Personal history for anyone suffering from serious anxiety:<p>Anxiety destroyed my 20s. It kept me home-bound. I rarely went out and would have attacks at the grocery store all of the time. Early on I hoped that things would come to a head and that I would eventually be immune to it, and stronger for it. But that never happened. I was afraid to seek help because I assumed they'd put me on meds that would dull my thinking. Looking back, that probably would have been fine. At every turn anxiety held me back. A stupider but freer me would have been welcome.<p>After a lot of self-analysis and experimentation I discovered that about 70% of the problem was the Pepsi I was slugging down every day. For my body, sugar and caffeine together are like crack. I switched to diet and dropped about half of my daily anxiety in a few months. I eventually cut the caffeine out altogether. Daily anxiety almost entirely dropped, with occasional spikes for stressful situations. A friend told me to look into choline. I'm not a supplements guy, but it turns out eggs have plenty so I started eating eggs every morning. I also started running which has had a huge impact on my mood. After a while I rarely had anxiety. In fact most of the anxiety was from worrying that I was going to have an anxiety attack. I'm not cured - I don't like certain situations and those can still bring out an attack. The good news is that it's now at a point where I can fight back and "be brave", which I always though would fix it but never did. That actually works most of the time now. That was just impossible in the past.<p>I used to think that caffeine was making me smarter. It was definitely giving me bursts of ideas, but ultimately it didn't give me anything I wasn't going to have already. I was abusing a drug, not thoughtfully taking a medication.<p>I basically had to become enraged at how my life was going in order to do something about it.<p>The bottom line is to never stop trying to solve it. Try the meds, exercise, diet, meditation, electroshock, whatever. Try everything until you figure it out.
Yikes.<p>>Toss aside the bath water of anxiety and you will also be tossing aside excitement, motivation, vigilance, ambition, exuberance and inspiration, to name just several of the inevitable sacrifices. Get rid of anxiety? Even if you could — and you can’t — why would you want to?<p>I would be extremely cautious with this train of thought. It is very dangerous, and by no means true.
If anyone is looking to build technologies to help quantify, then diagnose and treat anxiety, stress, and depression, we're hiring at Neumitra. I'm a neuroscientist by training and a severe family history of mental illness led me down this path.<p>hello@neumitra.com
Or you can get high: <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hallucinogens-could-ease-existential-terror" rel="nofollow">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hallucinoge...</a><p>I've found that the best way to handle anxiety to stop talking about it all the time, and just fill your mind with <i>living</i>. When HN gets in a spate of depression/anxiety discussions, it drags my mental health down.<p>It's almost enough to get me in support of the concept of Trigger Warnings.
For me, meditation beats anxiety. I meditate every day, more or less. I can skip a couple of days of meditation but then anxiety starts rising. Soon it's sitting on me 24-7. I get more and more upset and I start thinking crazy thoughts. So I meditate and the anxiety goes away.<p>I do samatha and vipassana.
From my own explorations, I've come to the conclusion that my anxious mind was a product from my parents. My dad is a fly off the handle, every small thing is a disaster. My mother is a chronic worrier.<p>It wasn't until I moved to CA where I had a chance to remove myself from it did it start to make sense.<p>Our emotional responses are learned and engrained from our earliest years. I see it in my parents when I go to visit but now that I'm aware of it I try to stay calm and grounded.
This book has not only helped me with back, neck, and shoulder pain but anxiety too.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-ebook/dp/B000SEHJOI/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1373942557&sr=1-2&keywords=divided+minds" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-ebook/dp/B000SEHJOI/r...</a><p>Turns out simple breathing exercises can lower most of my anxiety.<p><a href="http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercises.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercis...</a>
I've found it helpful to learn not to fuel thought trains. ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)[1] is helpful for that: It's basically about developing an understanding that thoughts and feelings are not real, and that they are not dangerous. A thought is the voice in your head, feelings are sensations in the body. Nothing more. It also has techniques that makes it easier to detect them.<p>By the way: Gut flora may play a role in anxiety[2], at least for some. It seems to play a role in many different mental, as well as physical, illnesses.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/dp/1590305841/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373970942&sr=8-1&keywords=happiness+trap" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/d...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx</a>
Anxiety is a naturally occurring process that has been essential to human survival. Some individuals have managed to place a completely different judgement on anxiety and we call those people thrill seekers while other individuals feel paralyzed with fear. Where one sees dread the other sees a potential for a state of euphoria. Conquering anxiety is not at all to do with removing it but with managing our perception of the experience. Embracing anxiety is not so much with accepting dread but to understand this naturally occurring system of defense and ultimately desensitizing ourselves to the dread associated with the experience.
I wasn't a normally anxious person before but 2 distinct traumatic events that happened in the last 2 years has now made me super anxious. The weird thing about anxiety is that it's like both sides of your brain are fighting for control of your body.
There's a fantastic book that may help with anxiety: Claire Weekes - Self Help For Your Nerves.<p>It teaches you how it's just a physiological response that feeds off itself.<p>Understanding this can help you to break the cycle.
In some sense anxiety is an inability to one region of the brain to tame activities of the other(s). There could be a whole set of possible causation, but the idea is quite simple - a brain is a muscle, so it could be "changed" via exercises. This is the reason why meditation works is a grossly oversimplified, naive wording.
So, yes, the way of out of chronic anxiety and anxiety disorders in general is not in medication or running away, but in contrary, go toward it and getting to know it by knowing oneself. This is how people survive on the war - by conquering extreme fear and anxiety.