Anixety is ruining my life

[melodydanielluna]

Anxiety is ruining my life.  So often, I am faced with intrusive thoughts (BPD and C-PTSD), and I am living in the future, playing out nightmare scenarios in my head.  99.9% of the things I worry about never happen.  I know this logically, and yet still I am plagued with fear. 

I am on an SSRI, which seemed to help for while, but now is not as effective. 

I have a daily meditation practice and I practise yoga, on average, thrice a week.  Those do help.

I really feel if I could heal this part of myself, everything would be a lot easier.

Any advice?

[Emrie]

Do you see a therapist?

[Phoebe]

Fear is when you make mistakes, so the intrusive thoughts don’t serve a purpose of preventing anything bad. And like you said 99%+ of the scenarios never happen.

So it’s not logical and completely emotional.

This means you need to get in touch with your emotions deeply, to get to the source or base of the trauma.

Meditation and yoga help the mind quiet, which is good if you want the emotions pure and without distracting thoughts.

Maybe you could try to think in a peaceful way about what caused the trauma and let any emotions rise, just to feel them without thinking?

[flowboy]

@Phoebe Excellent point.

@melodydanielluna

 

I'll record an even better one today

[ZenAlex]

On 2/11/2023 at 2:48 AM, melodydanielluna said:

Anxiety is ruining my life.  So often, I am faced with intrusive thoughts (BPD and C-PTSD), and I am living in the future, playing out nightmare scenarios in my head.  99.9% of the things I worry about never happen.  I know this logically, and yet still I am plagued with fear. 

I am on an SSRI, which seemed to help for while, but now is not as effective. 

I have a daily meditation practice and I practise yoga, on average, thrice a week.  Those do help.

I really feel if I could heal this part of myself, everything would be a lot easier.

Any advice?

What I often don't see people talking about when it comes to anxiety is diet.

Avoid -

Caffeine - ANY amount. Get rid. Get rid of caffeine for a month and see what happens.

High GI carbs/Processed sugars - Get rid of cereals, cakes, sweets, bread. Stick to Low/Mid GI carbs. The reason for this is high gi spikes your blood sugar which elevates stress chemicals. 

Alcohol - None.

If you're not eating healthy, start. Bad diet makes anxiety a lot worse.

I've heard lower carb diets can sometimes help, but for me it was more about types of carbs.

[NoSelfSelf]

First exercise is to see where your attention is going and on what, just observe as cliche as it sounds...

Edited February 16, 2023 by NoSelfSelf

[UnbornTao]

 

[Raze]

https://douglastoft.com/2021/09/08/meditating-on-fear-and-anxiety-insights-from-shinzen-young/
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVqANXVTLN4

http://happinessbeyondthought.blogspot.com/2012/05/surrendering-i-letting-go-of-suffering.html

 

[Grzegorz]

• Physical exercises are extremely beneficial. Make sure you are moving your body in addition to a healthy diet. If you are not into fitness, then start with walking, preferably in nature, so you can benefit from the biophilia effect. The longer and more exhausting it is, the more effective the relief will be. But if you never had a workout routine before, then I would suggest you start slow and gradually increase intensity. 
• Surround yourself with positive and uplifting people for as much as possible/ avoid negative people as much as possible
• Quit or at least reduce wheat, caffeine, alcohol and sugar
• Intermitted fasting can help as well
• Reduce screen time, especially before going to bed
• Make sure you get quality sleep!
• Reduce or stop watching the news 

If I could pick just one, then it would be fitness/ movement. 

There are supplements that can help with anxiety like Magnesium, Zink, Ashwaganda and CBD Oil. But I don't know if you can take these on SSRIs. 

[UnbornTao]

On 2/16/2023 at 9:17 PM, Grzegorz said:

• Physical exercises are extremely beneficial. Make sure you are moving your body in addition to a healthy diet. If you are not into fitness, then start with walking, preferably in nature, so you can benefit from the biophilia effect. The longer and more exhausting it is, the more effective the relief will be. But if you never had a workout routine before, then I would suggest you start slow and gradually increase intensity. 
• Surround yourself with positive and uplifting people for as much as possible/ avoid negative people as much as possible
• Quit or at least reduce wheat, caffeine, alcohol and sugar
• Intermitted fasting can help as well
• Reduce screen time, especially before going to bed
• Make sure you get quality sleep!
• Reduce or stop watching the news 

If I could pick just one, then it would be fitness/ movement. 

There are supplements that can help with anxiety like Magnesium, Zink, Ashwaganda and CBD Oil. But I don't know if you can take these on SSRIs. 

solid advice.

Perhaps add a vitamin D supplement.

Edited February 23, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Roy]

I've always struggled with anxiety to some degree too, it crippled my life for years to where I was just playing video games 24/7, making zero money, no friends, living with my parents.

