Mental Health

• Calisthenics
• Go for a (fast) walk (no music/headphones)
• take bike ride (no headphones aswell)
• drink some tea

these are my remedies. the real challenge is breaking free from those spiraling thoughts and recognizing when you need to do these things.

Maybe. I get anxious now just doing everyday things.

Dunno if this is a helpful thought, but at least for me often this feeling comes from something feeling wrong at a body level, often some kind of stomach discomfort, be it an upset stomach, or being hungry, that often gets interpreted as anxiety for me.

Trying to identify where the anxiety is felt in your body, or trying to make sure you're taking care of all of your physiological needs might be worthwhile troubleshooting step 🤷🏻‍♂️

In DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) the PLEASE skill is just about attending to those physiological aspects of feeling alright mentally:

I felt like this when I thought I was living the life I wanted but didn't. In fact I was steadily working myself towards burnout while being outwardly successful. It took a very long time to align my life with my values and preferences and leave the nagging feeling behind that something is wrong.

Emotions like anxiety and sadness are only rarely malfunctions of the brain. Most of the time they do have something relevant to say.

I'm still not over hyping myself with coffee - but it's getting better.

You're not anxious about anything in particular, you're just anxious.

I'm a seasoned campaigner. Often I've found myself very worried about whatever thing for days or weeks, only to find that when that thing is resolved and no longer a concern, I just move on to worrying just as hard about the next thing.

Most of my life, yes. I wear a layer of anxiety at all times, and it feels like everything is filtered through it first. Sometimes it gets thin, but it's always there. I know it's cliché, but exercise really does work.

I've suffered from anxiety and panic attacks since I quit nicotine, quite some years ago (for some reason, nicotine appeared to completely keep it under control 90% of the time).

It's basically under control these days, but I have to do certain things to keep it under control, and it's not been a case of a "magic fix", but a number of permanent lifestyle changes, combined with a bit of "try everything that might work".

I had to cut out caffeine, pretty much. I can have 1 caffeinated cup of tea in the morning, if it's a physically active day, otherwise decaf only.

I had some sessions of free NHS "Cognitive Behavioural Therapy", which included things like "deliberately activating and testing your triggers" - not dissimilar to your "drink a red bull to force anxiety". This worked pretty well for "logic your way out of a panic attack" - but couldn't really stop the buildup of anxiety in the first place. Overall though, this was incredibly helpful in stopping anxiety spiralling into full dread/fear/going-to-die panic attacks.

For the general background anxiety-for-no-reason I tried quite a few things with mixed results:

Dietary changes (other than cutting out caffeine) didn't appear to do anything for me, but might in other people. A lot of anxiety can come from the gut, apparently, and can sometimes be caused by stuff like constipation.

Forcing myself to get enough sleep, even if it means my life is now boring and my days finish too soon, made quite a big positive difference. I just have to do fewer things, instead of running at 100% all the time.

Mediation, yoga, stretching and generally increasing exercise all gave positive results. I think the yoga, stretching and some basic breathing exercises were most effective - though difficult to fit in the time to do them properly. If things get worse, I make time to do them properly for a few days. Just stretching a bit showed how much tension was being stored in all my muscles - and easing this would also ease my brain's "irrational" anxiety.

With exercise, as well as generally a bit more where possible, I had good success with treating anxiety attacks as a "fight or flight response", and giving my body the chance to think it was "running away" - so, if at home or in a safe space to do so, then using an exercise bike or "jogging on the spot" worked pretty well - especially if I worked up to a sprint, then went as fast as I could for as long as I could - this seemed to pretty much reset the anxiety level to nothing, and it would stay that way for quite a few days. If you are somewhere where it's appropriate to do so, I'd imagine running/cycling very fast outside would do the same. A milder paced cycle/jog a few times a week seems to maintain the level nicely.

I guess basically, try everything you can that's listed in the comments here - some of it, in combination with some other if it, will definitely help. It probably won't remove it entirely, but it should help manage and control it a bit.

Leaning into it is kind of funny but yeah it makes sense, gives you a sense of control.

Mostly what I do is exercise though - I run it off physically, that helps so much.

I think the anxiety sensor in my brain is broken so I don't really ever get anxious at all, even when it would be appropriate.

But I do this with, like, existential sadness. The fucked up shit in the world will start to really get to me every once in a while, and if I've got the evening free I'll put on my playlist deliberately designed to make it worse. I'll just sit there listening to like, Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, and start really thinking about all the horrible, completely artificial and totally preventable problems in the world. I'll just curl up and sob uncontrollably for about an hour or so, until I start to get dehydrated and run out of tears.

I've done that off and on for most of my life. Have you ever tried meditation? It takes some effort and some practice but you can get to the point where you can examine your brain's thoughts just as they form (you can't stop your brain from doing the thinking things, but you can observe). There have been times when that has allowed me to realize things were bothering me that I wasn't aware of and to make sense of them. I learned I have a history of fairly extreme avoidant behavior. I will do almost anything to prevent feeling difficult feelings. Didn't realize I was doing it for most of my life. The side effect of doing that sometimes is random anxiety and panic attacks. To unpack that stuff you might find a therapist who is skilled in attachment styles and maybe EMDR as well.

I relate, I sometimes get panic attacks for no apparent reason and then I’m frustrated by the physical symptoms because they feel unjustified.

I worked with a therapist for a while and we didn’t really identify reasons, we moreso worked on helping me pay attention to my bodily reaction so I would be forewarned and could go somewhere to calm down if my body started to panic. Now I notice when my heart starts racing instead of waiting to notice I’m soaked in anxiety sweat. I find the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise helpful for calming down. I also find there are ebbs and flows for me and I definitely think mine has a social component, but when it’s happening frequently that’s a sign I need to calm down my system and take it easy for a bit.

Anyway if you look into therapy (even just for private research) my therapist’s approach was behavioral therapy (mostly symptom focused), there’s also psycho-therapy that would try to identify the reasons in your personal testimony. I find psycho-therapy somewhat dubious, I don’t think my anxiety, triggered by things like which peanut butter to buy, is a product of repressed abuse or inattentive parents etc.

cortisol be like that

I also remember reading something where the increased cortisol also increases the likelihood of the next adrenaline spike creating a hellish positive feedback loop but I can't remember where I found it.

This is kinda the whole idea of the entire horror genre and anything like it