Hi VJ,

First off, thank you for your reassuring words. That’s really mostly what I need right now.

There have only been a few times – two or three – where the thoughts were strong and powerful enough to actually debilitate me for a while, and all of those happened during the summer. They made me lose all interest in what I was currently doing, and I had to get up and go lie down for a bit, or go through a breathing exercise to calm myself down, but they usually went away within the day. These days they’re a lot less intense, and usually just speed up my heartbeat a bit or dampen my mood. If I sit down and just focus on breathing for a short period of time, usually that’s enough to help. Other times, they’ve just stopped bothering me as much. I haven’t been keeping count of all the times it happens, but for the ones where I have to consciously calm myself down, probably once or twice every other day or so.

And then of course there’s the regular anxiety on top of that, usually based around worries of “when will it happen next?” or something of that sort. That happens probably twice a day.

Thank you for your help.