Dear Ian:

I have suffered a lifetime of anxiety and still do. The process to reduce it, minimize it, requires a whole lot of patience with the process. I call it “excruciating patience” because a moment of “I got it!” is often followed by: oh, I didn’t, there is more.

The process requires an equal amount of gentleness with yourself, empathy for yourself, as if you are taking the hand of a small, scared child, be soft, tender to that child.

The “outside approach” to reducing anxiety- current relationships with other people. Two things:

1. Cut contact with abusive people, and with people who were abusive to you in the past and still trigger in you the same anxiety response. There is no way to reduce anxiety long term when still interacting with people who are disrespectful to you.

2. Be effectively assertive with the non- abusive people in your life, state your needs, negotiate, make it a win-win relationship. If you regularly interact with a person whose habit is annoying to you and it is reasonable to ask that person to stop that habit with you (allowing for imperfection in the process), then ask that person just that. Otherwise, you repeatedly get triggered. The scared child whose hand you are holding, needs you to voice his needs, to take care of him. Be his voice.

3. Daily or every other day aerobic exercise, like fast walking, 30 minutes or so; other exercise, yoga/ other slow stretching. It is important to take the elevator, so to speak, down from the overthinking brain, to the body. Get physical.

4. Ongoing Mindfulness practice, making your everyday movements purposeful and slower, slower… making your movements matter for themselves, not only as a means to an end. Exit the overthinking brain more often, listening to sounds, feeling a soft object in your hands, looking at the clouds in the sky…

5. As you prefer: hot showers, hot baths, saunas; music, fresh air, a bit of sun, a bit of soaking in a light rain, petting a dog.

6. Let yourself know that you survived all the intense anxiety of many years of life. The anxiety you suffered did not kill you. It is not deadly in itself (the “solutions” we find for it, as in taking drugs can be deadly). You will survive this one too. This is the truth and it may eliminate the fear-on-top of fear.

7. Do not resort to the ineffective past ways of reducing anxiety, those “solutions” I referred to, such that cause additional problems. When you develop trust in yourself to operate effectively, that self-mastery, reduces anxiety. It lets that scared child whose hand you are holding know that he is “in good hands.”

anita