Radical Acceptance Theory, Acknowledgment Is The Best Cure.

Dear Readers,

I think we all know the cliche about ignorance being bliss, however I realized that the true ticket to a successful healthy lifestyle and state of mind is over acceptance of your reality. The other day I read this article about radical acceptance, its basic premise was to accept the things we cannot change in our lives and by confronting what plagues us dead on you are no longer it's captive but rather it's ruler.

The timing couldn't have been better, because just 24 hours prior to that I decided to accept my state of mind and just come to terms with the reality of living with my anxiety. Since that day, I haven't been phased by my anxiety and I can honestly say I have never felt better as a result.

Im sure your all wondering how can the solution be so simple. Well, Im not claiming that it's a simple solution, but by overstating your problems you are just simply being self aware, that's not the same thing as really accepting who you are. If your not comfortable in your own skin, you will never be rid of your anxiety.

I suggest that you dont just remain aware but rather say to yourself that this is who I am and IM DAMN PROUD TO BE ME!!

Here are some rather simple techniques that I used to really start feeling better:

1. Stop thinking about the long term and focus on the present. We live in the world of wants and if you constantly are thinking about what you want as opposed to what you have than your not living in your own skin, your seeing the world through someone elses eyes. More than most times the way you imagine your future is never how things actually turn out. This is important because when you wrap your mind around the future and let go of the present you are adding fuel to the fire of anxiousness. You cant predict the future! If that's where you put your attention your mind begins to race and anxiety sets in because your dealing with something out of the realm of your control. For anyone who feels anxious, long term shouldn't equate to more than a week and that may even be a stretch, everything outside of that is overkill.

2. Remind yourself of the things that you are grateful for. Finding appreciation for the things you have in your life is essential to keeping a calm state of mind. Whether it be your fluffy little pet or that classic car in the garage, your family or your health. Think of the things you have and dont take for granted even the simplest treasures in your life.

3. Stay active. Dont give your mind free reign to wander in a million directions. If you find yourself feeling anxious, typically it's brought on by not having anything else to think about, so you spend your time thinking about everything or obsessing over one thing. Whether you go to the gym, read a book, cook a meal, play with your dog. You are not allowing yourself the opportunity to think about everything and thereby you reduce any liklihood of feeling anxious.

4. Get your feelings out when anxiety starts to set in and overwhelms you. When I found myself in the midst of a panic attack and there was nobody to turn too, I decided to start this blog because I felt that I had to get these feelings out. Granted therapy is one source of release but unless your made of money and can afford to have an in house therapist at your beck and call and your friends aren't nocturnal creatures of the night, your going to have to find another means to do it. It worked for me and Im no different than any of you, trust me it works.

I guess for now these 4 simple steps can help you get started to feel better and less anxious. I truly hope this works for you because I understand what your going through. I was just tired of feeling the way I was and these 4 simple steps really helped me. I hope to hear your stories because I care to know that your feeling better, each one of you deserves a life free of anxiety and panic. Life is too short and if you believe that, your half way on the road to feeling less anxious because that will focus your thinking on appreciation of life rather than a search for one. Keep me updated and I wish you all better health and a better state of mind.

_The People_

Is Life a Race or a Marathon?

Dear Readers,

I came to the harsh realization today that on the track field of life, I'm definitely a sprinter. All those people around me who can just take life day by day and run a marathon, and don't care to know where the finish line is, well, that's just not me. I needed to know where the finish line was before I even got to the race, and Ive been that way for as long as I can remember. It was a very difficult reality for me to come to grips with because everyone around me tried to get me to realize that life is a marathon and comes in steps and stages. I was always the one to chase the larger piece of the pie and never was happy settling for crumbs. The problem wasn't in the slice of pie, the problem was in wanting more and it never seemed to come fast enough.

