Anxiety – Stop The Fear Right Now

This post is designed for people having panic attacks or severe anxiety right now. Feel free to bookmark for later use if desired.

Emergency Level (Panic Attack / Anxiety Attack)

That video is amazing.  Something about her voice and the river is highly effective – and it works fast. Listening once always works for me, but listen twice if needed.

Less Intensity Level Anxiety (but you’re still anxious and uncomfortable)

This post will guide you through anxiety relief from highest intensity to lower intensity. After listening to the emergency anxiety relief video above, I recommend this one:

This guy either keeps moving stuff around or breaking my link somehow. I own the mp3, so if this keeps happening I will figure out how to cut the mp3 down in size and upload it. Providing a link to his website as I do so, of course.

The video above also works nicely for irritable anxiety; anger, hostility, and aggressive impulses. It might take a little while. If it’s not working, try some other videos on this page.

If the prior video is too abrasive for your level, this gentle song might work. This sounds like massage table music.

Is it time to go to bed? Or are you at home and able to take a nap? Try this wonderful sleep hypnosis meditation below by Jody Whitely. A few minutes into the video she starts talking about melting… a soothing melting sensation, all your trapped energy just melting away.  That works great for me.

This one is probably not appropriate for emergency level anxiety. It requires a little more concentration. Try this one after something else here has taken your anxiety down quite a few notches.

The video below was actually recommended to me by a therapist in the past.

At the start, “Weightless” feels like it’s going to be too intense. But very quickly it molds into an incredibly soothing sound. It was written in collaboration with sound therapists.

You are on a shining beach at mid-day. Seagulls waddle by. The sun breaks through the clouds creating a silvery vacillating effect, adding to your relaxation.

“Drift” is awesome. But a little way in there is a mild “helicopter” effect thing that some might find too intense. This one is not for full-on panic level. Possibly it’s not designed for anxiety. But it works for me and it’s a great song.

Other tips:

Take a cold shower.

ICE COLD. It forces you to take in a big gulp of air. Almost against your will, really. It forces the issue if you are really having trouble slowing down enough to do breathing exercises. Trust me – if you have severe anxiety or panic – it won’t even be hard for you to keep the lever turned to ice cold the entire duration of the shower.

Last time I had a bad one, I took an ice cold shower and then listened to the “Emergency” video I plugged at the beginning of this post. Worked like a charm.

Pop a sugar free cough drop in your mouth.

It’s the menthol. Works for me, might work for you. Why sugar free? Because the ones with sugar taste like shit to me. I always have sugar free Hall’s lozenges around. It makes these videos even more effective. This is an old trick I learned from back in my stoner days. It relieved both the coughing and the occasional self-induced paranoia ;). It was an accidental discovery that menthol helps anxiety, but I use it to this very day.

Thanks for reading and be well.

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Thursday

I have tomorrow morning off and I am looking forward to it. Not that I will be doing anything super fun (I am moving a small amount of stuff) but I enjoy the driving back and forth part or moving. It’s a work at home thing, you start to get excited about errands. I had to visit the bank today, then clean up some litter boxes at the house and even this little outing was good.

I was cranky yesterday and I am mostly good today. I will get this meal down even if it takes 40 minutes. Mushrooms are a great addition to pasta. It’s a bit dry from being in the freezer but it tastes good. She used cheddar potato chips as breadcrumbs that go over the top of a pasta bake. Worked out well. This in addition to leftover taco bell (I ate it all, and half cold!) . So now I am going to be in the bathroom a lot I’m sure. But I needed some food. Plus a little bag of Doritoes. The texture is bothering me a bit but that’s okay.

People are funny. Someone came by to look at my desk last night and she brought me a little loaf of Panera Bread. Oh yeah, and she just rolled in the front door like she lives here. It was so funny. She was startled to see me sitting in a chair and I was startled to see her roll in all full tilt without knocking and make a beeline for the desk, and she was like “I brought you some bread” which I could not eat because I have no butter. And B was on the way with Taco Time.

She did not even take the desk because it won’t work for a sewing machine set up. I took good pictures. So two people have rejected it. One is coming tonight. If nothing else, B and I will haul it out to the street tomorrow with a free sign.

April Come She Will

“April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again

June, she’ll change her tune
In restless walks she’ll prowl the night
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight

August, die she must
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September, I’ll remember
A love once new has now grown old”

S&G are quite hit-and-miss for me. Either I love a given song, or I can’t stand it. I love the April song. On the surface you listen and it’s just about the changing of the seasons and then suddenly in the last line he’s thinking of a girl.

