Not fruit/veggie or tea, but something that’s probably going to sound insane.

You’re feeling strong anxiety. You want to get rid of it. This is called an avoidance goal. Avoidance goals, ironically, make us feel worse. How? Here’s an example:

• These stimuli make me feel anxious!
• I better take my Magic Anti-Anxiety Tea.
• I just drank it and I feel better.
• It’s so good to no longer feel anxiety.
• Oh no. I’m remembering the anxiety.
• I’m starting to feel the anxiety.
• I’m anxious.
• Better move on to other ways to avoid anxiety!

This is one of the mechanisms that lead to generalized anxiety. It happens because our brains have ways of connecting ideas quickly.

So is there no escape? Yes there is.

Instead of trying to get rid of anxiety, we can see it differently. We can change its role in our lives.

And we can do it without avoidance goals. Instead, we can do it with approach goals. We can move toward what matters. We can move to living a valued life. We can get closer to the kind of person that we want to be.

We are not alone in this journey. There’s plenty of wise and rigorous people who have discovered the way out. Some of them have developed mindfulness methods. Others have developed acceptance and commitment therapy. There’s many other approaches that are evidence-based and have helped millions of people around the world.

Let me know if you want resources or have questions. I really hope you get to take steps toward the life that you want to live.

There are some good ideas here, exercise and good nutrition among them.
You seem nice. You’re funny most of the time.
Lemmy isn’t a bad habit, but you might get a lot more out of interacting with real people.
You can do it. Get out.

Body weight exercise routines are free and the equipment is cheap and require little home area. It’s one of the only things that helps me in high pressure days. And prayer.

Squats and push ups for immediate relief.

Exercise is supposed to help.

Diet has a huge impact on the brain and mood.

There is lots of research coming out on the metabolic brain connection, basically try a well formulated ketogenic diet for a few weeks and see if you feel better, keep a daily mood journal!. Many, many, many people do, especially around anxiety symptoms. See the metabolic mind organization for the current research results.

One warning if your taking medication: changing your metabolism can make medicine much stronger then anticipated, so work with your doctor to modify prescriptions as needed.

Kava root.

Music that takes focused listening, or else the kind that zones you out.

Apparently sour food helps.

My therapist told me to start throwing a ball at the wall and catch it when I find myself in a downward thought spiral. It really works because apparently it’s hard to focus on a ball and have a mental breakdown at the same time.

I’m part of the autistic spectrum (originally diagnosed as Asperger’s, but apparently that term has possible roots in Nazism and “racial superiority”, yikes!), and I found that going outside and taking a walk outside always helped me calm down. I remember whenever I got upset as a child and overreacted, the teacher would take me for a walk around the school, and I always felt better afterwards. I also liked eating my favourite snack to calm down, though that might just be because I like snacks.

Just my two cents. I don’t experience too many of the negative “symptoms” of autism anymore nowadays, but I hope you (or somebody else) finds this helpful!

5 minutes of meditation. It won’t solve the anxiety, but it will insert just enough perspective and space to help you recognize a couple things:

• you are not your anxiety, it’s more like weather that you’re experiencing.
• the things that you’re worried about may be real, but your experience of them is warped by the anxiety.

My therapist gave me a really helpful metaphor. Anxiety is kind of like putting your hand right in front of your face. It blocks everything else out. It’s all you can see. It’s all you can experience. While this isn’t the desired state, you also can’t get rid of your hand without losing a real part of yourself. So instead, what if you focus on inserting space. Move your hand further from your face, and it becomes an element of the environment. It’s a thing you can observe. It’s still real, and it’s still there, but it’s now more in perspective.

That’s what meditation, even 5 minutes, can do. It pushes your anxiety into perspective. It won’t get rid of it, but it will help you see it as an element rather than your entire experience.

Exercise, a cat and forced social interaction with your local community. This feeling of angst is growing more and more among the population. My own opinion is the dissonance between how we would normally live our lives versus the bullshit that has grown all around us, causes a certain amount of despair. All the best.

Try fasting. Wake up, have coffee or whatever, water, but no food. Nothing all day. In the evening, eat a couple of raw carrots if you can. Next morning, have some yogurt, small lunch, small dinner.

I dunno why this works for me, but I suspect it draws unconscious, autonomic anxiety from the nebulous mass of all possible problems and focused on one simple, easy to solve problem - hungry.

Like how slamming your fingers in a door can make your knee pain go away for a bit.

Cutting out caffeine made a huge difference when I was getting debilitating anxiety about my old cat’s health (despite her being pretty much fine). Honestly, doing that was more helpful than therapy (though I’m not sure that I had the right therapist)

Other than that, going for a walk while on the phone with someone also really helped, as it kept me from spiralling thoughts and had me active.

In a pinch some really sour candy can help to knock you out of an anxiety attack too. You might want to have some on hand.

Get OFF of the internet.