It's ruining my life..

[keelynadine]

Hi friends.

Anxiety runs in my family so I figure a lot of my issue has to do with it being hereditary but I feel so overwhelmed.. I've been waking up every morning feeling wired and anxious and just down right scared sometimes. I'm super sensitive to all my physical symptoms of anxiety which range from just being shaky, muscle twitches (all over), headaches and sleepiness, increased heart rate... etc. I'm not on any medication for this although I have been in the past and I don't like the way medication makes me feel so I stopped taking it all together and haven't taken anything for this for months. Any suggestions on just how to cope with this and get through these physical symptoms?

Thanks

[Jeff1943]

Anxiety may run in your family but that doesn't mean you can't reduce its effect on you to the minimum, control it and experience long period of time when you're free of it.

What inhetited anxiety means is that our nervous system is prone to become over sensitive much more readily than most, maybe we pump out anxiety hormones more easily. Sometimes this may be due to too much cortisol in our system which peaks at 8 a.m. causing that extra anxious feeling on waking that improves as the day progresses. Some people find drinking green tea first thing is helpful in countering early morning anxietyas the L-theanine it contains reduced cortisol levels. But it only works for some.

Worry, stress and over work can cause our nerves to become too sensitive and it repays us by sending out all these awful symptoms and bad feelingsthat we know so well. Trouble is we react to these with more fear which keeps our nerves in this frazzled state.

Even though anxiety symptoms are all bark and no bite (they aren't life threatening and can't disable you or make you lose your mind) they still leave us with great discomfort - and it's so easy to get depressed about what' happening to us so it's a kind of double whammy.

However, if we can substantially cut down the amount of fear we react to the bad feelings with we can begin our recovery. This means accepting the symptoms for the time being calmly and with the minimum of fear. After all, we know that the symptoms of anxiety are just glitches in our nervous systems and not genuine physical illness. So frame your mind to accept those bad feelings when they come, they are fake symptoms after all, and just carry on with your life even though you feel like rubbish. The important thing is to accept utterly the bad feelings for the present and attach much less importance to them.

If we can stop frightening ourselves half to death for long enough our nervous system becomes less sensitive and we join that happy band travelling the Yellow Brick Road to recovery.