Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
My husband and I are heading to New Mexico to see his family tomorrow. We live in Germany so it is a long trip. I'm okay about it, I guess, but I'm not in the best mental place right now and I'm afraid I will keep slipping towards anxiety and depression as we travel and when we see his family.
I find air travel and long flights stressful and uncomfortable. Also, every time we go back to the NM, there is a ton of drama from his ex and that affects the way my husband's daughter acts towards us. She's seventeen. She barely wants to see her dad and she acts like I'm invisible. It has been pretty poisonous.
Anyway, does anyone have any advice to help me to keep from slipping into a really bad mental place on this trip? How do you manage your anxiety when you are in extremely stressful situations?
I find air travel and long flights stressful and uncomfortable. Also, every time we go back to the NM, there is a ton of drama from his ex and that affects the way my husband's daughter acts towards us. She's seventeen. She barely wants to see her dad and she acts like I'm invisible. It has been pretty poisonous.
Anyway, does anyone have any advice to help me to keep from slipping into a really bad mental place on this trip? How do you manage your anxiety when you are in extremely stressful situations?
What I'm trying at the moment, and it's been working on and off, is the following:
1. Take 2.5 mg lorazepam at night but only when I really, really, really need it. Ideally I would do this every night, but I have a very limited supply thanks to the doctors here in the UK who won't prescribe benzos.
2. I'm taking a daily brisk walk, about 30 min.
3. I'm practicing positive thinking. This is very difficult, but even one minute here and there helps and makes a difference.
4. I write daily about the following:
a) five things that went well the previous day and that I'm grateful for. Even the sun coming out for five minutes counts.
b) Write about my ideal future as if it had already happened. I focus on my future self in one-year-time, what I will be doing then, how I will be feeling. In your case you can write about your ideal trip, how you reacted to your step-daughter's snubs, how you kept so strong and so on.
c) I write a short letter of appreciation to someone that means a lot to me. I tell them why they mean so much to me.
d) This is the one that helps me the best: I write about an experience in my past that made me very happy. My favourite is when I was a child I remember running to greet my eldest brother who had just arrived home carrying my school supplies for the next school year. This memory makes me so happy that I keep on going back to it time and time again. Even now I can feel my heart palpitating slightly less hard.
5. I smile for at least thirty seconds as many times as I can remember during the day. The reasoning behind this is that smiling releases endorphins, natural painkillers and serotonin, which in turn help decrease blood pressure and stress. If you don't feel like smiling place a pencil between your teeth and keep it there for as long as possible. This will achieve the same results because it pulls the same muscles. I know it works because I do feel my heart beating less hard.
I took steps 4 and 5 from a book called 59 Seconds, which is about snippets of true and tried self-help research.
What I'm doing doesn't relieve extreme anxiety, but it can make it more manageable. Sometimes I feel dreadful, but sometimes I feel just very bad. However, I haven't had a single panic attack since my husband has found out he has lost ALL his inheritance, a nice sum of money that was going to set us up for life. He's got Asperger's so can't work, I'm too ill to work, so yes, my anxiety is very bad because of that.
Take care Judy, and I hope my advice helps you some. It must be very difficult to deal with such a dysfunctional family, but I'm sure other people here at DS will have tons of advice for you (and me).