So I’m experiencing a new form of anxiety… i guess you could say. Well, new to me anyway. You see, I wake up with full blown anxiety. Like before i even have the chance to think about anything. Does anyone else experience this? How the heck am i supposed to combat this?
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I went through that for a while . Can’t quiet remember what stopped it . Could have been new medication . If you take anxiety medication maybe try up the dose.
I used to wake up like that: really gets the day off to a great start, doesn’t it? Sadly I have no quick fix suggestions about dealing with it. What really turned things around for me was getting a regular meditation practice and learning to “let go” of the unwanted negative thinking. That said, I do still take prozac (which seems to help with anxiety), but I haven’t had a full-blown panic attack in some years.
Best of luck!
I wake up with a severe panic attack quite frequently and the only things that seem to have helped are making sure to avoid all sugar and caffeine until much later in the day.My Doctor explained to me that common breakfast foods like orange juice and coffee can make it worse.I have not been able to avoid these morning anxiety attacks by changing what I do before bed so it’s just a matter of coping with the mornings.The other thing that works really well for me is to hop on my exercise bike for just a few minutes and rev up my heart rate,you could even jog in place, just enough for you to feel that quickening of your heart rate and see if that helps?I hope my comments have been of some assistance to you.Take good care
Keeping busy and taking my anxiety med helps alot. Distraction is good too. Hugs.
I’ve had mornings like that and what has worked for me is to do something that I usually do to get me out of that negative space. Right now, and some people might think this is like funny or weird, I turn on the TV to what is my current favorite show, Dark Shadows. My son got me this ridiculously computerized TV – no, he isn’t a nice guy, it was his way of getting me into senior living and out of his life – and it offers the entire five-year series on a number of different – stations? Sites? Channels? I’m 67 and I’m supposed to know this? So, I’ve locked onto Dark Shadows as I used to run home from school every day to see every episode. It’s actually been so long ago that I don’t remember a lot of the details so it’s like watching it all over again. I keep this show on in the background all the time now, switching between “stations” or whatever as they all seem to have different story lines, while some are in black and white and others are in color. I can then focus on their clothing and what I was wearing at the time, being in love with Barnabas Collins again, how interesting their accents are, how old they seemed to me before and how young they look to me now. I also love the music and actually have a Dark Shadows LP and 45. All of this helps put me where I’d rather be than being 67 and constantly terrified of what awful thing is going to happen next – oddly enough, that’s exactly the impact this show had on me when I was 10 to 14 years old. My life has been a true horror story, so this show makes me feel safer than the characters I’m watching. I love feeling as I did being involved with this show and buying all the teen magazines. I grew up mostly alone - I had a brother and both of us were adopted (no relation) so feeling comfortable inside this show lets me feel like a real human being. Closed adoptions should be illegal. People who are adopting should also have to pass numerous classes to weed out the people that got me and my brother. “Dad” was a pedophile, so now my “brother” is, too, while Mom took out her disappointments on the two of us while never sharing that she actually had a pretty good life when she was at work. I think she thought it would make us feel bad. No, it was that she liked feeling like a victim and would do anything to get people to feel sorry for her. I guess this included yanking hairbrushes through my unmanageable red hair. Everything was simply different about me compared to them. It took me decades and lots of magazines to understand that my color was peach or autumn colors. My skin was also far more sensitive than anyone else’s, but all of this seemed to fit to them that I was hotheaded and thus deserving of being abused. I had “behavioral” problems. Right. My “dad” put me into the sex trade when I was 4 until 11 and I was sent to a Christian elementary school where the first class was always Bible studies and God seemed to find his way into every subject all day every day. Needless to say, I was confused and angry most of the time. I’ve been in counseling my entire adult life and was hoping that if I did have children, which I didn’t want to as like most abused kids they don’t like kids, that I would raise them to be a part of the larger world and care about things genuinely instead of out of fear. I was mostly unsuccessful, even though I only had one kid – who’s supposedly a man now (he’s 46) and who’s announced that he’s never going to have kids. Well, he screwed up three relationships and now his health is an issue, and he doesn’t want to have kids who when they are ten he’ll be 56 – which is what happened to his father – being raised alone by people old enough to be his grandparents. They were also more involved in climbing the societal ladder and he’d be left with a senior-aged babysitter as he was showered with every game and toy on the market. Which is what these same people did to my son - who is now almost as messed up as his father. Most of 46 years of my life right down the drain. My son has an attitude problem and has been very abusive to me - just like his father. We’ve been divorced for 30 years - 30 years that I could have no friends or even an adult life as his parents paid for EVERYTHING, and being 40+ years older than us they simply stepped in and did things before we even had a chance to make adult decisions – so my son pretty much sees at least me as an older sister – which we did look VERY MUCH alike, leaving his father to look like our father. I’m sure he enjoyed that. So, he immediately went out and married a woman 9 years older than himself – his mother had died and I was a “modern woman” and wasn’t about to earn money that he would get away from me via days-long arguments. Why didn’t I leave? Everyone always asks. His parents were paying for my very expensive counseling to survive what had been my so-called childhood. I also had health issues from doing EVERYTHING short of shoveling snow or cleaning the hot tub. And no, he didn’t have a job. His job was keeping his parents’ money flowing in. Honestly, I think all of this would make for a really good tv series, especially as he did try to kill me, why my “dad” also had, too. So, there’s sex, drugs (everything available), rock and roll (he was in this pretty awful band), physical and mental abuse, new cars, old cars, kittens that never learned to use a litter box as our son was a baby so the litter box had to be put on the steps leading to the basements – of the house his parents put us in - that always had 3" of water in it, right next to where they put the washer and dryer - drop something, wash it again. I also built most of the furniture and moved most of it, too. So, yes, I am disabled now. And my loving son put me under a guardianship while doling out half his money during a three-year marriage. Suddenly he realized how old he was, what little education he has, and how much of his money was gone, so he put me under a guardianship as he’s still doling money out to others. That’s ok – he will be where I am in less than 20 years. At least he’ll have friends – thanks to me – and a few relatives, again, thanks to me. While I have neither. Ok, I’ve written way too much – I always do. Just ask my son – he will no longer read my emails claiming he’d rather talk, but then rarely calls or returns calls, so he’s also blossoming into the world of lies his father lived in. Just great. The stupid woman who got me this used furniture – from a resident who died – gee thanks – and that has caused odors in my apartment – chewed me out in front of other people when I came to her as she said I should – and I’m now supposed to trust her choice of a counselor for me – a MAN. I have PTSD from being put into the sex trade when I was four. “But they’re not all like that.” She obviously didn’t grow up in Hillbilly central like I did. Even my son was molested when he was about six by the son of one of my cousins. My brother’s son was also molested at that age by the son of the minister of their church. And they’re now saying the next step for me will be an institution. ME, not them. It’s all too easy to find a scape goat, especially if that person has been used and abused most of their life. I apologize again for the length of this email.