Exercise has long been known as a good way to induce relaxation and promote feelings of well being. As a result I have tried to encourage anxiety sufferers to exercise to achieve some peace in their lives.

Although it dawned on me that telling someone what they should do and giving no direction is kind of useless, so I want to provide you with some information about an exercise tool that I’ve been using for awhile that I feel is an effective means of achieving phyiscal fitness.

The vast majority of my stint as an anxiety sufferer has been spent in utter confusion about what the hell was wrong with me. It took me years of searching, reading, asking, and probing before I got a clue.

Going to my primary doctor wasn’t always the best information session because the doctor’s reaction was to give me a drug and call it a day.

For a long time I was afraid to be happy. I was afraid to laugh too strongly, I was afraid to get carried away with any overly positive feeling because it would make me nervous.

It sounds strange to say but I was holding on to myself tightly (emotionally speaking) so I wouldn’t lose control, or at least that was the thought process.  Anxiety has a way of doing all kinds of things to you and destroying your sense of joy is a major one.

Over the life of this blog I have talked a lot about how changing your thinking can lead to less anxiety. But what does ‘change your thinking’ even mean? Today I want to talk about a specific thing you can do (or think) to achieve the goal of less anxiety.

I recently wrote about my day in the public library and how I was able to find a few books of some interest. One of the books I discovered is called Healing Anxiety and Depression. The book is filled with helpful information but one of the most useful was the list of 32 effective coping strategies found in chapter 20.

The idea for this post came to me today while I was surfing the web. I suddenly asked myself if I was keeping myself from being anxiety free. After I posed this question to myself I concluded that I was, partially.

I don’t think that anyone keeps themselves anxious because quite frankly this would be pure lunacy. However I wondered if my long suffering with anxiety had conditioned my body and mind so much toward anxiety that I not only expect to be anxious most of the time but also find that being anxious is my normal state of being (low level anxiety).

It’s bound to happen at some point in everyone’s life. Somebody makes a negative comment and it hurts your feelings in a big way. But according to a new study conducted by researchers affiliated with the National Institute Of Mental Health social anxiety sufferers react more to these types of comments.

An amulet is essentially an object meant to “protect a person from trouble”. Almost anything can be an amulet but generally speaking they are small and portable – think rabbits foot. Some people think of amulets as lucky charms or in some cases they are meant to keep away ‘bad spirits’ e.g., bad vibes.

A few years ago I visited my primary doctor because of chest pains and after a few tests he confirmed that I had an anxiety disorder and not heart disease. After the test he spoke to me for about 5 minutes, prescribed Prozac , and told me to have a great day.

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In this short article a man describes his life with anxiety and how it finally ended up causing him to go from simply anxious to obsessed. Although slightly humorous I wanted to share the article as an example of why you don’t want to have an untreated anxiety disorder.