Well, then I read the lyrics and he’s talking about the girl the whole time. It’s sexual at the start, right down to the “come she will”, the mention of ripeness and swelling, and of course the first 3 months are female names. Right. And then August is typically a male name. Maybe they fell apart because good ‘ol boy August entered the pictures. And then you can kind of relate it back to the weather again, because that hot bastard August is always the beginning of the end 😁

Jokes aside, it’s expert songwriting and a beautiful tune.

I should do more of this. It gets me out of Journaling (which I am decidedly not always in the mood to do) and the effort of all the copy and paste action, plus a couple thoughts, is enough time to complete a blog n eat.

I’m pleased that I behaved myself last night and also checked off all the boxes on things I wanted to get done.

Moments

I did have a moment, but I got past it by reminding myself that the box which houses the 24 hour allergy medicine says to avoid sin. Unless you want to feel weird and/or pass out. So that’s keeping me on the straight and narrow.

Today I cooked a decent breakfast that tasted good. And I fed B. But while cooking, the tell-tale irritability and lack of coordination made their appearances. Not helped by the fact that the faucet must be delicately turned to that littlw sweet spot where it’s just a little north of warm, and not scaulding hot. I should find that place and mark it with a black sharpie.

Now I am eating leftovers from yesterday, and having successfully beat a booze craving (thus far), I am wishing I had cheetos, ranch doritos, dark chocolate, rich and moist chocolate cake (with shredded bits of dark chocolate adorning whipped cream on top), Ghirardelli hot chocolate powder, whole milk and vanilla ice cream.

You know, as much money as I’ve spent on booze in the past I may as well go out and get each and every one of these things. Or a facsimile of the harder to find items (Ghirardelli powder is not common). I mean really. There is only one time of the month when I experience such incredible chocolate lust. I do have a bar of fancy dark chocolate that I left at her house and I am damned tempted to drive back and retrieve the thing. Ha.

Anyway. I very well could go get some ranch doritos and other sin food, and it remains an option. Or, I may just settle for the packet of reeses cups I have, paired with a small amount of Greek yogurt doused heavily in Hershey chocolate syrup.

Enough food talk. The salt cravings are maddening. I want All the salt and ALL the dark chocolate. Good thing my pasta foods I am eating are also salty.

The plan is to finish up the meal, go for my second walk of the day, have a bath and a shave… and then do some tasks on the laptop. Mostly involving posting things I am giving away because I am here until next Friday and then I turn the keys over and move in with B.

Given my energy challenges lately, this list of things to do is quite ambitious. If all I do is walk for an hour, then have a bath and a shave and go to bed, then I guess I will do the other things tomorrow morning. The most important thing is that I stay away from the corner store. If I go anywhere at all, I go down to QFC to get sin food and swing by her house to share the bounty. But more than likely, this yogurt and reeses thing will suffice. And probably I won’t let myself go anywhere so that I avoid the corner store. Although, I am feeling like I pretty much got over the hump. Dinner helped. I can trust myself to head to QFC if food lust continues, because it’s literally in the opposite direction. It’s not as if I even pass it when heading for QFC.

Hey. Plain Greek yogurt is at least healthier than ice cream.

Anyway. Dinner and dessert being now accomplished, I think I better head out for that walk. We have more daylight now. It’s spring.

Lost N Found at the Flexible Time Axis Train Station

They need a Lost N’ Found for souls. You just roll up to the counter and see, pray tell, if anyone seen your old soul lately.

Description, please, says the counter worker with a tall red bell boy hat because I been watchin’ the Crown on Netflix and so I picture this Lost N’ Found counter in an old fashioned train station.

Well sir, thank you for asking, the soul had energy and life force, dare I say passion in a few different areas and now it’s bored at times and has new physical ailments in the body that houses it.

Ah, he says, I can look but it sounds to me like you got to get yourself back to the garden.

I stare mutely for a moment because I can’t believe he’d be that cheesy. Dear sir, I say, tell me you didn’t just quote CSNY or Joni Mitchell or whomever that was. He smiles coyly and gives me a wink. This is the train station of Flexible Time Axis and he knows all these things. All at once, he turns around and begins to rummage through the chest of lost souls and dreaming alibis. A moment later, he turns around and throws his hands up, a cloud of confetti shooting out of each sleeve. Oh dear I’m afraid it’s not here. You’ll have to keep searching or perhaps create a new one.

*

I’m not even on psychedelics, I’m just like this sometimes. I’ve actually been moody on account of pms and anti-histimine. So it surprised me to sit down and shit that while thing out. It started out as just a thought or maybe a lyric about lost n found for souls and became this whole scene.

Silly cats.

B can get some cute videos of her cats. Look at this first jewel.

It’s so perfect.

Them she did other cure shit to good effect.

The one below is not new but it never gets old for me.

And this concludes our “Yes I am hungry and I will eat” post. So far it is going better than it did this morning.

