I can relate 100% to what the comment above here said. I plan to go see a therapist or similar when I have time to try to sort things out, but I'm so anxious I can't even really bother to figure out where I need to go / who to talk to.
I've used beta blockers in the past for things like speeches, and they are quite miraculous in my opinion. I'd like to get another subscription. In any case, they definitely do not help for longer-term problems in the sense that I will have anxiety for the days / weeks building up to things.
> CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you seem to explain. YMMV.
That is CBT with a therapist, or self-applied CBT? I've been meaning to go through "Feeling Good" book, it seems to be widely regarded as an effective way to apply CBT to yourself.
Re:The Importance of Anxiety
by petercooper on Friday February 13, 2015 @02:02PM
(#9046388)
First with a therapist but then self-applied. I think I needed an external "benchmark" to calibrate against and gain some structure from first.
Thanks. I hope I'll find some non-stupidly-expensive CBT therapist at some point. Did you use any resources for self-applied CBT, or were just basing on the things you learned on therapy?
Re:The Importance of Anxiety
by petercooper on Friday February 13, 2015 @04:46PM
(#9047427)
The latter. It was more having some mental artillery to use than a particularly formal process.
For the less controllable situational physical "fight or flight" anxiety, however, I've found low dosage beta blockers work very well. Apparently a lot of musicians and surgeons use them for similar purposes, but you'd need to have the mental anxiety sorted out first, I suspect.