A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.
This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.
You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.
People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.
In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.
Therefore, I present to you:
THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS
–Go on a walk
–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.
–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching
–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind
–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift
–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:
–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.
–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.
–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.
–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)
–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.
–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.
–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:
–List the capitals of all the U.S. states
–List the capitals of all the European countries
–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.
–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.
–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.
Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.
(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)
My friends, this is a dark hour. Intolerance, cruelty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and environmental destruction have been let loose across the land.
Trump controls the Republican Party, the Republican Party controls the House and Senate, and the Senate and Trump will soon control the Supreme Court.
Republicans also control both chambers in 32 states (33 if you count Nebraska) and 33 governorships. And in many of these states they are entrenching their power by gerrymandering and arranging to suppress votes.
Yet only 27 percent of Americans are Republican, and the vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump. The GOP itself is now little more than Trump, Fox News, a handful of billionaire funders, and evangelicals who oppose a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage, and the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
So what are we – the majority – to do?
First and most importantly, do not give up. That’s what they want us to do. Then they’d have no opposition at all.
Second, in the short term, if you are represented by a Republican senator, do whatever you can to get him or her to reject Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, or, at the least, postpone consideration until after the midterm elections. Urge others to join with you. Senate switchboard: 202-224-3121
Fourth, don’t succumb to divisive incrimination over “who lost” the 2016 election (Hillary loyalists, Bernie supporters, Jill Stein voters, etc.). This will get us nowhere. We must be united.
Fifth, vote this November 6 for people who will stand up to the Trump Republican outrage. Mobilize and organize others to do so. Contact friends and relations in “red” states, and urge them to do the same.
Sixth, help lay the groundwork for the 2020 presidential election, so that even if Trump survives Mueller and impeachment he will not be reelected.
Finally, know that this fight will be long and hard. It will require our patience, our courage, and our resolve. The stakes could not be higher.
Complaining about incivility assumes a level playing field between individuals. That is not the case here. When most people say something negative to someone, it carries with it little consequence beyond briefly hurting that person’s feelings. That does not hold true when the supposed leader of the free world—or his agents—do it.
That outrage seems to ignore the fact that, for instance, calmly asking someone to leave your restaurant harms absolutely no one but Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a woman who, by her actions, has assisted in harming a great many.
Most of the ways that the GOP and its members are being protested aren’t remotely violent. We’re not talking about violent resistance. The debate has gone from “Can you punch Nazis?” to “Must you serve Nazis a lemon meringue pie with no objection?”
If you stand by and stay silent and civil in the face this kind of behavior, here is what will happen: people working for the opposing side will say you’re very polite. They will pat you on the head. Then they will, unopposed, go out and institute policies that will hurt thousands of people.
When you write the rules in violence, don’t be surprised when the gentle respond in kind.
What the fuck is this even supposed to mean
thank you for asking. it is a direct response to the right-wing movement’s “keep the peace” rhetoric that suffices every page of “minion memes are funny” facebook. it is a direct response to the incredibly, incredibly ignorant demand that those who are being oppressed simply deal with it.
black people are being shot for being black by a militant police. millions of dollars pour into arming individuals who report domestic violence rates of two to four times larger than the general population. when black children are arrested for attending pool parties, the police officers are given the benefit of the doubt because “blue lives matter.” black children are not given any benefit. they are told to sit down and shut up and be un-violent, with the promise that if they are a peaceful people, they’ll be slaughtered someplace less public. when a man kneels, this is seen as offensive and degenerate. but police officers committing felonies is “just how it is.”
school children are being killed because individuals love a tool more than they love the incoming generation. despite the fact we know, as an open fact, that the NRA buys politicians, we are told to sit on our hands and just buy a gun if we don’t feel safe around them. the american schooling system is entirely built to be classist and currently forces college grads who didn’t die into a system of debt that ensures little to no upwards mobility for many students, ensuring the creation of a lower class that is indebted to the higher class. students are assured that Miss betsy deVil has their best interests at heart while she absolutely annihilates every chance they’ve got.
women speaking out about sexual assault get silenced so much that it takes forty women saying “yes, he does this, it happened to me” before someone is actually charged with assault. we literally live in a world where “incel” is a real thing women have to watch out for; a community set around the idea that men are owed a woman as a reward. these men and other men kill women for rejecting them. women are assured if they stop dressing like sluts and started giving these good honest men a chance, we would be hurt so much more delicately, without the man feeling nearly so close to guilty.
two years ago was the pulse shooting, where a latinx gay community was targeted, yet nobody talked about it on tv. instead every news caster pretended to be reeling: “what could he have wanted possibly.” this world, this america, this land-of-the-free, has gay/trans “panic defense” as a legal precedent in which i can be murdered if a straight person perceives an “unwanted homosexual advance”. i will not be around to defend myself, because i will be dead. i am assured that if i want to be upset about these things, i can just take my cake to another bakery. that it’s someone’s right to discriminate against me, because apparently freedom of speech covers bigotry.
we have been told backwards and forwards and upside down that everything we do is violent. that our peaceful protests are riots. that our legal demands are taking away from real problems. that we are not being good, that the violence enacted upon us isn’t really violence, it’s just The Way It Is. They quote MLK to us while they step on our necks. the anger we have is always too much, too loud, too valid. it Upsets The Peace.
i’m saying: you made the game. you set it up and played. you made sure we were always, always, always losing.
you don’t get to be surprised when we return what you gave us. you don’t get to cry “hate begets hate” instead of stopping the original bigotry in the first place. you don’t get to say it’s not fair! when you’re the ones who made it unfair to begin with. you don’t get to turn the other cheek to nazis but call anti-nazis a disgrace while whining and keening you’re not actually a racist. you don’t get to ban abortion for the “sake of the children” and then turn your nose because people are protesting children in cages. you don’t get to wring your hands now that people are punching nazis rather than sitting them down and letting them have a say. i’m saying you made the fucking rules!!
Gonna be dead honest. Does it matter? They’re showing support. I’ve long held the believe that doing the right thing for selfish reasons is still doing the right thing.
The fact that they belive it’s profitable means that society has changed. I think that’s something.
Just want to add that Kellogg’s and Orea jumping on the bandwagon is actually super helpful to young closeted LGBT+ kids who don’t really have a lot of support, and then they pick up their favorite cereal or snack and see something like this? That’s amazing! And it’s helping cis/straight kids see that being LGBT+ isn’t something that should be shamed, it should be celebrated and accepted, and I think endorsements like this, especially for products commonly consumed by children, are helping shape our younger generations to be the most accepting and open-minded ones yet!