Now that I have come to grips with this reality, I have to be able to accept the terms and try to figure out a way to make them work for me as opposed to against me. I feel like I have enough adrenaline pumping through my veins to propel a rocket to space and not being able to find an outlet to release this superfluous energy leaves me restless and thwarted. Now I have a better understanding why every night when I lay down to bed, I find myself rocking back and forth; unable to lay still and enjoy a calming transition to sleep. Instead I require a xanyx tablet to sedate me and bring me to a point where I feel relaxed enough just to go to bed.

The Anxiety that you and I feel partly comes as a result of not being content with who we are and confused as to why the world around us refuses to change to accommodate us. However, the people who require bending just a bit is us. We are like a puzzle piece that would fit perfectly if only it weren't for that one edge that you wish you could cut to make the accommodation. Lets be honest, you and I both know the entire puzzle just wouldn't look right if you were to do that, so we seek tirelessly for the right piece.

It can be a daunting and overwhelming task to De-construct our entire personality so that we can feel more adequate to our surroundings. What if we didn't have to change ourselves completely to find serenity, what if we only had to change a fraction to feel exponentially better. Then perhaps we wouldn't feel like we lost a sense of who we are and have always been. What if changing 5% of the way we do things can yield us a life that can eradicate those anxious feelings. Maybe we don't have to sacrifice ourselves and deprogram ourselves to a point where we don't recognize ourselves anymore.

My suggestion is that you appreciate who you are, and if your a sprinter like me and live the world in the left lane and aren't satisfied just coasting by and eating crumbs all your life. If you insist on passing others by and aren't afraid to risk getting a ticket. All you have to do is make sure you have a radar detector. I hope you get the metaphor and if you don't let me simplify it for you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get to where your going as fast as you can, but just take precautions and be ready to deal with the consequences.

_The People_

Extremism and Anxiety, Does Being Anxious Lead to Extremist Behavior and Mal-Content?

Dear Readers,
I was trying to gain some insight to how my actions throughout my life has correlated to my anxiousness. All of my life I have been the typical "all or nothing" personality type. To use poker terminology for those of you who play; I was either all in or I left my chips beside me and refused to mix it up with the rest of the table. Life was either black or white, but unfortunately life isn't usually black or white, it's typically grey with shades of black and white.
Whether it was in my career as a day trader or my love life, even my hobbies. I was either going to invest all my time and resources into what I was pursuing or I would just give up; not seeing the joy in landing somewhere in the middle. Anxiety comes as a result of wanting what we don't have and not having an immediate way of achieving our dreams without focusing on what we have in our hands at the moment.
Anxiety is a result of frustration and we seek blame in everyone but ourselves. Someone is always at fault and we are far too perfect to actually see the fault rests with us. We are the cause of our anxiety. Granted that is a hard realization to come too, but if we are to come to grips with our anxiety we must stare into the mirror and be completely honest with ourselves. When we are able to look at our lives as a reflection of our own actions we will gain much more than insight, we will be able to breakdown our lives and brew a simple remedy of success and better health.

Living life by only seeing the ends that justify the means is not really to live at all.
For example, if you are thinking about going to the gym. You start to workout and you have this image of what you hopefully will look like after all your hours of effort. However, it's your first day and you go through your workout, come home sore as all hell and have to find the strength to go back the next day. Your standing in your bathroom after a hot shower and start to flex into the mirror as if you were about to get ready to pose for the Mr./Mrs. Universe contest.
Day after day you do this and you don't see immediate results, your not living up to that poster image of Arnold Schwarzenegger and are getting frustrated when the results aren't in par with your expectations of yourself.

You begin to question your efforts and decide that since the results aren't immediate your just gonna call it quits. If your like I used to be, you will probably drop the dumbbells and find the nearest Dunken Donuts and scarf down a nice ice cold french vanilla coffee and some Boston cream donuts.

WRONG WRONG WRONG!! The goal of exercise is to benefit your state of mind and body and with each workout, whether you see the results or not, you just took a huge step to a better life and a better state of mind. You can relate this attitude to a multitude of life events and activities we take part of everyday. The ends don't have to justify the means to live a better life because life exists in the means by which you live it.

