A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.
This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.
You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.
People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.
In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.
Therefore, I present to you:
THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS
–Go on a walk
–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.
–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching
–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind
–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift
–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:
–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.
–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.
–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.
–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)
–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.
–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.
–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:
–List the capitals of all the U.S. states
–List the capitals of all the European countries
–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.
–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.
–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.
Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.
(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)
This would’ve been great an hour ago
If your anxiety includes rapid heartbeat for no reason then it may help to exercise! It helps for me because I’m focused on whatever moves I’m doing and breathing, and it gives my heart rate a reason to be that high so that I can start the slow cooking down process and (hopefully) bring that heart rate down with it. Look up a quick cardio workout on YouTube or something and just do it in your room!
This is so, SO true.
All ‘doing something relaxing’ ever did for me was give my brain MORE free time to FREAK THE FUCK OUT.
I like how this boil down to grabbing something then tell the brains weasels to GO FETCH YOU PIECES OF SHIT
This week’s current issue in mental health: the price of medication. With numerous people sharing stories about how medication was the first step when they were getting help, we wanted to point out how the cost of these treatments is prohibitive especially for people without insurance.
Wait , over 500 dollars for propananolol?! I got that for free? What is wrong with your country?!
[Image: Screencap from the above website; you can click through to read the whole thing, but I’m going to copy-paste this same bit because it answers so many questions in my life – mostly related to “Why am I crying about this?”]
Rejection sensitive dysphoria
(RSD) is an extreme emotional sensitivity and emotional pain triggered
by the perception – not necessarily the reality – that a person has been
rejected, teased, or criticized by important people in their life. RSD
may also be triggered by a sense of failure, or falling short – failing
to meet either their own high standards or others’ expectations.
Dysphoria is Greek for “difficult to bear.” It’s not that people with
ADHD are wimps, or weak; it’s that the emotional response hurts them
much more than it does people without the condition.
When this emotional response is internalized, it can
imitate full, major depression complete with suicidal ideation. The
sudden change from feeling perfectly fine to feeling depressed that
results from RSD is often misdiagnosed as rapid cycling bipolar
disorder.
It can take a long time for physicians to recognize that these symptoms
are caused by the sudden emotional changes associated with ADHD and
rejection sensitivity, while all other object relations are totally
normal.
When this emotional response is externalized, it looks
like an impressive, instantaneous rage at the person or situation
responsible for causing the pain. 50% of people who are assigned
court-mandated anger-management treatment have previously unrecognized
ADHD.
Capslock translation from above: “Wow Im so glad my doctor told me about this” said none of us ever
One more reblog for the road. I’ve seen at least eight people go “There’s a name for this?” as a result of sharing this link, and I want to try and reach even more. It’s so meaningful to me to know that there’s something going on, and that it’s not just me being inadequate at dealing with my emotions. When you consider the level of horror I feel over even minor screwups, my reactions are completely understandable. My feelings are valid.
For anyone else out there who cries over spilled milk, or at the drop of a hat? This might be worth a read.
This is your irregular reminder that Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria Is A (terrible, horrible, no good, very bad) Thing.
Alternately, this is your notice that There’s A Name For That Horrible Experience.
Support to all of my fellow ADHD-ers out there; RSD is made of terrible.
Oh look, it me.
Well huh. Have to say, definitely experienced this when I was younger. And had a good handle on things for years. And it’s now a thing again. I’m going to need to start a list for when I get to seeing someone about getting a handle on it all again.
“So doc, here’s a list of things that sound WAYTO FAMILIAR and we should probably keep that in mind as we go forward…”
am i the only person not affected by generalized positivity… like post it notes in bathrooms that say ‘you’re beautiful’ or posts that are like ‘smile! you are a beautiful sunshine flower!’ i’m just like … okay…
I just heard a psychologist (Guy Winch) say that the people that positive affirmations help most are actually the people who have high or at least normal self-esteem. They really do cheer those people up!
But for the rest of us they run so counter to our general worldview (we’re fundamentally bad and deserve nothing) that our brain rejects them immediately as lies and uses that moment to remind us of how terrible and abnormal we actually are.
What usually works for people with low self-esteem is stuff like writing out a list of very specific things we know we’re good at, and revisiting it every day to write a paragraph elaborating on one of those things (i.e. “I’m a compassionate person and here are five examples”) to try to set our brain on a different track long term.
That makes so much sense.
the psychology behind the “ok that sounds fake but ok” meme
Holy crap
I got really curious about this so I decided to dive into
the literature! I’ll summarize what I
dug up below.
Very, very short version: yes, self-esteem can affect the way affirmations affect you, but most specifically the TYPE of affirmations that affect you.
(This is mostly from McQueen & Klein 2006, a review of
current experiments involving manipulations of self-affirmation. Stone &
Cooper 2003 is probably the second most relevant to this topic, as it looks at
how self-esteem affects different styles of self-affirmations.)
In sum:
-People have an inherent need to maintain an overall
positive self-evaluation.
