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Do This the Moment You Feel an Anxiety Attack
Interestingly, similar steps for recovering from a spin in an airplane can be applied to when the world starts spinning too fast around you.
I live with generalized anxiety disorder. I don’t know when it started. I’ve always had a mind that likes to run away and think of the worse possible scenarios. Actually, it likes to think of all possible scenarios, good or bad. But it’s the bad scenarios that scare me and almost completely disable me from time to time.
Thankfully, it doesn’t happen too often now that I’m an adult. And I learned many techniques to hide the paralyzing moments throughout my life. If you had seen me during the defense of my doctoral dissertation, you would have seen a calm and collected me. But people who know me knew I was screaming on the inside. My palms were sweaty. My heart was coming out of my chest.
And no, I’m not at all ashamed of this disorder. It's something I’ve been open about for a long time. I want people with anxiety disorders to know it’s possible to be functional in life, and that it's okay not to be okay from time to time. There is nothing wrong with you. It’s just a brain that’s too good at gaming things out.