Severe Anxiety

@Veg - I don't think so, the meds usually help . I'm feeling better now that I'm at my brothers and we're watching comedies.

@Christine - yes, but it was a loooooong time ago, and my mother has thyroid issues so it may be time to get it checked again.

feel like there's tabasco sauce in my veins

A+ metaphor!

Fingers crossed you figure this out quickly. /hugs

^^^^

I just happened to take today off anyway and I think that'll help. may just go for a drive later and enjoy my freedom!

my dreams lately seem to reflect the state -- largely violent, and often times I'm perpetuating the violence! this has been happening on and off for like the last 5 months tho.

dunno what it was, me taking PPIs to kill the heartburn, a day off of work, watching The Godfather, dunno but I got hit with a wave of relaxation late yesterday that I'm happy to ride this morning!

i dont mean to make light of this thread which is quite touching and compelling but lmao:

i dont even update my blog often enuf~~~now ill never get a presitigious blogging job~~~

― rip dom passantino 3/5/09 never forget (max), Thursday, March 26, 2009 6:04 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

jumpiness and minor tremor is back, but the good news is that below the surface, my 'base' is calm, ie, that I don't feel doom or despair, but just calmly acknowledge my jumpiness and know it'll pass. Makes it a lot easier to deal with! when you have a very negative 'base' below the surface, like I did a few weeks ago, taht's what sucks!

oh man this has gotten so bad the brief moments where it lulls (or i'm boozed up enough) are verging on euphoric

oh goody it's back as of this morning, so hyped up and freaked out i'm a bit worried for my physical safety

no more caffeine

hey, i hope you'll be okay. appropos of nothing, i guess, but this seems like the right place to note that i look forward to reading your posts.

thankyou :)

oh i just mean though when i get hyper i get somewhat more accident prone

i don't think it's hyper-anxiety with me, but being one of the partners at my (small) firm puts a lot of pressure on me all the time. when there's a peak in the volume of the work, i feel overwhelmed. when there's a valley in the volume of the work, i worry that i won't get any more business. in some ways, it was easier just being an associate at a big firm.

This was mentioned before, but have any of you tried Buddhism? I went from 100% social anxiety down to almost nothing when practicing Buddhist meditation regularly. It's the only thing that's worked ... it teaches you how to control your mind and just feel appreciative of being alive, and makes you get in touch with the causes and roots to your anxiety. It's honestly the only thing that's ever worked for me. The only trouble is when anxiety starts again, it's hard for me to understand that I'm anxious ... like I know it's there, but it's a racing mindset that you just. have. to. stop. and the hardest part is realizing that that's what's going on.

Perhaps it's worth considering!

Meditation is pretty good and part of a balanced diet, but for a lot of people it's not a magic bullet.

True, anxiety has a lot of causes. Mine came from traumatic experiences, and I've found that it's especially receptive to meditation..... there could be a lot of differentiations involved in what helps and what doesn't depending on the cause.

Yeah. My anxiety has been present since childhood and I pretty firmly believe that it's a chemical thing. The only thing I've really found that has helped has been meds.

Yup. Even when removed from stressful situations, I'll be buzzing. It took me way too long to realize that I am actually anxious because I have nothing to be anxious about at times. I'd try to sit around calmly and start remembering some car accident I was in five years ago. At first, I thought I was just generally stressed and deflecting my anxiety on to something from the past in order to avoid my present situation, but nope, my brain just likes to race.

I'd try to sit around calmly and start remembering some car accident I was in five years ago

!

Ativan is working wonders for me, but I can't be on it all the time, there are health risks with long-term usage, and it won't magically un-fail me from school or give me the last 15 years of my life back.

Actually, I'd usually do it in the shower first thing in the morning. Have trouble getting out of bed, and then I'd start stressing in the shower about any random thing my brain settled on. It's amazing how much you start avoiding life in general when you're afraid you're just going to accidentally create more mediocre memories to rehash.

Yup. Even when removed from stressful situations, I'll be buzzing. It took me way too long to realize that I am actually anxious because I have nothing to be anxious about at times. I'd try to sit around calmly and start remembering some car accident I was in five years ago. At first, I thought I was just generally stressed and deflecting my anxiety on to something from the past in order to avoid my present situation, but nope, my brain just likes to race.

― mh, Tuesday, February 22, 2011 3:47 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

Exactly.

I have an RX for Ativan but a take it maybe once a week if that. I mentioned it upthread but it's long now so I'll do so again - I take Effexor which is an anti-d but indicated for use in Generalized Anxiety Disorder which is what I have. It's seriously worked wonders for me.

