to read everything and believe everything. It’s rather to read about topics you are curious about with a critical mindset and only taking the advice you judge could be helpful for you.
For me reading both types of books has been a great way of getting new ideas to think about, to discuss with my therapist and to draw conclusions from.
Have structure in your life
Managing your time well means more control over your life and your mind.
Arriving home after work and realising you have nowhere to be and nothing to do can get scary once you reach your limits. It will give you the ‘poor me, I’m so miserable’ feeling which can easily lead to panic attacks. Even worse if this happens during weekends. So what helped me was to set up a schedule for myself. Mondays – alone time, reading. Tuesdays – training. Wednesdays – therapy or friends. Thursdays – creative evenings. There was a time when I took this so seriously, that I even included them in my calendar to know that for this or that evening there is something scheduled, no need to worry about feeling miserable at home. Even if the scheduled item is just like ‘alone time and reading’, it’s scheduled, I’m not doing it because I have nothing better to do but I’m doing it because I scheduled for myself activities I appreciate. Then of course there’s no need to be strict about your schedule, if you actually have a better plan, go ahead, change it in your calendar. The point is not to count your minutes and become control-freaks, it’s rather to make sure you don’t end up feeling sorry for yourself for not having anything to do.
Get enough sleep
Being well-rested helps you feel more stable and strong.
I guess it varies from person to person, but I feel well-rested on the long run if on average I sleep 7.5 – 8 hours per night. This doesn’t mean that if one night I don’t get my 8-hour sleep I’ll start panicking, it means that if in a given period most of the nights I’m able to sleep at least this much, then during that period I will feel less exhausted and more balanced. However, in a bad period panic and depression sucks out so much energy from my body that during those days / weeks my sleeping needs can increase significantly.
Unfriend alcohol
While 100% abstinence is not needed, drunk nights are definitely not promoters of a balanced life. Don’t get me wrong, having fun every once in awhile can be appreciated as long as you don’t lose too much control over your everyday life. For me personally panic doesn’t happen while drinking, but the day after I really suffer. Headache and feeling sick are the worst and this suffering often leads to short panic attacks as I feel that I’m not able to control my body.
Lose something important
This one might sound somewhat strange, but here it goes. Probably many of you have been in a situation where sadness was so overwhelming that you could not focus on anything else, just to survive somehow one moment after the other. You might have lost a close relative, a friend or your other half, or had been disappointed too much… several events can cause that endless emptiness with which you are walking on the street and just don’t understand how it’s possible that people are walking around you, everyone’s life is going on somehow while you just lost everything. As if it wasn’t even you anymore, as if it was only your body taking the steps one after the other but you were nowhere in it anymore. If you have ever been this deep, you probably know what I mean. Well, the good news is that even in the dark hell of these situations, there is one positive aspect, and it’s that while you lost everything, you have nothing to be afraid anymore. You don’t need to panic or feel anxious, you only need to survive the day so that you enter into the next one, which means again the start to somehow keep existing with all the emptiness inside you. Actually these are some of those rare moments when you really experience the ‘here and now’, the true moments of mindfulness when you are somehow placed in a role with which you quasi observe your own life from the outside.
Some years ago when my heart was broken after a breakup, and from one moment to the other all my dreams were destroyed, I remember feeling this way and thinking that there was no point even in panicking, so I didn’t. And to be honest, now, from the distance and that I forgot the intensity of the pain I felt, somehow that period of my life seems the most honest, the most emotionally intense and in a way the most stable period of my life, which gave me a proudness and satisfaction like nothing else by letting me passing it with victory.
Now the point is obviously not to encourage anyone to look forward to a period of grief. The point is rather to experience these moments with the mindset that as bad as it could get, you might get something out of it, maybe a chance to learn how not to care about panic anymore, at least as long as you have more to worry about.
Very deep and interesting post! Everybody is going through these kind of moments and it is always good to know you are not alone facing up this situation.