Anxiety Reduction

When I was young, I had uncontrolled anxiety attacks that were debilitating. They were basically extreme fight-or-flight responses coming out of buried stress that I hadn't dealt with. My doctor suggested these as a means of controlling stress to prevent anxiety attacks.

Meditate. Take some time out to just sit a quiet place and focus on your breathing. Steady, controlled inhales through the nose. Steady, controlled exhales through the mouth. The goal is to remove the noise from your mind and to achieve a singular focused 'unfocus'. Instead of having your brain constantly leap from thought to thought, try to relax, open up, and take in everything around you at once without actually focusing on a single thing. Or, concentrate on something trivial. Try to control your heart rate, or rest your hands gently in your lap such that your thumbs are one on top of the other, but no quite touching. Try to keep your thumbs as close together as you can without them touching each other. This actually takes quite a bit on concentration since if you relax, your thumbs will fall together and your own blood flow makes them twitch ever so slightly.

Just taking some time and focusing on your breathing alone helps a lot in the midst of an anxiety attack.

Hard excercise. It gets the blood moving, and releases natural endorphines. Try to do it during the day or early in the morning. I find that I sleep more soundly and feel more rested when I wake if I get a nice workout in the day. You also come away from the workout feeling energized, more focused, and filled with a sense of vigor.

Take up a hobby that requires some concentration. I like to digitally illustrate things, photo-manipulate, or mess around with web/network applications in my free time. It requires focus, which pushes out stressful distractions from my mind, as well as gives me a sense of accomplishment that I can use as a base to get what needs to get done out of the way.

If I can't get to sleep, I'll get a nice hot cup of tea, a sketch pad, my 0.3mm lead pencil, and turn on some music through my iPod. I let the music guide my imagination, and then project that onto the paper. After about an hour, I'll be tired enough and calm enough to get some sleep.

Jam it back in, in the dark.