You Have to Do the Work...

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Originally Posted by fixmybrokenmind

f you want to overcome your issues it is going to take hard work and lots of uncomfortable situations. I have lived with anxiety for as long as I can remember and the only way it ever improved was with effort.

Effort can include things like finding a medication that works for you and it doesn't discount the fact that your problems are real. If you are overweight you have to diet to lose weight it doesn't just happen, if you have a cold you rest and take medicine and if you suffer with anxiety you must also take measures to overcome it.

Little steps everyday add up. "Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can" - Arthur Ashe

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Yep! So great! Maybe you can write more about how you took initiative and the steps you took to getting better. It's so fundamentally simple but it really is a huge stumbling block to take initiative. I think some people simply had not been told how to do it, as they see anxiety as some far out disease that only media professionals can help, and don't know that they need to take initiative.

I do believe many people do not want to get better, as they had become identified with anxiety. For those people, they will fight you when you offer solutions because they actually want the limitations. It may be subconscious, but nevertheless, I really do believe this denial is very prevalent with people for many things, not just anxiety.

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Originally Posted by fixmybrokenmind

Whenever Panic posts it turns into an all out war.

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If you notice, I'm really cool to people that offer beneficial content to other readers of this site, but everything I every post no matter where, Gypsylee has to come invade, offer nothing but insults and stupid jokes, yet complain how much she hates what I wrote and tries to insult me. Isn't that like hating a TV show but continuing to watch it and complain how much you hate it every week? Why doesn't she just change the channel?

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Originally Posted by Teafrenzy

For me, the only thing that has really seemed to help was exposure therapy. I tried a lot of things, eating right, exercise, supplements, meditation, lots of water and tea.

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Well exposure therapy must have involved you doing quite bit of hard work which helps illustrate my points. That is totally you taking initiative and not just sitting around waiting for a miracle. Good job on that!

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Originally Posted by Teafrenzy

See the thing about anxiety is, it persists. You can be doing everything 100% right and see no progress. That's completely different than losing weight. With losing weight, you actually lose weight relatively quickly. In 2 weeks of strict diet and exercise, you will definitely see a few pounds drop and your clothes feel looser.

That's why anxiety is so hard. Anxiety seems like something that should be easy to overcome but it isn't.

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There may be something wrong with your healing techniques or you need to add something to it. I went from panic attacks multiple times a day and unable to leave the house without taking Klonopins and have not had a panic attack in years! I saw results constantly little by little. You can read about my journey up in the Stickies in my Techniques post and maybe you can find some inspiration or ideas from it.

I find accepting anxiety as an inherent part of the human condition allows me to suffer less, than when viewing it as the primary source to one's mental condition. This mindset alone takes work given how one is conditioned - to reject all forms of pain in favor of endless comfort. The influence of which I write is far different to that of natures programming that help's us avoid pain so that we may live and thrive.

Our economic culture uses fear itself in order to promote suffering so that we may adopt unnecessary methods and controls. What's any of that got to do with "doing the work"? In the spirit of "It's not that simple," I'm simply exposing the complexity of how many of us are influenced into doing more work than we really ought - or should. Moreover the key being in recognizing how we are are taught to fear fear itself. In fact I would go as far to say that my own predispositions spawn from a complex past of child abuse and varioius other negative environmental factors is less detrimental when compared to the mechanism that drives our current ideals, philosophies and ways of thinking.

So it is through this realization that I am better prepared to accept "anxiety" with a lot less fear which gives me more energy to do the work (regardless of which method) that actually works. At any rate ... it would appear to me that one's approach is more crucial to success than the testimonials of successful methods.

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Originally Posted by PanicCured

Well exposure therapy must have involved you doing quite bit of hard work which helps illustrate my points. That is totally you taking initiative and not just sitting around waiting for a miracle. Good job on that!



There may be something wrong with your healing techniques or you need to add something to it. I went from panic attacks multiple times a day and unable to leave the house without taking Klonopins and have not had a panic attack in years! I saw results constantly little by little. You can read about my journey up in the Stickies in my Techniques post and maybe you can find some inspiration or ideas from it.

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Yeah I have been seeing results too.

But the point being for some anxiety sufferers, they notice nothing after just 2 weeks. At the other website, anxietycentre, the creator of the site had anxiety for years before recovery. He found that it took 3 months before he noticed any difference. There is no scientific way you can diet and exercise for 3 months and not lose weight.

I do encourage you and anyone else reading this to tell people to stick with it. However, it would be wise to tell them they may not see results for a long time after starting the process.

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Originally Posted by Teafrenzy

Yeah I have been seeing results too.

...There is no scientific way you can diet and exercise for 3 months and not lose weight.

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"There is no scientific way you can diet and exercise for 3 months and not lose weight." Yes there is - I have done it. It's called trying to hard. (research the impact of cortisol/stress levels) You can do all the work you want, but if you don't allow time to heal ... you will not only hamper positive results, but end up worse off. The same applies to any kind of recovery work we take on.

Of course this is not to take away form your point of "sticking with it." Just a minor correction to an otherwise confusing statement.

