r/Anxiety

I won't bore you with the details. I was extremely unwell for years, 24/7 disgusting anxiety (to the point that an actual panic attack felt like a relief because my baseline was so much worse), every physical symptom imaginable, DPDR, flashbacks from a traumatic event, looping intrusive thoughts. During these years I only felt a few minutes of peace a day, and sometimes not even that. I was living in hell - and now I don't struggle with anxiety at all and am quite happy! What helped me is what everyone is always talking about - acceptance.

At one point I realised that the stuff that I'm doing to help myself (reading books and watching videos about anxiety, trying different techinques to get rid of my intrusive thoughts, talking to everyone about how I feel, reading Reddit posts etc.) is not working and that I'm only getting worse and worse. So I said fuck it. It's been years, I'm bored of always being focused on myself, my anxiety and my thoughts. It's selfish, unimaginative, repetitive and I'm sick of it. I don't care anymore about how I feel. If I'm meant to feel like shit for the rest of my life, so be it. I don't give a fuck anymore. Whatever will be, will be. If I'm meant to get ill, die, become an alcoholic, homeless, unemployed, alone, ridiculed, crazy etc. (my worst fears that I was always worrying about) so be it. Such is the fate of some unlucky people, maybe I'm one of them, and why not? I'm not better, I'm not special, I'm not above illness, homelessness, addiction, mental illness. If that's my fate so be it, there's nothing I can do about it. I let go.

I stopped obsessing over my thoughts and feelings and focused more on my body. I treated myself like an abused animal that needs healing - long warm baths, massages, naps, healthy food, stretching, socialisation, walks, lying on the grass. I stopped trying to solve my feelings by thinking about them, reading about them or writing about them, I just let them wash over me over and over again, no matter how scary or disgusting they were. I started talking to myself like I'd talk to a friend. I started dancing, singing, laughing, telling people how much I love them. I realised how much I'd neglected my fellow humans during the years I struggled with anxiety. I took on more responsibility with domestic chores and other errands. I also started talking to strangers again, a habit that I once loved but that was annihilated by depression and anxiety. I finally started doing the things I always wanted to do - I joined a painting class, I started singing in a choir and playing piano again. I stopped doomscrolling so much and went back to reading difficult books, learning new things, watching good movies and spending time with people. I felt like shit through all of that and I still did it beacuse I realised that how I feel is not that important. There are sooo many things that are more important than my thoughts and feelings!

I didn't do any of that to get rid of anxiety because at that point I truely accepted that it may stay with me for the rest of my life and I genuinely didn't care anymore. I didn't expect these things to fix my anxiety or symptoms. I did them out of love and respect for myself and others, I did it beacause that's how a human being is supposed to live and take care of herself and her loved ones, I did it because it's healthy and good for my brain and body, I did it because what else is there to do? Spend my life obsessing over how I feel?

Now I feel like a healthy person again. I still struggle a bit with other things (which is perfectly normal, everybody struggles with something) but anxiety isn't one of them. Anxiety is a feeling, the weird physical symptoms and scary thoughts are the way it expresses itself, the same way that being in love expresses itself in your heart fluttering, your face getting red, your head getting dizzy, your thoughts being taken over by that person. Anxiety, like every other feeling needs to be felt and released, not obsessed over and talked about. You don't need to fix anything, get rid of anything because THERE'S NOTHING THERE. Let go :)

Nothing has ever made me feel as light and airy then when I had benzos. My doctor only gave me 10, but the 10 times I took it were the best times of my life. I know they have long term use issues and they’re addictive but the things I would do to be able safely take them everyday is immeasurable.

SSRIs have not helped much at all, and I’m tired of people/doctors pretending they help just as much if not more.

Hey all. So the past 2 months have been ACTUAL hell lately. It all started because of one dry heaving episode that turned very quickly into "I can't eat solid foods for a week, then two, then more". I still get my nutrients through liquid calories and still get water but the anxiety or lingering fear, never goes away. Not only that but I also have pretty bad emetophobia so that mixed with anxiety has just been...the actual worst. I can't even function normally without thinking of everything to do with my body at once and I got the classic line of "Well no one likes to throw up". I know I need help to deal with this and I wanna eat normally again so badly but my mind has literally been on edge everyday. It just fucking sucks. And everytime I think the anxiety and the pit in my stomach goes away, it immediately comes right back the next morning. It's making staying asleep and falling asleep very hard. I feel like I don't even know my body anymore and I just want this to be over with once and for all. Thank you for reading.

