Hello everyone!
I am a 31 years old male, and i’ve been fighting wildly with anxiety for my whole life, like a lot of people here i suppose, since anxiety is becoming more and more common. At my younger age i had plenty of panic attacks, i used to go to the hospital every night with certainty of death. After a few months of that, a psychiatrist said it was all because of anxiety (i was 16 at the time), and told me to take some meds, which i didn’t, since i thought with myself: if it’s in my mind, then i must be able to control it.
The fact is, i could control the panic attacks, everytime one would start i could manage it, so that worked fine for me. The problem is, i couldn’t ever control anxiety, the fear of very simple things, like going to the dentists, having sex with a woman for the first time (sometimes it won’t even go up because of the nervousness), etc., these kind of things frighten me in a way i can barely describe, i stop eating in advance, i literally lose 4 or 5kg in two or three days if i plan something like that.
Now, the ambivalence is, i trained myself to think of the possible bad consequences of these things, and rationally speaking, i KNOW that there is no consequence that would affect me in a negative way, i am not afraid of being rejected, i am not afraid of pain, i fear very little things when i speak rationally just because i think of the consequences, and they aren’t frightning. And yet my body feels every single inch of pain on the antecipation, my stomach feels bad, everything, then i keep telling myself “you idiot, what could possibly happen?”, and then i answer to myself “NOTHING! NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN!”, and this still won’t solve the problem, in the back of my mind there is something eating me.
Could you PLEASE tell me another trick so i can try and fool my brain? I do everything you can think of to manage anxiety, i exercise everyday (running and gym), i pretty much cut coffee, i cut alcohol, i eat very healthy for years, so it can’t be physical you know? It has to be on my brain, my thoughts, even with these thought experiments i adventure myself.
Thank you very much for the help, maybe some of you went through the same and found a solution for this torment.
Have a nice day!
