Looking back on my years of anxiety it’s now easy to take a more rational view of the way it progressed and the state of mind I was in at the time. This is much more difficult to do when you are in the thick of it, being rational, and severe anxiety, just don’t go together. If I had kept a diary I can guarantee that looking through it would reveal all the proof needed to expose the reality of how panic attacks occur and that it is indeed brought only by fearing it in the first place. Although there is no doubt that lack of exercise and poor diet play a big part, they are not the root of the problem, if anything they just add fuel to the fire.
Most people looking to cure anxiety naturally will probably be looking for herbal remedies but this is not going to be about anything like that. I am going to discuss the most natural cure you can possibly have and that is to do what we should be doing naturally, force yourself to act out some basic human behaviour. I use the word force because it’s quite important. The reason we suffer anxiety so badly in the first place is because we have forced ourselves into a very unnatural way of thinking, so forcing our way back out of it is the best cure.
Once you are in too deep you lose the ability to stop yourself thinking about. You expect anxiety to consume your everyday activities. It’s easy for a non sufferer to simply say, “don’t think about it, relax” but we already know it just isn’t that easy. It is my belief that the only way to truly take your mind off of this unnatural behaviour is to find an interest that is powerful enough to make it happen naturally. Nothing under the sun can turn your thoughts off like a switch, there is no drug and no trick.
The best thing you can do is make sure you are in a place where you feel most relaxed. By this I don’t mean you will necessarily be relaxed but somewhere where you feel the least threatened by an anxiety attack. For most of us this will be somewhere that we won’t be seen by others or not trapped somewhere like driving on a motorway. Unfortunately this is also the most difficult part, especially if you need to go to work everyday.
At the very least take a few days out and then find a way to occupy yourself with something that requires concentration and physical movement, i.e., gardening, decorating, washing the car, change your house around, move the furniture, have a massive clear out, etc. What you don’t want to do is something that requires concentration without physical effort like a jigsaw puzzle or computer game, at least not at this stage . If you can’t stop thinking about anxiety or having a panic attack then don’t worry about it, let it eat you up if it has to, let it do it’s worse.
The reason for this is because it’s less stressful than trying to run away from it. It doesn’t matter what you do to occupy yourself but the most important thing is do not stop, not for a second. Don’t take time out to lie down till the feeling wears off, just create a task and see it through to the end, preferably something that will take you all day or a few things that will take a few hours each task. If you need to stop what you are doing then stop but fill that time with a long brisk walk or a run. Your goal is not to cure your anxiety right here and now but to force yourself into a non stop action plan for at least a few hours and then monitor the result.
When you have finished a task, try to take yourself back through what you were doing and how you felt. You should notice there were quite a few moments where your mind was completely off of the anxiety. If it wasn’t then find something different to do and start again. If you do this every day for as long as you can you will notice that less of your day is about anxiety and there are quite a few moments where you feel completely normal. Use this as your proof that this is all in your mind and that you can get over it.
The most important thing I figured out from my anxiety and panic attacks is the more I was in a situation that I would least like it to happen, the more likely it was to happen, in fact I’d go as far as saying it was guaranteed to happen. I went through years of this. The times I would be least likely to have an attack would be when it mattered the least to me, this would be when I was home alone with nobody to have to hide it from and no plans made for that day where I would have to leave my safe zones or stressing about having to go somewhere. The more things I got involved with that required concentration, the less I would think about my anxiety, this was especially so when that activity was also physical, or at least not sitting down or standing still.
This was consistent for me and I would suggest you try the same. Add to this some regular exercise, better diet if necessary and you should be on your way to recovery. One more thing you notice with sufferers of severe anxiety is they don’t laugh or have a great time very often because the anxiety tends make us avoid it. It’s not easy but try to change that, look for some fun activities to get involved with, regular laughter has an amazing effect on health.