I know a lot of people say their anxiety gets worse at night, but for me it’s almost the complete opposite.
During the day, my anxiety can be pretty high. There are people around, traffic, work, random interactions, things I need to do, and my brain seems to constantly find something new to worry about.
But once it starts getting dark, I feel noticeably calmer.

It’s like my brain suddenly goes:
“Alright, that’s enough worrying for today. Everyone go home.”

Everything feels quieter and less overwhelming. There are fewer people around, I don’t feel like I’m constantly expected to do something, and I can finally relax.
Sometimes I’ll be sitting at home at 10–11 PM thinking, “Why couldn’t I have felt this calm at 2 PM?”
It’s almost like my anxiety has office hours and refuses to work the night shift.

Anyone else get that feeling where the darker it gets outside, the calmer you become?

Hi guys

This reddit was suggested to me and I realised that like a lot of people, I once heavily relied on threads and forums like this to keep me afloat and until it appeared on my feed today, I hadn't even thought it for months or even years. People tend to either still have issues, or fix them and never come back to say so. So I thought I'd do a little post to say that there can be a normal, healthy life after Health Anxiety. Something that at one point felt genuinely impossible to me.

A little back story a few years ago I was in my living room having a perfectly lovely day with my family. I suddenly felt very very off, but absolutely nothing like a "normal" panic attack. I was completely fine, then bam. I felt like I might pass out. It was all I could do to stay upright. I had weird numbness in my left side. I tried going for a lie down and somehow felt dizzy even lying down. I went to A and E utterly convinced I was having a TIA. They checked me over, did all manner of tests suggesting stroke, clot, MS. Everything came back clear. It happened again a few weeks later. Everything was clear. They told me I was anxious. I said absolutely not, I didn't feel anxious at all mentally, until after I felt bad physically. I realise now that my body knew I was anxious long before my mind. But honestly at the time I didn't believe it was possible. I was ill and no one was listening.

Anyway to try to trim it down, I spent months/years running back and forward to the GP. Every tiny sensation set me off. I googled diseases and illnesses and obscure stuff even most GPs have never heard of and convinced myself I had it. I manifested genuine physical symptoms and couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. It got so bad I sat in either my GP surgery or A and E waiting room (not registered, not using resources just being in proximity) as these were the only places I felt safe. I had three young kids and it was a horrible horrible time as I was so honest to god sure I was physically ill.

Eventually I started just dropping my kids at school/nursery and sleeping. All day. I slept. Nothing could hurt me when I was sleeping right? I had physical symptoms of something or other, all the time. I was so terrified of illness and death that I reached a point I almost wanted to die. The very thing I was terrified of, because then at least I wouldn't fear it anymore.

Here I am today, years later. And I am genuinely OK. I have an occasional wobble. I'm very good now at knowing what's real and what isn't and what is reasonable and what isn't. It's a little sad because a part of me will never fully trust my mind or body, but I've come a long long way and I never thought I'd feel normal again. One of the most helpful things I've seen was simple. You can have absolutely every symptom of something.... And not have it. This was a groundbreaker for me as I realised I ticked every symptom list of many conditions over the time I suffered. How many of these did I have? None. Zero.

I don't suppose this will maybe help many people as there was no one thing. No magic cure. But you can recover from it and when I was in my darkest struggles, I didn't see many people come back and say... It gets better. But it can. It does. You can be OK ☺️

So for context I have always suffered with extreme anxiety and depression. When I was around 5-6 I thought I was always going to die soon or if I did not do something in a certain time I would die. Once I got older and in my twenties it kinda slowed down but then I had a very very traumatic event involving an immediate family member and ever since seeing that the thought of someone around me dying has never left my brain. It feels like I wired it to remind me at least every 5 minutes that something bad might happen. I always have impending doom. I am on Zoloft and it has slowed down my anxiety and my heart racing but my thoughts consume me and what I witnessed consumes me. I feel crazy and I’ve tried therapy in the past and I just can’t get behind just speaking to someone it does not change my brain chemistry.

I am leaving on a trip for 3 weeks and have been getting super worked up about being gone, out of my routine, etc etc. I brought this up to my doctor and she recommended hydroxyzine.

Would love to hear peoples experience with it. I already have health anxiety, so I am particularly worried about some of the dizziness side effects.

If you’ve taken it, let me know your experience, if the side effects were bad, or if it even helped at all!

I’ve been going through a long period (about a month) of bad anxiety attacks. I seem to be carrying a lot of it in my abdomen. I’ve started deep breathing to ease the tension, and it seems to be helping (early days yet). It got me wondering, where do others experience or carry the anxiety/fear/tension in their bodies?

