One of the best ways to stay anxious is to be inflexible. The biggest reason why many anxiety sufferers are inflexible is because they think in absolute terms. Everything is all or nothing. In other words, you don't just get chest pain, you get potential heart attacks. You don't just get headaches, but potential brain tumors and so on. Learning how to break the chains of absolute thinking is essential to getting rid of your abnormal anxiety. At the height of my anxiety illness I'd always rely on my best guess about what was going on
Archives for February 2011
How to Move Forward in the Face of Change
Being an anxious person is a shocking experience. No part of becoming or staying anxious is easy. A lot of that has to do with the huge amount of change that you undergo when your life is turned upside down by anxiety. Everything suddenly becomes about what you should or shouldn't do to avoid being anxious, or about how anxiety is going to tear down your health or make you go crazy. Hard change, indeed. Facing change of any kind can be hard on anybody, but for you it's a monumental struggle. Anxiety causes you to live in a constant
My Rebirth
Today I'm going to talk about myself. I never talk about myself, really. I suppose that I don't because this blog is about helping you. But I want to tell you about how helping you has changed my life. In 1999 I started a new phase in my life, namely an anxious phase. In 2006 I started dabbling in research about how to help myself. By that point I'd gone through therapy, rejected meds, and was confused as ever. By 2008 I had made a lot of progress in terms of understanding what was wrong with me and how I could fix it. That's around
Are We Bothering Others?
Today's guest post is brought to you by Daniel Stelter from the Anxiety Support Network. For many social anxiety sufferers including myself, a common thought that we often struggle with is the belief that we are bothering other people by talking to them or asking them things. Sometimes, this belief arrives from the experience that when we were so afraid of doing things on our own, we would ask so many questions of others that we actually did end up bothering them. Once it became clear to us that we were overstepping our bounds and