Anxiety has been a struggle that I have recently come to get a handle on. I suffered for quite some time, I was afflicted by it when I was younger and managed to 'cure' myself of it for many years until about a year ago when I became crippled by anxiety for several months. That has dissipated now and I am in a much clearer place. For the person dealing with anxiety it can be quite a harrowing experience and we should all be sympathetic as to what triggers the anxiety and what effect it has on the sufferer, sometimes it is not as easy to maintain a control of anxious tendencies especially when facing uncertain times. Yes, most of the time the fears are unfounded but to the sufferer in the throws of a bout of anxiety everything feels incredibly real and a great sense of impending doom feels like a weight pressing tightly down on them crippling the sufferer. A lot of things are subjective and remain in the eye of the beholder, I think the key to dealing with an anxiety attack is to teach the patient to find ways to distract their mind with a task or something similar that takes a great deal of concentration. We are not very good a multi tasking and if we can misdirect the attention away from the cause of anxiety then we soon realise that the anxiety has dissipated. Over time and with practice this gets easier and easier like working out a muscle at the gym until we find ourselves completely free of anxiety due to maintaining control of our ability to remain composed. These are just my personal thoughts and experiences but I have witnessed this technique work for several people in reducing the frequency and severity of anxiety attacks.
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Greetings @wildo
Interesting your analysis. According to what we propose, we must develop activities that allow us to keep our focus away from the situation that starts our anxiety.
By creating different daily routines, such as exercising, eating, resting, studying, generating a daily cycle of emotional, physical and mental stability, with which the symptoms of anxiety are combated.
Yes in a way. Those routines may prevent generalised anxiety to an extent but what I was talking about was once a bout of anxiety has already begun and the attack is ramping itself up in the never ending loop of panic that continues to feed itself. These intense acute panic attacks can come on suddenly without warning.
My technique requires stopping whatever you are doing as soon as you notice symptoms of an anxiety attack and finding something that will take as close to maximum mental concentration as is possible, it also helps if the chosen activity has a physical component also to help counter act the hyper ventilation that occurs during a panic attack (believe it or not masturbation is actually a good technique to use, I and several others I know have used this method to great effect, but any task that shifts focus away from the symptoms of the attack will work).
This distraction is generally enough to take the sufferers mind off the attack long enough to allow the respiration rate to regulate, helping to control the anxiety since a major contributor to the intensity of an attack is the feeling of shortness of breath which causes hyper ventilating which then leads to over oxygenation of the system leaving the sufferer light-headed and 'tingling' causing more panic to set in thus feeding the perpetual loop. It also slows the tachycardic element that is also present during an attack.
Once that loop is broken the anxiety attack is essentially 'distracted out of existence'. Suddenly the sufferer realises that they no longer have anxiety. They aren't aware of this actually occurring at the moment of cessation due to the distracting activity but suddenly have the realisation that the attack has dissipated and they feel normal again.
I'm talking about actual acute anxiety attacks here, generalised anxiety due to some form of stress in the environment is different to try and manage it as becomes more of a case of a long, slow draining marathon instead of the full on 'sprint' of a panic attack.
As far as a full blown panic attack goes this technique works quite well once it has been learned and once mastered anxiety attacks can be halted pretty much as soon as they are noticed.
So yes those points you mentioned can serve as a distraction from generalised anxiety most certainly and can help to alleviate some of the discomfort, however if the anxiety is caused due to some form of great stress in the sufferers environment then whenever there is 'downtime' there is always the risk that the anxiety will return. In these cases it is perhaps best to attempt to remove the cause of the stress if that is possible.
Sorry for the wall of text and the novel length reply. I just felt I should explain myself a little more clearly as to what I was referring to.
I don't know if my comments will help any anxiety sufferers that read this post but I am hoping that it will. If anybody does suffer from attacks and would like me to explain in more detail feel free to message me and I'll try to explain it a little better. It is quite effective and I've seen several people who were crippled severely with the affliction make it much more managable and even right up to the point of cessation of all forms of anxiety all together.
As you are all well aware the mind can be an extremely powerful force both positively and negatively depending on the circumstances and the individual.
Someone once told me that sometimes the hardest battle that we will fight is against ourselves. I've learnt that this is definitely true, in fact I would have to say that the hardest adversary we will EVER face really is ourselves.
While there may be external factors at play in our lives everything that happens is still reliant on our OWN perception of OUR reality. We must empower ourselves even when facing negative situations, although this is an extremely hard skill to master (especially when somebody is sitting at 'rock bottom') but nonetheless just another skill that can be mastered with practice.
I apologise once again for the length of my reply, I can ramble on at times.
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Excellent exposure @Wildo, and completely in accordance with your approach, the mind is our biggest enemy, since it knows us.
Thank you for your clarification, I will keep it in mind; here in Venezuela, every 10 minutes we are suffering from anxiety attacks.