Be grateful for every experience you take part of. Whether it be as simple as sitting around and surfing the web or working at a soup kitchen feeding the homeless. Everything we do every moment of our lives has a effect on the people and the world around us. Show gratitude and love for the things in your lives and you will be a better person for it. You will see your anxiety start to dissipate and you will feel genuinely happy.

We always play the role of the victim and we need to let go of all that resentment and frustration and replace it with appreciation and contentment.
We can either find pieces of our lives that make us unhappy and ponder the countless ways to change it or we can look at each day as an opportunity to better ourselves and feel better about ourselves. I hope you readers out there heed this advice because I know it to be true. I wish you all the best and I would love to hear your thoughts. Good luck and better health to all of you.

SMILE AND THE WORLD SMILES WITH YOU!!
_The People_

No Easy Solutions!!

Dear Readers,

What is the answer to finally getting rid of these anxiety attacks. I'm staring into this computer screen right now gasping for air. You come to a point where you don't know how much longer you can bare this feeling. Suffocating yourself in your thoughts and fears, although on a conscious level you tell yourself over and over again that it's not real, that you can't be feeling these feelings. How much longer can a person bare the isolation and suffocation caused by this debilitating disorder.

I'm actually writing this article in the midst of an anxiety attack. The reason I actually started this blog was in the hope of relieving my anxiety attacks by expressing them on paper. The idea being that maybe a transference would take place where if my anxiety was being expressed in my writing that it would be released from within myself. It seemed to be working for a little while. Recently though it has resurfaced and it seems as though I'm not making anymore headway. I'm hoping as I type these words I regain some of the comfort that I used to feel.

The other day I felt great, and by that I mean just calm. I was able to take a full breathe unconsciously and just felt my mind and body at ease. I think most people seem to take that simple reality for granted. Up until recently I was probably one of those people. Of course I suffered many anxiety and panic attacks over the years, but with time the attacks seems to have gotten worse and leave me feeling more desolate and alone.

I was feeling optimistic when I started to take Lexi pro, thinking that finally a simple medication would make everything OK again. Although I felt my anxiety dissipate, I experienced very strange side effects like a really bad tingling sensation in my arms and occasionally I felt very light headed, so not wanting to trade one disability for another, I cut the medication off after only 5 days of use. I HATE THIS FEELING!!!

I do start to feel better when I write!! The goal of this blog is not to share my personal stories and feelings with you, to be honest, I don't really care if anyone of you out there read this. I do this to feel better and treat my own anxiety. I read so many articles about how people tell you that you can stop your anxiety attacks right away, those people probably never even suffered from anxiety because there is no simple solution!! try and write your feelings when you feel an attack coming on. Maybe it will help constrain some of your anxieties.. IT REALLY DOES HELP!! GOOD LUCK TO ALL OF YOU!!!

_The People_

Isolation Anxiety

Dear Readers,

I think the one thing that most people who don't suffer from anxiety fail to understand is just how debilitating and isolating anxiety and panic disorder can make someone feel. I went to see some friends of mine over this past weekend, one of whom also suffers from anxiety.

That same day he told me he was having anxiety attacks and wasn't able to remove himself from his bed. I thought the best thing I could do as a fellow victim of anxiety and as a friend was to go and visit him; thinking that maybe having some company would help to alleviate some of those attacks. Like the old saying goes, misery loves company.

The funny thing is when I started to speak to him about his attacks, he tells me that I can't really understand what he was going through and that I have no idea how he feels when those attacks strike. I understand the competitive nature of people, but do people with the same disorder really have to compete as to who has it worse.

When these attacks strike, the immediate feeling we all get is that nobody has it as badly as we do. I have been a competitive person my entire life, whether it be in sports, board games, cards, school. I always tried to strive to be the best I could be. Often times if I saw that failure was right around the corner I would probably just jump ship and leave it at that. Never in my life did I feel that I would have to justify how debilitating my illness was, especially not to someone who suffered from the same disorder.