Flowers

“Through the corridors of sleep
Past shadows dark and deep
My mind dances and leaps in confusion
I don’t know what is real
I can’t touch what I feel
And I hide behind the shield of my illusion

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end
And flowers never bend with the rainfall

The mirror on my wall
Casts an image dark and small
But I’m not sure at all it’s my reflection
I’m blinded by the light
Of God, and truth, and right
And I wander in the night without direction

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end
And flowers never bend with the rainfall

No matter if you’re born
To play the king or pawn
For the line is thinly drawn ‘tween joy and sorrow
So my fantasy becomes reality
And I must be what I must be and face tomorrow

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end
And flowers never bend with the rainfall”

Higher self

This one is a little longer. The key points I will summarize below are going out of memory.

Key point 1 – she talks about the two wolves that battle inside everyone. The elder says the first one is malice, jealousy, violence, all those things. The second wolf is compassion, kindness and things along those lines. The youth asks the elder which wolf will win. The elder says, “the one you feed.”

My thoughts; true and we need to be reminded of it. But it’s also a very hard battle. When you are isolated, resentful. This battle may happen all through the day where your good wolf is constantly having to keep your evil wolf from getting out in the open. For my part I do think I will work on my resentments with a therapist. Because left to my own devices I will shove them down and bulldoze over them. They did this to a field of weeds near my place last summer and the weeds and all the plants popped up again like nothing. I suppose I want someone professional to help me tear out the roots. Anger at anyone else is a part of anger at myself.

Key point 2 – thoughts are just tools. We are not our thoughts. They are simply tools that lead to getting things done in our day to day lives. The mistake we make is to identify with our thoughts as though they form our identity.

So for example, I was or used to be the music lover and free spirit who enjoyed learning new things on guitar. And all those neurotic thoughts I started identifying with gained on me and made me a freaked out anxiety depression person.

I did it to myself. And once the damage is done, it’s done. And so we end up in situations where we start taking medication just so that we can be level headed enough to do therapy, so that we can work toward getting off the med and have what we learned in therapy be the bigger tool.

I poo poo’d all that for a long time, but now I see the logic. The wolf got fed so mightily that now you have to do both meds and therapy to be functional.

I am still being somewhat abusive with my language, going back to what she said in yesterday’s video. Yes, well, the two wolves are circling each other. At least I have vision now. More than I could have said in past years or months. So I will still sit here and be abusive to myself and others, but I will recognize it and attempt to correct course.

Writing does help. The resentments will swirl around and I will experience them. Writing like this releases them. And listening to her as much as I can. And crying. And choosing to be vulnerable with at least myself, if nobody else.

All this against the backdrop of being very ill. I told B this morning, and I stand by this, that I have immense compassion for all those other people out there who have depression/anxiety and who are now sick with covid or any other serious virus. If I were to die, at least I died with some grace, compassion and forgiveness in my heart even if I also was walking thru little resemtment clouds in my last days.

This post wasn’t supposed to be so much me me me, but it kinda came out that way. Anyway the vid is worth a watch.

Watch that Language

In this one she relates a story that teaches us a lesson: Even therapists fuck up sometimes. Take them with a grain of salt if they say something offensive and then correct them.

She chose to move (chose to, not had to) as a temporary setback in her goal to get back on her feet. The end result was stabilizing and then getting a house later on that she liked even more than the first house.

Her therapist had made a catastrophe about this. While trying to be sympathetic. And Jody guarded her palace. Now she shows us how to do that.

It would not bother me at all to dedicate every post to her and feature a video. I have turned to her for refuge, finding it nowhere else in my life, and now she is the goddess who imparts lessons and I share and transcribe them for anyone else who wants to come along for the ride.

My one sided relationship has been deepened as I learn that she was/has been just as capable of being dark, twisted, and bitter as the next person. Because again, most people meet a nice hippie female pixie like this and assume that they hatched out like this. From day 1.

Sometimes these people who do good things for others and heal themselves are forged from metallic forces of pain that you can’t even imagine.

She had nowhere to turn, so she began looking inward. She also did traditionally recommended things like therapy. She read self help books. She made it her job to get well.

This is my main tool. I have this and I have a friend. And if I can pull through this virus, I will be dedicating more time to being her disciple of sorts.

I reached a breaking point a few days ago. There was crisis and there was nowhere to turn. I went as far as to text a crisis line a few nights ago, only to be reminded that they will drop you like a hot potato if you’re not standing on a bridge about to jump off.

I realized at some point this year that I have a very grave need for safety and security in another person. This is not something I was always aware of. I cannot get that need met anywhere. I knew it before, somehow, and that is why I kept to myself for a long time.

But, with this lady I can get that need met in a one sided kind of way. Her together with a male contemporary of hers.

