Hello everyone. I hope you all are doing fine. I wanted to fill in an update since the last time i wrote in. I continue to practice acceptance and as you might have guessed it, i had an episode this morning where my mind was relaxed but my body felt tense in different parts of my body. I had been feeling a little stressed over two things that occupied my mind. The more i thought about those things, the more tension my body was producing. it was like approaching fire with your hand, the closer you got to it, the more uncomfortable you felt. So the tension was there and ever increasing. If i struggled with it, i felt more of it, so what did i do? i just let go. I let go and of course the sensations were still there for a little while longer, with an occasional thought of the worse case scenario, but sitting with my feelings and sensations helped my body calm down. As soon as my mind settled, my body soon followed. All i am left with is just the muscle soreness where i was tensing up. So along with acceptance that what i feel is not going to hurt me, I am now going to practice not fearing the fear. Not fearing the fear that this will happen again (anxiety attack or panic attack), strips away the fuel that anxiety brings. It runs out of gas so what is left is just the bodily sensations without all the baggage of what ifs and this means this or that. What are your coping skills? I hope this help. Take care guys!

Hello Rich,

Acceptance is not the sense of failure and having to surrender to the fact that you get anxious. Acceptance is more like understanding what your body is doing at that moment without placing a label on your sensations. What i did was Identify anxiety as an emotion like happiness or sadness. That this only happens under certain situations and then it goes away. For me, my biggest issue was fearing that the symptoms and sensations i would get when i am anxious would trigger an illness. Once I removed the fear, I began to accept the sensations like a racing heart, dizziness, muscle tension, etc...Anxiety is trying to tell me something. What I used for acceptance is meditation. Meditation for me allows me to bring myself to the present moment. For example, in the middle of an episode when i get the sensations, i stop, and look beyond my racing heart, nervous trembling and focus on a distant sound or object. Then i bring it closer mentally until I can feel my breath. After a few minutes my mind settles and i feel my shoulders drop where i am relaxed. At first, before i did this, i couldn't wrap my head around the idea of accepting and i too had the interpretation of surrender. This is what has worked for me and it takes a while for your body to adjust. This has been a slow process where i have a lot of better days than bad days. Now when i get anxious, i accept that it happened and move on to something else. I see this differently nowadays but because i have been doing this for a while now. I hope this makes sense. It is hard to explain how to do it but there is a lot of info on acceptance.

🙂 Take care,

I walk five miles a day, drink lots of water, cut out crap food,and have a host of other personalized little things. I have found that modified exposure therapy ( my modifications, as it should be. 🙂 ..like a "seek and allow mission " is helpfulsometimes. Berating myself when I dont cross the personal finish line does not ever work.
If i keep track of my progress on a daily basis, I freak out internally somewhere. Usually my brain.
Coping skills are personal. nonetheless it is wonderful to interact here and give other people's ideas and skills a try. we are all in this together yes. yet, autonomous nevertheless.

ps...i get the electronics so far away from me when I;m on disconnect time (evening...and it usually takes me a while, ). I put the @!%&*!!! phone on vibrate and bury it under pillows in the dining room.
Sometimes even a nary of residual noise will set off certain things.
I too sit with my anxiety. That has been slow to come to-the practice of that. i noticed I had a tendency to tense against the emotions. So I sat. Out of resignation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, as this was in the earlier stages of my recovery, this was a very powerful revelation , and practice. Still is.