When Anxiety Attacks and What To Do About It
Let's talk about my lifelong struggle with anxiety and what works and what doesn't.
Update (July 2020): This is the first post on my blog explicitly dedicated to mental health. Before this, I’d mentioned my issues with anxiety a few times in passing but never actually admitted to having an anxiety disorder until this post.
While some of the things I talk about in this post are a little vague, the bulk of the advice is still valid. Note that when I wrote this post, I still considered myself a “healthy-living” blogger, but as you will read, I was in the very early stages of realizing that overall health is less about appearance and more about self-care and inner work.
What’s interesting to me about going back through my old posts is that now, having been diagnosed with Autism, OCD, and ADHD, I can spot it in my writing. For instance, the advice I give in this post for helping prevent anxiety—don’t procrastinate, stay organized, concentrate—are all GREAT tips for someone who doesn’t have untreated ADHD, as I did. I am impressed that even though I hadn’t been diagnosed with OCD as of this writing, I was able to talk about watching my thoughts and labeling them as anxiety. Even then, I knew the power of distraction to help lessen my intrusive thoughts. Overall, I am grateful I’ve written this blog for so long because it’s helpful to look back and see how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown.