I have a lot of cynicism and darkness to work through, some of it justified. For example, if I have Jody and my needs are met here, then why should I waste money on a therapist? I’ve already made plans to relay the brick fortress around myself and just be the follower and transcriber of what I learn from this glowing angel. And so should I bother putting my neck on the line anywhere else? This isn’t necessarily the best way to think but that is where I am at right now. Ironically I could use some of these tools I am looking through this one non professional therapist I am clinging to and maybe work through that.

It is something I have thought for a long time. If I were able to do it on my own 100 percent, then why the fuck would I need friends or even a lover at any point? There is a certain bitterness there. The answer of course, is let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Since I don’t actually know what it feels like to be healed, then I cannot possibly visualize what it’s like to relate to people in that state. I guess I just assume they will all mooch good vibes off of me and I get nothing in return. But why would I even care in the first place? If I was this more spiritually advanced person, I would not be concerned with mooches, now would I? Do you see where I am going with this? I am trying to imagine something that I cannot actually imagine because my brain is not like that yet. And I am future casting a scenario where I would presumably be different than I am now, but I am looking at that situation through the eyes connected to the mind that I have now. And that is what I mean when I say these concerns are getting ahead of the moment.

I did not expect this to be quite so long. My modest little meal ended a while ago. Now i have moments where I almost feel normal. And other moments where I have brain fog and still very much feel sick.

I could hop about doing things, but I think I will rest more, do more study of her videos (I am legit taking notes – for real I take notes on this stuff now) ans I can try to do some chores tomorrow.

Yeah covid is pretty fearsome. I would not wish this bug on most people.

Now that I am feeling more kind, I hope that anyone who reads this is having a good day and if you are not, then I hope tomorrow is better.

Changing Beliefs

I like this one too. She’s correct, what she asks of people can be incredibly difficult.

So why listen to her? Oh, I dunno, maybe because she has fibromyalgia, subsequently became an alcoholic and depressive and was then able to change her beliefs and change her life. Jody has some street cred where it concerns overcoming struggle.

Ain’t no doubt in my mind she created a persona that brings her joy and helps a lot of other people. At some point she stopped producing content but that is A okay because she’s already got tons of it.

Also ain’t no doubt she used to be just as dark, twisted and grumpy as the next depressive.

Stupid people will assume the stork dropped her down on earth, already packaged as this cheery earth mother persona that she became in order to benefit herself and other people.

People won’t consider how she was a bitter drunk with a physical disability. And at the time of her content producing, she was psychoactive free. Though I would not put it past her to eat mushrooms now and then. And I like this about her.

I suppose it gives me a tiny bit of hope, and she herself would argue that tiny adds up.

I like her example in this video – 1000 is either not enough to cover basic living expenses, or it can be a token of how kind humanity is capable of being.

There’s about 17 or 18 of these little videos over there. Little depression management tricks and tips.

He said be the change you want to see and there she was.

I still have to eat once a day or more, so here I am. Having myself a covid little Christmas.

They dropped off a lot of food that I can’t taste and so will not eat. It’s all right, they don’t really understand. This is like an aggressive move, typical of my family. Shove food into her territory and she WILL eat. In a moment of drunken fear I had texted the matriarch that I can’t smell or taste anything and that I am scared. All this served to do was scare the shit out of her and now she remains anxious. Great job, junkie drunk. Scare your mother. Now elderly.

Just successfully got down an asian cup of noodles. Have not had those for a while and they have not changed. It is almost tastable.

She left me a message this morning. I had a brief weep and pulled myself together. Just that she loves me and knows this is a shitty Christmas. I better take that mosquito medicine she brought. Et cetera. Well, I have begun the zinc they brought but I am not too sure about the mosquito medicine and the other shit which some doctor on Hannity said to pair with it.

Was good to force posting that video up there… because it’s opposite what I woke up feeling. Sometimes we need to do opposite action or expose opposite idea to ourself.

Because much of morning was all about, you know, I am ready to go. Thanks. Just make it relatively fast and not too painful. Talking to what most people would I guess call littleggod. I despise how that gets auto capitalized so I will always say little g in front of it to beat the system.

Anyway made peace with the idea of respiratory failure and didn’t want to rise. Now I am just trying to get chores done. Go back and forth between like littleggod go ahead and take me up and opposite attitude like fuck you I will get this whole floor vacuumed at least. Eventually. Folding laundry warrants a sit down break.

Anyway I am done here. I’d wish people a nice Christmas except that I’d be a liar if I pretended to actually give a shit. But. I can at least put good vibes out to extent possible and say thanks for reading and or thanks for watching the vid.

Y

You are not your depression.

I like this one. I think people with depression do think that other people react to them as people, rather than reacting to the illness itself. She does a much better job explaining what I mean in the video.