In my twenties I suffered from severe anxiety and panic attacks but seemed to grow out of it with age. Right around my 30's it just sort of stopped, without meds. Although right around 34 my dormant OCD manifested itself, talk about out of control thoughts zooming in my head...it felt like a constant word jumble. I've been on Celexa 60mgs a day and trazodone since. It helps, but ocassionally still have the races in my head.

Man, that's a lot of celexa.

Here's my abuse of drugs admission: I've always had what I perceived to be a really good memory. Not for facts and figures, etc, but for events. Not as bad as the people who manifest OCD as perfect memory, but an overactive memory, for sure. I'd also get pretty nasty anxiety attacks whenever I got a hangover.

SSRIs completely kill that for me. If I have a few drinks while on them, my memory fuzzes out. I definitely do not black out, but the overactive recall effect just isn't there and it's the most amazing thing.

SSRIs completely kill that for me. If I have a few drinks while on them, my memory fuzzes out. I definitely do not black out, but the overactive recall effect just isn't there and it's the most amazing thing.

This is why I would be very reluctant to take them again. My memory and thought processes became way too fuzzy when I was on them (approximately 10 years ago).

my memory is perfect....OCD. Even when drinking its sharp as a tack...but i get terribly depressed when hungover.

huh. I've never had memory probs with Effexor but it's an SNRI so maybe that's why? I have a ridiculously detailed memory and would seriosuly freak out if something started fucking with it so I get why that must have been freaky. I don't have OCD at all but part of my anxiety would sometimes (ok often) manifest itself in obsessive thought so maybe that does have to do with the memory after all.

oh wait, i looked at my script its 40mg's i forgot (great memory ha!) that i went down last time i saw the dr.

my ocd manifested one day and i asked my wife questions for 16 hours straight...16 hours.

effexor made me a lot less panicky — haven't really noticed bad side-effects apart from the awful awful withdrawal when I ran out one time

yeah the withdrawal fucking sucks the longer I'm on it the faster I get withdrawal symptoms too which is sort of concerning. I take it am and pm because my insurance doesn't cover extended release and if I'm late by a couple hours I'll start feeling it. When I first started it I could skip a day or two before that would happen.

I misstated -- I still have memory of it, but I don't feel the compulsion to replay the whole thing.

I mean, other than the time I accidentally drank too much this past year when I was still recovering from broken bones. I went from tipsy to falling down drunk in no time.

i had some serious tunnel vision this past weekend because i didn't take my meds thursday - sunday as i was taking care of a kid with the flu and myself who couldn't keep water down. My head was spinning and a rush of thoughts popped in, is this withdrawal from my celexa.

My depression and anxiety (but not, thank God, the hypomania) comes back after a few days of skipped and irregular doses of my meds.

i just wrote this big long four-paragraph freak-out trying to stave off an anxiety attack by trying to explain it while in it, and then somehow had the wherewithal to call my mom and broke down on the phone with her. but she knows what to do, i mean, this happens to me about once a year, though i think actually less often really, but since i was very young. but i've never called it anxiety or anything until sometime last year when a book abt anxiety (kind of an autobiography and a history of anxiety at the same time) came across my desk and basically read like my life, which was surprising and weird and revelatory to me. because my anxiety isn't a constant thing - or it is but i don't acknowledge it as such and go about my life non-neurotically etc etc though with this underlying level of what? vaguely anxious buzz with no pin-pointable cause? but there's been a lot of change lately in my life and a lot of feelings/thoughts stirred up and so anxieties have been building to a point of me being overwhelmed and not being able to deal at the moment.

i guess i'm just saying i feel pretty alone in this feeling and hardly even have words to express it tbh (check these awesomely constructed sentences here lol...), or do have words but they're causing a kind of eerie distancing, so i came to this thread to say hi and try to be clear about the fact that other people get this too and it's not a horrible thing that will halt my life as i know it and cause irreparable damage and etc etc. and i can wake up tmrw and do all the work i need to do if i focus on that and nothing else perhaps.

breathing.

but then i'm like, ohgod there's so much more important stuff going on in the world and wtf is my problem and how can i be so self-involved when i am so lucky really
it hurts my palpitating heart

when i was having panic attacks a lot i found reading the ilx threads on anxiety really helped get me outside my own head enough that i cld calm down, remember to breathe, forget i felt like dying &c &c

i guess its not this thread but i posted a little about it - maybe going through some similar things - had made a fairly drastic life/career change & was beset w/ anxiety had i done the right thing, fear of failure, terrible uncertainty, lack of confidence, i felt like a foreigner in my own life, like everything was slightly unreal. i still feel this way a little.

it was/is hard to describe & the anxiety meant i spent so much time in own head just thinking about it that it all becomes garbled & tangled & barbed idk i guess this is not helping. you arent alone, is my point. but for me it helped to stop 2nd/3rd/4th guessing myself, layering all these uncertainties on one another...

i have that meta-anxiety about my "regular" anxiety too

Thanks so much. yes, the layering is so the wrong direction but that's what happens. I'm trying really hard to stay aware of that, use the skills/tools I have to get through - it just gets so tunnel-vision on these rare occasions of breakdown. Like even writing this, it's as if a dif part of my mind is writing while other parts keep reeling. At least I'm a decent sleeper. going to try that. tomorrow is a different day.

xp - yep, geez...

