A place to visit when you have anxiety.

There are many things you can do to get through the “moment”, take a deep breath, close your eyes, stretch…. Anxiety can hit at any time and it can be triggered by just about anything. The worst part is there are multiple degrees of anxiety that can have multiple degree’s dependent on the triggers. The other negative part of anxiety is it’s a gateway to depression. Depression can literally be deadly as some people get to the point where they have no hope and they lose the will to live.

There are some things we need to remind ourselves this regularly to make sure we get through moments. One of those is we are not alone. There are tens of millions of people all over the world who have anxiety (to various degrees). As an example a woman living in Syria (as an example) likely has different stressors than say a 40 year old finance professional on wall street.

It doesn’t make either or more important than the other, but what we do glean from this is this is a worldwide issue. Dealing with Anxiety and staving off depression, for many of us, is a lifelong battle. It’s not a battle that affects us exclusively but it touches the people we love, the people we work with, the people we interact with. I will give a quick example…

A few weeks ago I had gotten some bad news that was minor in the grand scale of things but It was consuming me. In my mind I was dancing through all the possible outcomes to this news but I did have to pick something up at the store. My head was down, I was walking purposefully, I was not engaging other people with eye contact I had a scowl. Did anything happen? No, did someone likely see me and say “something isn’t right with this guy need to avoid” perhaps, and there in is one of the unspoken side effects of anxiety. People have to make a judgement on what they see when they don’t know you, and in today’s world one can never be too careful when they see someone who is “brooding”.

Are you having one of those moments and maybe need somewhere to go? Check out the Anxiety and Depression Association of America  https://adaa.org/  There are a lot of very good resources here in addition there are sub links to helpful articles and facts and statistics. For me, sometimes reading about issues and looking to see that there is someone else in the same boat is all I need to pick myself up and carry on.