Dear Christy Lim:

You are welcome to come back to your thread any time you feel demotivated.

Distraction helps, sure, being busy, having a daily routine is very helpful for an anxious person. Of course you can’t be busy ALL the time, can’t be effectively distracted all the time. Feeling anxious does feel “abnormal”, doesn’t it? I know the feeling very well, unfortunately. It is so good to feel calm that you hope to never be anxious again, but then… here it is, again.

What brought about anxiety, experiences in childhood, can be looked at, insight gained, and that can be very helpful but even if you gain all the intellectual understanding of how your anxiety came about, you will still be anxious because the brain is in the habit of being anxious. Connections in the brain are already in place that will bring back the unpleasant experience of anxiety.

Healing from anxiety involves insight into the origination of the anxiety, understanding the habits of the mind that keep the anxiety going and learning new skills so to create new habits of the mind. It is a very slow process, but if you take it on consistently, in a few months you will experience a great difference and in a few years, a much greater difference. It will not be a linear process, getting better and better in time. There will be better, then worse, then better, and so on. Overall there will be progress.

Did you attend psychotherapy so far? And would you like to share about the origination of your anxiety- where, when and how it started?

anita

Dear Christy Lim:

I understand: when you share with friends/ boyfriend about your anxiety again and again, and they give you their best advice, really trying, and you keep being anxious, they would get frustrated, feeling that their efforts are for nothing, not working at all, long term. So share with them in moderation, sometimes, not when they are stressed with their own issues.

The way to work on this is to increase your Distress Tolerance- this is a gradual process. It means that over time, you learn that you are indeed able to tolerate it, that you have tolerated, endured it for so long, survived in spite of it, and you can continue to survive. You learn that it is not as threatening as it feels. You learn that you are strong enough to endure it and still function well.

When your feet or hands sweat, notice it and take deep breaths. Say to yourself: this happened before and I lived. I survived it. This is not dangerous: unpleasant- yes, but not dangerous. When someone wants to shake your hand and you fear it sweating- tell the person you feel uncomfortable shaking hands because your hands sweat. This is how you take care of yourself, being assertive.

View yourself at times as a little scared child and treat yourself as you would treat a scared child- talk to her, comfort her, take her for a walk outside, prepare a hot bath for her, play her favorite music for her, and so on.

anita

Dear Christy Lim:

I understand you feeling “tired and fed up of facing this (anxiety)”- it does take a lot of patience to face this, no fast and easy solutions. I didn’t choose my anxiety and I can not wish it away. If I had the choice, I would never have chosen it! And if I could wish it away, I would have wished it away at the first opportunity, decades ago.

As to your questions: I am not part of the staff of this forum. I am a member just like you. I am an active member, posting a lot, but still, no more than a member.

Sure I have my own problems and I share about them. The advice I give is the same advice I take for myself. When anxious and distressed myself, I remember what I write to others and practice it. Posting here helps remind me, on an ongoing basis, of what I learned. It helps me heal from my anxiety.

anita

Dear Christy Lim:

I am not sure what you meant by “Do you mind share about what makes you here in this web or forum”- if you mean, what motivates me to post as much and as often as I do, I will give you an example of this very moment. Your post above brings to my attention, this very morning as I sit here, typing this, how difficult and unpleasant it is to feel anxious, how very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that we want to never feel this, never again. And when we do feel it again, we think something like: not again! No, I don’t want this!

Correct? And I am reminded of a post I read a few days ago about the concept of “distress tolerance”- very anxious people have low distress tolerance. It means that I have believed throughout my anxious living, that I am not able to endure anxiety, distress, discomfort. It is sort of … fear of feeling fearful, fear of feeling distress, discomfort… as if we can’t handle it, as if it will destroy us.

Low distress tolerance involves believing we are unable to survive feeling badly. This is why feeling badly feels … extra bad.

What do you think about this concept?

anita

Dear Christy Lim:

If we, as children, were taught how to deal with disappointments, with unpleasant feelings, that would be so helpful for the adults we became. Life would be so much easier. But when as children we were not taught that, when we did not witness it, when our parents didn’t handle their emotions well, there was no way to learn it.

And there is no other way, as adults, to learn it as adults. Only it is more difficult as we are set in our ways, in our ways of thinking.

Learning how to tolerate unpleasant feelings is a personal process involving thoughts and feelings, trying new behaviors and evaluating those. You wrote that you cannot afford psychotherapy, if I remember correctly;  perhaps a good book on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy will help you, a book that includes a workbook with exercises you can do…?

anita