-When someone’s sense of self (identity) is attacked they
experience psychological discomfort (dissonance, dysphoria).
-People employ a variety of strategies to reduce this
discomfort, including distancing themself from the person or information
causing the dissonance, minimizing its importance, seeking or interpreting
situations to enhance self-view (self-inflation, can be an unhealthy coping
response—for example, downward social comparisons), or self-affirmation in
other areas to restore “global” (overall) self-image.
-This last area gets a lot of interest and research because
there is a lot of evidence that people become more receptive to challenging ideas
(that may damage sense of self) when self-affirmation is used to maintain
global self-image.
-tl;dr, if you want people to be able to accept challenging information
like “a thing you do is racist” “that activity you like is dangerous/unhealthy”
“that habit of yours is destructive to yourself or others” you need to help
them disarm the instinctive mechanisms that exist to help them defend their
sense of self from the trauma of psychological attacks. This can be done by helping maintain their “global”
sense of themselves when one aspect is being challenged.
-Self-affirmation can serve as a buffer or coping resource when “self” is threatened by reducing cognitive discomfort and dissonance (dysphoria).
-This affirmation does not have to directly relate to the challenged area (and, in fact, for many people--and particularly people with low self esteem–will work better if it doesn’t).
I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else.
Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different.
I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year.
So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them.
I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated.
It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching.
And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition.
Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier.
Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time.
never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.
find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.
talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore
picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else
if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.
… 8|
That’s some pretty good advice. I don’t know what’s left of my humor after ‘guess I’ll just die’ jokes but it’s worth a shot.
Personally i went from “guess I’ll die” jokes to “IF I HAVE TO BE HERE FOR 5 MORE MINUTES I PROMISE YOU I WILL BUY JUST, AN ARRAY OF CLOTHES.” and other wild hyperbolic stuff. Just replace the death part with something ridiculous and off topic. Its very entertaining
This also works with calling myself things like stupid, worthless, trash, etc. Even if you do this jokingly to yourself, your brain still believes it, and keeps up the cycle. Seriously, I found that when I stopped saying these things about myself, even jokingly, it made a massive difference.
Here’s a tip I picked up from a friend that’s helped me a lot — replace self deprecating jokes with ironically self aggrandizing jokes
Like every time I trip and fall, instead of saying “l’m just a disaster human” I say “I’m the epitome of grace and beauty”
Or like, when I draw a picture I’m not 100% happy with, instead of saying “my art is trash” I say something like “you know I think it’s time we replaced the Mona Lisa”
When you do that you get to make a joke, but you’re ALSO getting practice building yourself up, y’know?
And eventually it becomes a reflex and you get so used to it that you can say nice stuff about yourself even when you AREN’T joking
Hello, everyone. I feel very ashamed right now, but I need your help. I’m going to talk about my situation and it involves triggering subjects which are tagged accordingly, so don’t risk your safety and jump straight to the end of the post if you feel like you can’t read it.
I don’t talk about those things, because it was my fault and I feel like bringing it up is disrespectful to many people who have it way worst than me. But here it is. Hi, I’m Mako. I’m a 20, French, and a student. When I was 13, I was raped by a 21 yo man who I had never met before. In July of this year, I was raped again by someone I knew, trusted, and told the story of my first rape to. I’m in a very bad place. I’ve been self-harming for almost a year, and it has gotten really bad. I have a physical disability in my ankle for which I’m prescribed daily doses of morphine. The medication, though having a huge impact on my chronic pain and thus, being a big relief, also makes me paranoid and anxious. Since July, I’m thinking every day about killing myself.
I used to have dreams and hopes. I’m a sound engineer student and I love my studies. But right now, I’m in no place to take care of myself, and though I sometimes get out of this mindset (enough to write this post, for instance), I’m at risk every day. I don’t want my life to end like this, but I know if this keeps going, I’ll end my life soon.
Therapy in France is very expensive. I can’t work because of my disability and my scholarship only covers living expenses. My parents make less money than I do. There’s no one I can ask for help.
I’m very uncomfortable with asking for donations. I don’t feel like I deserve that. But I’m an artist and a writer, and I’m absolutely willing to draw or write anything you want if you can help me a little. I have an art commission page here and this is my art tag. You can find my writing on AO3 and I’ll take ko-fi commissions for writing. Each coffee will get you 500 words of any pairing, any prompt.
I just need enough to cover a couple of sessions because due to my age and disability, if the therapist judges I’m a danger to myself, I can have access to free therapy for youth. But I need to pay for those first sessions and I don’t have the money, not if I want to eat every day or afford my pain medication.
If you don’t want to commission me but still want to help me, here is my paypal: tear.skydust@gmail.com
Thank you. I know a lot of you guys, or follow you from afar, and know that you’ve all helped me over the past few months, just by being awesome. But I can’t keep living this life. I need help.
If yall can spare some change they’re an utter, utter sweetheart. Please do consider helping them out if you can.
wupacing 