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Tag: mental health
how did my ancestors survive the brutal unforgiving wilderness when I get anxiety sweats from going to Target
to be fair im sure your ancestors would have the exact same reaction going to a Target
In the brutal unforgiving wilderness false positives cost nothing and false negatives are expensive. You’re better off being afraid of something that can’t hurt you than not afraid of something that can hurt you.
In a world where we mostly aren’t in danger, day to day, as long as we don’t play in traffic or jump off something, that’s no longer quite as adaptive.
We got our anxiety from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who were scared enough to survive, and pass on those genes!
It helps me sometimes to think about that at night, when I can’t sleep because my heart is pounding over something like “what if my usually reliable alarm clock doesn’t work in the morning for some reason and I’m late for work and lose my job and everyone hates me.” There’s nothing wrong with me, I just have a lot of extra, unused run-from-tigers juice that my grandparents left me.
“Unused run-from-tigers juice.”
I love that.
Our brains have been running Hunter/Gatherer 1.0 for 60,000 years without a software upgrade.
some edgy loner character in a TV show: do you know…. do you KNOW what it’s like? to be AFRAID of YOURSELF?
me, thinking about that time i ate an entire family sized bag of doritos in one evening: god dude i sure do
TV mental illness vs IRL mental illness.
i think the worst idea that this site has popularized vis a vis mental health is that its okay to treat your friends like therapists, and that its expected they react like one when you have an episode or breakdown
its a lot like approaching a friend and going “hey, you bandaged my cooking burn once, can you give me open heart surgery?” and getting upset when either they refuse to do so or getting hurt when they dont have the knowledge needed to do it safely.
people can support you, and they can help you out of rough patches, but relying on them for your continued functionality and stability is stressful and dangerous for everyone involved.
Why “doing something relaxing” does not help your anxiety
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.)
You can be depressed and not feel sad or blue. Depression can also be a haze of sleepiness, distractedness/obsessiveness cycles, and a twinge of irritability that can be hard to recognize because you might already be a “fiery” person. It can feel like a lazy Sunday that keeps imposing itself for weeks or months.
Can we just… I’ll leave this here.
Watch: Kristen Bell opens up about the mental health double standard and how she manages her own struggle.
Follow @this-is-life-actually
Hit reblog on this so hard
SHOUT OUT TO KRISTEN BELL’S MOM THOUGH? WHAT KIND OF FANTASTIC SELF-AWARE PARENTING, WELL DONE MA’AM
Therapists are just…. Common sense filters
Me: yeah so I just don’t have the energy to get up and make myself a sandwich or wait for something to cook so I just. Don’t
Her: why don’t you just eat the sandwich components without putting them together
Me:
Her: you can just eat a handful of cheese and some sandwich meat. You don’t have to make a sandwich.
Me:
Me: what
Therapists finding loopholes for mental illness things is one of my favorite things about dealing with mental illness because it really helps me understand that just because a reaction is Common doesn’t mean it’s Right. Does doing dishes stress you out a lot? Buy paper plates. Do your obsessive thoughts make you worry about leaving your curling iron on so you drive home from work to check? Just put the curling iron in your purse and bring it to work with you while we work on tackling where this worry comes from. Symptom management doesn’t have to look like drudgery.
i hate when ppl say shit like BUT ANTIDEPRESSANTS ALTER YOUR BRAIN FUNCTION UNNATURALLY READ UP ON IT NURGGHH like yeah, youre right, they force it to produce serotonin so i can function, similar to how i take thyroxine bc my thyroid doesnt fucking make the right shit, similar to how people with diabetes take insulin, similar to how people with low iron take iron supplements, you thin slice of nutloaf
do you yell at people for eating food bc their body doesnt just naturally photosynthesize energy on its own
Never not reblog.
On point
does anyone else with intrusive thoughts do that weird dismissive head shake when they get them to kinda like.. reverse/reject the thought or is that just me
Gotta shake your brain like an etch-n-sketch and start over
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