Any suggestions for relaxation techniques also welcome :-)

someone convince me i don’t have a brain tumor. my anxiety & stress levels have been through the rough in the past few months. i’ve noticed moments of disassociation & get freaked out when i realize i feel off or have brain fog. for the past year i’ve had cases of ringing in my ears. dizziness when moving fast. sometimes dizziness for no reason. i went to the ENT & they said it sounded like it could be an inner ear problem but my insurance won’t cover any of the diagnostic testing so i wasn’t able to get a diagnosis. about a month ago i started experiencing nausea & food aversions; i chalked it up to my gastritis flaring because i haven’t been eating healthy due to the anxiety & stress. now im spiraling because i feel like everything all together could be a brain tumor. i am what my family says the biggest hypochondriac in the world so i try to give myself grace & ground myself in those moments but i really feel like im spiraling. i’ve been noticing being way more in my head lately, moments of possible DP/DR & it’s freaking me out even more. has anyone experienced anything like this, did u end up being okay?

I (21F) got the tetanus shot around 3 hours ago now, but at around the 2 hour mark, I noticed that my tongue felt too big for my mouth. I started to feel a slight panic. I am allergic to Lamictal and I had that similar, tongue swelling feeling. I called my mom, then I called my doctor's office. They told me to take some benedryl and go to the ER. So, that is exactly what I did. I reported all of my symptoms to the nurses, and they had me drink some water to make sure I could still swallow. It was a bit difficult to swallow, but it kept getting better as time went on.

That being said.... I don't think I actually needed to go to the ER, or even call my doctor. I suspect that my anxiety made it feel like I actually had swelling in my tongue, when in reality, I was just overthinking it.

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

I’m having constant heart palpitations… how do I know that I’m not going to drop dead, have a heart attack, cardiac arrest or that my palpitations won’t stop and then I go into SVT?

I’m 29M and I’ve struggled with anxiety and panic for a long time. I’ve been on antidepressants since I was around 18 because of an anxiety disorder, but I’ve been off them for some time now.

The last few weeks have been extremely stressful. My mother has been doing very badly with eating. She has lost a lot of weight, was taken away by ambulance and recently had surgery. I’m very close to my mother and she has always been a major source of safety for me.
At the same time, I’ve been dealing with a very problematic relationship situation, which has caused a lot of additional stress. Over time I started getting more and more physical anxiety symptoms, especially tingling in my hands and feet.

A few days ago everything came together. I had been out drinking and eventually became very drunk. At some point I was simply exhausted and decided to go home. On the way home, I happened to run into someone I knew who uses a lot of drugs. I have occasionally taken drugs before, but I don’t often use them, and honestly I don’t remember clearly how exactly everything happened that night, why I decided to take it, or how it ended up escalating the way it did. I ended up taking 3-MMC and staying awake until the early morning, after which I experienced intense panic.

The next day, my ex unexpectedly showed up at my door and there was more drama and stress around the situation. That added another huge amount of emotional pressure when I was already exhausted and panicking.

Since then I feel like my nervous system has been stuck in complete fight-or-flight mode.
It has now been about four days. The strange thing is that I have actually slept the last three nights. But every morning I wake up hoping that my body will finally have calmed down, and instead I still feel like I’m in some kind of constant survival mode.
I get strong heartbeats, physical tension, waves of panic, hot flashes, tingling, a strange/wazy feeling in my head and a constant feeling that I can’t switch off. I’ve also been eating very little for three days because my stomach feels completely activated.
I’ve tried walking, taking a shower, lying in bed, white noise, EFT tapping, podcasts, breathing exercises, sitting quietly and distracting myself. Sometimes I can actually become calm and lie down, but then another wave comes and it feels like I’m back at the beginning.

The scariest part is that I feel like something has completely overloaded or “burned out” in my nervous system and that I can’t switch it back into safety anymore.
Rationally I understand what is happening. I understand the fight-or-flight response and how anxiety can keep feeding itself. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t seem to be enough to make my body calm down.

My biggest fear is that this will become permanent. That my home won’t feel like home anymore, that I’ll go back into the anxiety problems I had years ago, or that I somehow broke something in myself.
My mother has always been the person I reached for when I felt unsafe. I did the same thing in the past when I had panic while travelling. Now I’m trying to learn how to deal with this without immediately needing her to make me feel safe.

But it’s incredibly difficult. Part of me wants to call her, another part of me feels like this is something I need to learn to carry myself.

I’ve already spoken to medical professionals and was told there was no emergency based on what I described. I was offered a calming medication but haven’t taken it. I’m not against professional help, but I’m wondering whether my body can eventually come down from this by itself.