It's not a horrible thing, it won't ruin your life or, I would venture, even make the slightest dent, and I'm pretty sure it's way more normal than you think, lovey. Your whole built-up life has been shaken like a snowglobe lately and some former pillars of security are gone now and the unknown is p fucking scary, let me tell you, and you don't have to have life-long concerns about your anxiety level to feel like that. No meta. Just feel the feelings, open all the doors, you don't have to contain everything, you can let it flow in and right back out. Look at me, I'm not even making any sense!

hey rrrobyn, you may already know this and i think i've already posted it in this thread or the panic attacks thread, but make sure the deep breathing you're doing is through your diaphragm - you should feel/see your stomach inflating, not your chest, otherwise it can worsen the physical symptoms.

also: write write write; this is shown to be super helpful, and is pretty much the #1 thing that has helped jordan with panic/anxiety attacks (flying). he showed me some of the stuff he wrote and i tried really hard not to lol (but then i lol'd anyway) bc it's some corny-ass stuff, but apparently it is much more effective then just thinking the posi thoughts. so really analyze what you're feeling and thinking and write it all out. no guarantees, obv, but worth trying.

yes writing talking saying stuff out loud is so key (for me) (and i would think for a lot of other people). getting words and concepts out of your brain (where they fold over on themselves millions of times and make everything worse) and into the air can do so much to deflate the worst of it

xp laurel is totally otm - i've experienced a handful of severe anxiety attacks, and the worst part for me was feeling like it would ~literally~ never end. like, that is how i would feel forever. but it never does. just like things in your life changed so tumultuously, they will change again, for the better. it is the ~circle of life, man~. you know all this already, but never hurts to be reminded of it by an outside perspective.

it just gets so tunnel-vision on these rare occasions of breakdown

yah my thoughts become really obsessive when im panicked, both narrow & hyperaware, & theres something almost seductive about this kind of keen analysis just getting as detailed as possible in feeling terrible & helpless

theres nothing ive found that really help breaks this but stubbornness just continually trying to force yourself out of it this is exhausting obv & it sucks & im sorry your here, feeling this...

xps: justine i ordered that book your recommeneded! have high hopes for it

lol i was just about to repost the details! here they are again:

http://www.amazon.com/End-Panic-Breakthrough-Techniques-Overcoming/dp/1572241136/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

an end to panic: breakthrough techniques for overcoming panic disorder
by elke zuercher-white

i am a total stan for this book, make sure you post about how it goes, lamp!

thanks so much, all. breathing and writing and reading your responses really helped. and sleeping! still not subsided this morning but i'm just focusing on the work i need to do right now, which is helping. i'll take a look at that book, j. i also just need to get off fb and not read/listen to the news right now, as much as that might sound like sacrilege for someone who's supposed to be 'informed' re my work and all. but there's just so much filler/bs clogging up my works - again, adding extra layers of anxiety i don't need. what a world. just going to focus on what i need to at the moment. <3

That's interesting, because I become more nervous when I detach myself from the outside world; I need, need, need that contact with the collective mass of humanity in order to stay sane. I'm not talking about having a bunch of friends, I'm talking about being surrounded by people doing their own thing and following their own lives. If I'm isolated--living out in the country with no Internet access and only two or three people for company, forex--I fold up after a few weeks. I wish things were different.

Why the hell can't science invent an anxiolytic that works for the long term? Fucking science. Always with the radar and microprocessors and shit, never the magic pills that will let me have a fucking life.

this is fucking with my shit again

been a stressful couple of weeks though, i suppose that doesn't help

came up for me again today and i was like noooooo. exacerbated by not enough sleep, physically exhausted body, a coffee i didn't need, and too much to get done over the next few days (or so my stressy brain thinks). consequently got hardly any work done today! and i was going along so well! it will be okay again

I'm just coming out of a few weeks long depressive episode, which always makes my underlying anxiety even worse. Ugh, now I'm two weeks behind in classwork... adding even more stress and anxiety. Keep getting too nervous to leave the house lately... been waking up with panic attacks in the morning...

Ugh I'm already up to ~3mg of klonopin a day now, and I've been on it for like 4 years now. Its the only thing that keeps my life from spinning out of control and my doctors continually want to take me off of it. Don't know what to do but cling to them with dear life and risk the eventual liver failure.

What else are you on?