Nerves

[darkbloodwyvern]

I'm seeing a therapist for Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Here's the professional advice and stuff I'vecome up with to assist my anxiety:

Three deep breaths. Breathing out activates the calming centers of your brain (sorry, it's my day off and I'm enjoying some adult beverages or I'd look up the actual brain parts for you) Breathing in (hyperventilation, something that happens when you are stressed) corresponds to the STRESS centers of your brain. All kinds of althletes, musicians, singers do exercises where you take a deep breath for say,4 seconds, then let it out for 6, or 8, or 10!! Basically, let the breathing out part take longer.

Relax your tongue. It's supposed to be a good indicator of how stressed you are. If you can't do it immediately, it means you are probably stressed!

Focus on relaxing other parts of your body and writing it down. See where you hold the tension. I get headaches when my hands are tense and overall stress when my neck and facial muscles are stiff from not relaxing. I kept a log for about a month of how stressed i felt on a 1-10 scale. Each day I wrote down the number 3x daily and took three breaths and had to focus on chilling out for about 5 seconds or more if I had the time. It really helped!

Also, my own neurotic solution involves taking fifteen (or some planned amount of time) to tackle the big stresses.

Schedule your worry time: Specifically pick out a time, about ten to thirty minutes to do nothing but freak out and worry. Nothing else and spend the whole time doing it. if you start to worry early, remind yourself that 3pm is the time to worry, not now, and you are busy doing something else. It's important not to skip or forget about it. You can start to make the time shorter if you don't feel like you can use it all, or possibly enlist someone to just listen to your worries without them needing to input until your time is over. I like to write down stuff or draw because getting artsy helps me express better.

Here's my big example: I lost my job last year and moped around a few days after. But then I sat down and wrote down all the stuff I liked and hated about my previous jobs. I made lists of jobs I thought were close to my experiences, jobs I WANTED no matter what the qualifications, and then broke down each of them into pros/cons and things I would be required to do to get into such a career. Many things required volunteer or school work and I researched as best i could on my top five ideal jobs and about the same time went into job research for things I could achieve pretty easily with the skills I already had. I also added on therapy and a few other goals I wanted to achieve because about that time I found out I was transgender and wanted to undergo therapy to be more masculine, the way I always saw myself in my head and wanted to be seen by other people as a man, not a woman.

It did really help, but I still have anxiety problems, as well as other things. It's much better now and feels more manageable, though last night I was freaking out over, well, pretty much nothing. The main issue with anxiety is it's usually small thing blown out of proportion. I think most people worry about their image and how others see them, so the transgender issues (to me) aren't more complicated than the average person wanting to be seen in a certain way.

I have a pretty good job now, still interested in seeing what other things I can do and considering spending some of my free time volunteering at some places I may be interested in getting into, but overall I'm able to afford my therapy, medical stuff and lots of things for my snakes. Just got a fantastic new cage setup installed, still working out the minor bugs, but very happy with! I'm in no way 'fixed' but I feel like i have tools to deal with my issues now. I'm no expert, but I do like to help people talk over their issues, so PM me anytime and I'll try to get back asap :3