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Originally Posted by Ponder

"There is no scientific way you can diet and exercise for 3 months and not lose weight." Yes there is - I have done it. It's called trying to hard. (research the impact of cortisol/stress levels) You can do all the work you want, but if you don't allow time to heal ... you will not only hamper positive results, but end up worse off. The same applies to any kind of recovery work we take on.

Of course this is not to take away form your point of "sticking with it." Just a minor correction to an otherwise confusing statement.

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Personally I don't believe you can put yourself into a caloric deficit and still not lose weight. (You could go ahead and ask on bodybuilding.com forums). However, there is a lot of controversy on the subject. But even if that is correct, the point being made is that it is generally much easier to see results when trying a sensible weight loss program than it is to see results at anxiety symptom reduction. The neurons involved in the limbic system are just far more complicated cells than fat cells. That's why this process takes so long.

Believe me I wish it was as easy as diet and exercise. Losing weight is a piece of cake compared to this.

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Originally Posted by Teafrenzy

Yeah I have been seeing results too.

But the point being for some anxiety sufferers, they notice nothing after just 2 weeks. At the other website, anxietycentre, the creator of the site had anxiety for years before recovery. He found that it took 3 months before he noticed any difference. There is no scientific way you can diet and exercise for 3 months and not lose weight.

I do encourage you and anyone else reading this to tell people to stick with it. However, it would be wise to tell them they may not see results for a long time after starting the process.

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I don't know how it would be possible to not see results for months if one is devoted to their dealign and doing everything they could. For me, I bought Patrick McKeown's anxiety Buteyko breathing book, read it, practiced the exercises, among doing other things, and within 5 days my anxiety was probably at least 30% better. Remember, I was at an 11 on a scale of 1-10, but in a week I was noticeably better. Still not good in any way, but noticeable changes. You notice getting better in ways that may be subtle. Such as, instead of waking up at 5 AM with panic attacks, they don;t happen until noon. Maybe you have hours of the day where you feel normal rather than none at all. Maybe you were able to buy food at the store without a problem. Little things. Maybe people should keep a journal and write down certain symptoms and look back every week to see the changes they may overlook.

I would say from the day I jumped on the healing path devoted to getting better, until where I felt totally purged of my panic disorder, was about 9 months. But I was also trying to get off Klonopins at the same time which created a whole added mess to the whole thing.

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Originally Posted by Ponder

"There is no scientific way you can diet and exercise for 3 months and not lose weight." Yes there is - I have done it. It's called trying to hard. (research the impact of cortisol/stress levels) You can do all the work you want, but if you don't allow time to heal ... you will not only hamper positive results, but end up worse off. The same applies to any kind of recovery work we take on.

Of course this is not to take away form your point of "sticking with it." Just a minor correction to an otherwise confusing statement.

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Totally off topic, but obviously if you ate in a seriously low caloric deficit you would lose pounds within the first week. The problem is people do not understand you don't burn fat and all the little gimmicks don't really matter, just eat less calories. Exercise is totally important for many reasons, but matters very little for just straight weight loss. There is no burning fat, you can only burn off calories which then your body uses fat as energy.

Using this as a metaphor for anxiety, then we can see that results happen in a straight forward logical method. Eat any food at all with an overall caloric deficit of 500 or more calories per day, you are dropping pounds unless you have something physically measurably wrong with you.

The trick then becomes to do this in a sustaining way, so you can keep it up, still get all of your nutrients and remain healthy, and not get so hungry you lose it! This is the actual strategy.

And by doing exposure therapy you are doing the work! :)

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Originally Posted by PanicCured

I don't know how it would be possible to not see results for months if one is devoted to their dealign and doing everything they could. For me, I bought Patrick McKeown's anxiety Buteyko breathing book, read it, practiced the exercises, among doing other things, and within 5 days my anxiety was probably at least 30% better. Remember, I was at an 11 on a scale of 1-10, but in a week I was noticeably better. Still not good in any way, but noticeable changes. You notice getting better in ways that may be subtle. Such as, instead of waking up at 5 AM with panic attacks, they don;t happen until noon. Maybe you have hours of the day where you feel normal rather than none at all. Maybe you were able to buy food at the store without a problem. Little things. Maybe people should keep a journal and write down certain symptoms and look back every week to see the changes they may overlook.

I would say from the day I jumped on the healing path devoted to getting better, until where I felt totally purged of my panic disorder, was about 9 months. But I was also trying to get off Klonopins at the same time which created a whole added mess to the whole thing.

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yeah but PC you have to understand is that everyone is different. Anxiety is truly the "snowflake" of mental health. No 2 conditions are ever purely alike. Some people get a nervous stomach, some get uncontrolled fear, some feel totally fine but get heart palpitations. There are over 100 different symptoms possible. Some people get this problem when they are young, some get it at middle age. etc.

Therefore, everyone's reactions to recovery will be different as well. Some people will recover quicker than others.

You are using your own unique circumstances as a template for how fast everyone recovers, which just simply isn't fair. When people struggle with recovery, the last thing they want to hear is "they are weak" or "they aren't doing the work". You don't know what they are doing.