Maybe this won't be nice to hear, perhaps it will provide some comfort - 

The way out is through.

Anxiety is anticipation of a future outcome that you deem negative or unwanted. It's quite normal to feel anxious, and it really is a good thing because it means you actually give a shit about stuff! However your current emotions now don't have a reason to map onto how you will feel 15 minutes from now when you are doing that thing. You'll only know how you feel then when it IS the current moment.

Once you are in the moment actually doing and accomplishing the thing you were anxious about, you'll notice that emotion didn't really have any weight to it in the first place. As you prove to yourself that things aren't so bad, again and again, life becomes a lot less overwhelming and more attainable.

Anxiety/fear is your brain's mechanism of pre-judging an event in order to protect you, which is great in a case where you're walking on a mountain in the dark. It's useful to feel something like that so you don't fall off , however you would agree the stakes of most things that happen in our life aren't that bad right? So what do we really get from pre-judging everything so often?

March forward into the things you want to do and brace yourself if you must, most of the time the evidence of outcomes will show you had nothing to worry about at all. 

[Grzegorz]

I forgot to mention, that there are many breathing exercises that you can do as well. A very common one is the  4-7-8 technique. Check Andrew Weil on YT. He teaches this technique. It might be worth trying.

 

[sholomar]

Keep reading personal development materials. The most helpful books for me have actually been Eckhart Tolles books The power of now and a new earth. However I've read so many books including probably six or eight of them on Leo's book list that it's hard to say which book made it click in my brain but it's finally clicking to where I shut off the part of my brain that likes to create mental scenarios and fantasies and try to resist the world and live inside my head instead of just being and accepting what is in the present moment.

I suffered from generalized anxiety disorder for more than a decade so I'm speaking from experience here. The racing heartbeat jitteriness and the like are gone though I still have some lingering bad habits I'm working on.  There's no magic pill that's going to cure you I did it without any drugs the key is changing the way you think and then getting your limbic system or subconscious mind or what Sigmund Freud would call the ID to actually believe what you're doing is correct which will lead to these moments of clarity and peace which increase over time. Until then you're going to have to learn to embrace and accept your negative emotions without letting them control your thought processes but merely learning to observe them like a scientist would be watching a zoo experiment. Then you choose to react differently and not let the emotions hijack your perspective. If you can't do that then you just sit there and observe the emotions mindfully.

I would say the book a New Earth describes the mechanisms of the ego better than any book I've come across. I've read these books in the past but it took years and years for them to finally click though. I had to be suffering badly enough to where I wanted the change badly enough to do personal development work instead of playing video games or engaging in some other activity as a distraction or simply wanting to hold on to a position because I am emotionally invested in it because I feel the cause is just or that the viewpoint is so correct. A lot of people on both the left and right engage in this activity. Most people into politics are varying degrees of neurotic. A lot of the men who are part of the manosphere who have this moral idea of how relationships are supposed to be and humans are supposed to behave also suffer from this neuroticism.  Again, just more of what Leo would call "should statements."

If you're a man I would also add that self-mastery is important that is creating good routines and habits for yourself. A dopamine detox can be quite handy. Beware that it will often make you feel worse before it makes you feel better as all that unconscious emotions come to the surface for release not to mention when you give up any addiction your body's going to generate withdraw symptoms... They might make you act and behave like a man child :-)

Everything you need to fix the anxiety is also in Leo's free video content there's so many good videos where he talks about should statements and moralizing and 40 signs that you're neurotic it's all about releasing control especially over things outside your ability to control them. Sometimes it helps to listen to this content or read a book you find that clicks with you multiple times read it a half dozen times. I've listened to some of Leo's videos eight times. I'll turn them on while driving I mostly use the mp3s.

Also, using the excuse that it simply your body's way of prejudging as a way to justify your emotional responses will not help you get rid of your anxiety. You choose if you want to break your chains and be free or not. Most people are very addicted to the content of their mind and their ego positionalities. Heck this post makes my spiritual ego look larger than Mount Everest :-). 

If you happen to have a sympathetic dominant nervous system over exercising can actually worsen the problem in the short term also. I found this article to be quite accurate. For me super low cholesterol was actually a symptom of the anxiety disorder I had cholesterols levels down around 110.  I need to emphasize though that any fix you try to make that doesn't involve changing your thoughts and perspective is merely treating the symptoms and not the cause.

https://www.holistichelp.net/blog/autonomic-nervous-system-dysfunction/

 

 

Edited February 18, 2023 by sholomar

[Eternal Unity]

@melodydanielluna

A quiet walk in nature 2 times a day. Disconnect your phone.

Or

Go with your phone and listen to my playlist on spotify:

Greg Margolis - Alchemist Tunes