I get where you are coming form i have dealt with anxiety since i as 7 im now 22!! Its horrible! you have your good days and then you just have horrible days! It will get better for the both of us :) Hang in there.

Here's how I learned to get past that "manage" word.

Anxiety is natural, so those panic/anxiety attacks are natural. Since it is natural, it means that natural choices (moving, tapping, drinking liquid, etc..., are all good choices, find the one that fits in the moment) will make it naturally go away.

Once I figured out that the way I pushed through those icky moments made the ones following a little, or in a couple of cases, a lot better, I could get past that word "manage".

Best wishes to feeling better! And, another positive to those attacks, they are your body's way of saying take a break ... sometimes, they stop us from making really dangerous choices.

You're not alone.

It's horrible isn't it. I've had depression and anxiety since my late teens and I developed haphephobia about two years ago. Some days you struggle worse than others. I've had days where I feel like I'm going completely around the bend. But you're not alone, you have plenty of support here.

I swear allot of the advice you see online is written up by someone who hasn't experienced mental illness for themselves. How does one expect you to manage it. You can't control it. You can use different techniques to help calm your nerves before and while you are having an attack but that's not really managing it.

I can't tell you it'll go away completely, but it can become a bit less overwealming with time.

Also, mid eyebrow I loved your advice!

You said it as well, sync, it's those people who have never actually physically faced a daily commitment to accept anxiety as part of their normal daily routine, who make it harder for everyone.

I am realizing that it is a learning process that I am going to have o go through before I get better. I am learning that when my body tells me something like "your tired, it's the middle of the day but it's okay to have a nap". I will take care of me.

You're heading in the right direction Hope. That's a good mindset!

I totally agree with you, in the long term you want the problem resolved, cured, your stress levels down to a normal stage where when you do have anxiety, it's due to real issues, and not an overreaction in your adrenal glands.

Because you experience anxiety as a normal part of existence even when you are cured. Just nothing like as much of it. :D

I personally think it can be cured, I have operated that way and I'm going very hard through the lessons I have needed to learn. I was raised to think things were far more all fired up vitally life/death important than they actually are, I was raised to think that any error was a terrible thing, and that I should attempt perfection in every single thing I did. I was raised, in short, in a very unrealistic way. And it means I have reacted to things in a way I would not now react, knowing what I know.

We have to learn more about the other people around us, and what they are actually thinking rather than what we fear they might be thinking. We have to learn how our body works and how strong it actually is; what it can overcome and surmount. We have to learn what our bosses want from us, and how to manage the people in our work life. We have to learn how to manage our kids so that they are not totally controlled by us, but we don't feel completely out of control.

It's hard. I call it growth, having gone through it. I think it's evolution, maturation which was blocked or stultified but which we must smash through in order to break free and escape and be on our way. Like a moral/emotional concentration camp.

... (sorry, hit send by mistake)

But in the short term yes; you have to manage it. You have to manage it in order to learn that it was unnecessary, to teach your defence mechanisms that this thing did not in fact kill you,and is therefore not a life & death issue.

You have to learn how to get through the experiences without doing anything to increase them, and let time be your friend.

If my logic is strong: we are getting anxiety because we have in the past NOT handled stress experiences well in the moment. We have not managed them well. This has led to a build-up in our system and now we're hypervigilant, hyper-reactive, overexposed to still-current levels of stress from events that should have been defused years ago.

So we have to learn how to handle each new one in the moment in order to learn how to release this stress.

so yes, i agree that we want it gone long-term and I agree that this can be done. But also, we do need to learn how to manage it short-term. :) so it's still valid.