A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.
This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.
You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.
People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.
In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.
Therefore, I present to you:
THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS
–Go on a walk
–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.
–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching
–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind
–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift
–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:
–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.
–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.
–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.
–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)
–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.
–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.
–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:
–List the capitals of all the U.S. states
–List the capitals of all the European countries
–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.
–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.
–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.
Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.
(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)
This would’ve been great an hour ago
This is good advice for anxious peeps and peeps with anxious friends. Seems obvious now but I hadn’t thought about it this way before.
For real, this is the greatest advice I’ve ever seen concerning aniexty
That is why sleepy time is the worst. My brain has nothing else to do and, unfailingly, decides it’s time to Ruminate All Your Troubles and Make Up Some More
Closer closer closer
This, but with the noise a printer makes lmao.
This cat be lagging, movin at like 1 FPS.
Me at a meeting in person: careful, look attentive! Do. not. doodle. on the provided paper. Stop fidgeting with your necklace. Great, you’re not listening, are you?
Me at a meeting on Teams, webcam off: listening to every single word while peacefully mending my pants and socks like a woman in a Middle Age painting lost in her embroidery.
finals
im actually speechless
I actually did this for math finals
For my English essay we were allowed a sheet of notes so I literally spent a week developing THE perfect essay and then summarising each paragraph into one line of shorthand in tiny writing 100%, A*
in US Government last year our teacher said we could have one notecard to use as a cheat sheet and gave us a whole packet (meaning like 10 pages) of things that would be on our test. he said, and i quote, “there is no way to fit everything youre going to need on there so you better study”
i fit every last piece of info on that card and didnt study at all
i got an amoral of the story: dont tell me what i can and cannot do
before my midterm in Modern Physics, my teacher told us a story about how one kid kept switching glasses during an exam. he walked over and the kid had red glasses and blue glasses and kept switching between them because he wrote his notecard in red and blue ink. he made a 3d note card.
y’all do realize, that with the intense effort it takes to plan and create these sheets, that you’re studying, right? you’re totally studying. love, a TA.
The best way to study even if you can’t bring a cheat sheet is to make a cheat sheet and write everything you would write on one if you could have one. It’s an awesome method!
‘but what you’re doing here is studying. its still studying, that exact thing you didnt want to do before…?’
‘yeah but see this is powered by hubris and spite, so like… it’s better’
^^^^^^^^^^
Well, that’s a profoundly bullshit update to the terms, YouTube. (adblock. adblock and support creators directly) I hope they fuck it up badly enough that they get their asses sued.
“Right to Monetize
You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments.”
Pisses me off. I intentionally made sure I was opted out of the Partner program back when they offered it to channels my size (I’m not eligible anymore) specifically because I didn’t want anyone to watch ads. I’m not making videos for money, I’m making videos because I want to share things with people.
Now YouTube has decided to add ads… unless if you’re a Partner, where you have a completely different deal and can actually chose things for ads.
Please just adblock the crap out of them. I’m quite aware that YouTube costs a lot of money in terms of bandwidth to run, but they already make hand over fist in money from the large channels, they don’t need to monetize everyone. Hell, I doubt they’d even make more than a few cents over the entire lifetime of my channel; it doesn’t even make sense for them to do this.
“Good cops”
I need this to be watched by the masses.
This is the simplest explination ever and people still don’t wanna hear it.
Close up video of a black man with glasses and a red t-shirt
“I hate when discussing police brutality people like to say ‘but there are good cops too,’ there are good cops too?
Fam, there’s clean water. If I live in a house where the tap water is coming out dirty sometimes I don’t just say ‘well, it’s not always dirty so it’s okay, nothing wrong.’ No! I need to replace the system, I need to examine the system at the source so my water is clean and acting like water every single time.
The idea of a police man is to be good so if he’s not acting like that and if more policeman aren’t acting like that we got a system to examine.
Cause see tap water systems in houses- tap water systems have filters that are supposed to stop, uh, the dirt from coming through, when the water comes out of our sink and into my cup I’m supposed to be able to trust that that water is safe for me to drink on sight, I’m not supposed to have to, to test it at all. Same thing with a police man– I’m supposed to see a man with a badge and trust him on sight and know justice and nothing but pure things is supposed to come from him.So when there is a possibility of that not being done there’s crap getting through the filter—we gotta fix this filter!
So if that water in my house is coming out dirty sometimes and clean sometimes, when I pour a cup of water I have a reason to be worried until I fix that system, until something changes I have a reason to be nervous when I pour a cup of water from the sink and I look at it am I like ‘is this gonna be a dirty glass of water or is it gonna be clean? Is this gonna be a bad cop or a good cop? ‘I shouldn’t even have to worry about that, I should see a cop and know for a fact that’s gonna be a clean cup of water, everytime I see him.”@saxifraga-x-urbium transcript!
This is the best explanation I’ve seen on this. I tried to use the bad apple example before and it didn’t work because people don’t realize you’re supposed to destroy bad apples as soon as you find them to prevent spread.
This water explanation is simpler and cleaner. We need to fix the systems and update the filters.
Necromancy can be done with consent (before AND after death) while a swath of enchantment is explicitly non-consensual.
Necromancers in my D&D setting are some of the most trusted mages in the land, as they provide essential services such as allowing people to speak with their fallen loved ones, investigating crimes, and get very angry when people abuse those gifts. It helps that their patron deity is the Young Goddess, a CG deity of exploration, curiosity, knowledge, and aid.
One of the already-revealed major villains of the campaign is Bertrum (they never found his body), a sociopathic Enchanter who nearly succeeded in charming the city council into killing each other.