Has anyone experienced several consecutive days of intense hyperarousal/panic like this, even while still sleeping? Did it eventually switch off? How did you get through the period where you were convinced something was seriously wrong or that it would never end?

I’m debating whether I should take the calming medication I was offered, increase my antidepressant dose again, or seek further medical support because I’m worried that something might actually be wrong.

I’ve also experienced some mild dizziness while walking, occasional moments where I feel almost high or “stoned,” and a strange, disconnected feeling in my head. I think it may be from dealing with this level of fear and hyperarousal for several days, but it’s honestly starting to scare me because I don’t know whether this is still anxiety or whether something else is going on.

At the same time, I feel like I need to stay strong and somewhat sit this one out, almost like exposure therapy, and teach my nervous system that I can feel this fear without immediately needing to escape or seek reassurance. But honestly, it’s getting increasingly difficult lol.

I’d just really appreciate hearing from people who have been through something similar and eventually came out the other side.

Think about it. How many times did it keep you awake at night? It creates anxiety and raises cortisol over nothing to a point that you can’t sleep. And for some unlucky people like me it will also create tinnitus (constant ringing in the ears) that makes sleeping even harder. And the funny part is also the brain is the organ that suffers the most from insomnia. But it sleeps just enough for you to be alive while making you suffer everyday. And the only things like benzodiazepines that actually calm down your nervous system can’t be used longer than a few weeks because your brain will down regulate your gaba receptors to build a tolerance. I want to fucking kill my brain. Not my body just this fucking parasitic evil thing called the brain.

I took a .5 of a Xanax bar cause I was having a panic attack at my friends house but I wasn’t thinking it straight

I have a probation ua on Monday and it’s Wednesday today, will this stay in my system for that long..?

I feel terrible 24/7 anyway but for the past couple months, it gets unbearably worse whenever I think of doing anything I love, like playing my favourite video game or going swimming or writing or even just talking to my best friend. The only thing all those things have in common is that I actually want to do them (at least for the split second before the panic kicks in). I don't feel good when I'm doing chores either, but there's no spike of terror and disgust (or whatever that feeling is, it's hard to tell).

Anyone else has experienced that? Found a way to make it easier?

I'm so anxious and overwhelmed by the idea of time passing. It stresses me out so much. The idea that I'll soon be one year older, then the next year flies even faster. I feel so behind. I have countless movies/series to watch which I haven't watched yet. And I've been wanting to wach some for YEARS but never "had the time". Same with games, with books, etc. etc. I'm 17 and I'm scared that I'll blink and I'll be old already. I feel like I haven't done enough things I've wanted to. I haven't made the friends I wanted to. I feel like I don't really have any real ones but that's not what this post is about. I just feel like I haven't done enough and by every passing day I just feel like more and more time is out and wasted and I'm so stressed by it. Like time just goes and goes and goes and I just can't ever stop and relax because the time will keep going and that would stress me because what if I'm wasting it etc. Guys I wanna get a therapist. I've wanted that for over a year now but TIME PASSED and I'm so anxious. LIKE it's been a year already? oh. my. god. I feel like hours are so much shorter and days pass by super quicker than usual.

I'm overwhelmed.

28F. Lost my husband almost 3 years ago to cancer. From diagnosis to death it was 3 months. Left behind to raise our 3 kids under 10….

My health anxiety has SKYROCKETED and has been giving me many physical symptoms which lead me on a goose chase…After telling my PCP about this all they offered me lexapro to which I declined because I really don’t want something daily. Just for the nights when it’s really bad…next we tried 10mg hydroxyzine but I would even cut that in half, and it made me wayyyy too groggy. I like running every morning at 6am and while it would knock me tf out, I just didn’t like how zombie like I felt afterwards.

Any suggestions? I have a telehealth appointment with a psychiatrist this Thursday but I’m doubtful they’ll prescribe me benzos there…would in person be better???
just really looking for relief and to trust my body and not live in fear again…

What advice would you have for someone who prefers drama, anxiety, fights with her loved ones, adrenaline, rather than quiet routines and silence?

23F, I’ve struggle with severe depression, anxiety, ADHD and addiction for 8 years now. I’ve always had trouble with loneliness, silence and routines, which leads me to have unhealthy behaviours for myself and for my partners. One of my traits is metacognitions, I constantly overthink my patterns and how good of a person I am. I go to therapy, I have a stable job and friends (that I unfortunately don’t see often due to my depressive episodes or my isolation). I’m not sure what to do, anything would help at this point