However, when panic sets in, we will seek out anyone who will listen, for me it doesn't matter if they can empathize or if they suffer from the same problems. I lay in bed, tossing and turning, my heart begins to race and i realize that I'm in the midst of a panic attack. There is only so much comfort turning the TV on and watching the same old re-runs can do to alleviate my pain. It's 3am and not another person within a mile of me to talk too. My mind races and I pray that I can find a way to relax. Sometimes I will call on family when there is nobody else, because they maybe the only ones willing to pick up the phone in the middle of the night to listen to my suffering.

It scares me to think that this is what my life has become; an endless and vicious cycle of insomnia and fear. During the day we can find a myriad of distractions to help deal with our anxiety, but once the curtain of darkness sets in and the moonlight is our only audience, our anxiousness is amplified by the silence and we yearn for a friendly calming voice to make it seem OK.

When i choose not to burden my family and rob them of a well deserved night sleep. I actually call upon my friends who live in a different time zone, preferably a few hours back, so that I don't feel like I'm intruding on their sleep as well, at least not as badly. After keeping them on the phone for several hours, i finally exhaust myself and find my way to sleep.

It's a tough burden to bare, but maybe we are strong enough to handle it. Although I know I would very much like not to have to carry this burden. I would love to hear from my readers as to how you deal with your insomnia, who do you turn to in times of panic? how do you find ways to calm your restless souls?

_The People_

Procrastination Anxiety. Does the longer we wait to do something makes us more anxious?

Dear Readers,

I am a natural procrastinator and I have been for as long as I can remember. I eat my breakfast at lunch time, I used to do my homework for class while the teacher was taking attendance. No matter how large or daunting the task, I can't remember a time in my life when I actually took the initiative to start a project right from the onset. It's probably one of my defining characteristics.

Lets not confuse tardiness and procrastination, I never had a problem with deadlines, but my rationale was that as long as the work gets done, who really cares when you start. Remember, it's not how we start, it's how we finish.

That cliche just happens to work for me, but isn't that the point? I was giving this idea some thought today and wondered have all those years of procrastination catered to my anxiousness?

Lets break this idea down to it's simplest form. Assuming today you get assigned a project that isn't due for two weeks. You decide there are just other things going on that seem to take precedent and you say to yourself as I would " There's plenty of time to get this done, I'll just hold off for a little while."

That's how it all starts, but really what we are doing when we say this to ourselves is:

I'll keep this project in the back of my mind, so that i have something to keep thinking about. It's like these little ghosts that haunt our minds and every so often until we actually take the initiative to start, they keep haunting us; thereby giving us additional things to worry over.

I don't see myself changing anytime soon, but I know that I can be more conscious of the things I have to get done. I can't say that procrastinating is all bad, it has taught me to work under pressure like a champion. I can knock out a 20 page paper in an hour, clean my house as if i were the Tasmanian devil. The bad part is, it doesn't slow us down, it just makes the adrenaline which causes our panic attacks and anxiousness to become that much more prevalent within us.

I think the idea is that if we pace our actions, we pace our thoughts and therefore we would decrease the likelihood of feeling anxious. We can slowly train ourselves to do things in pieces and avoid "the rush" which occurs when we feel that time has gone by and we have no more choices. Than all we are left with is consequences and it's either you sink or swim at that point.

I know it will be difficult for me to retrain myself to do things in stages, but I'm working on that right now and overtime I think that will help to reduce some of my anxiety. I would love to know from all my fellow procrastinators on this issue. Does procrastination lead you to be more anxious?

_The People_

I am who I am, Being Social with Social Anxiety

Dear Readers,

We grow up in this world with an enormous desire to be accepted by our peers, colleagues, classmates and relatives. It starts for us all as it did for me by asking my parents for that cool pair of jeans that everyone in class was wearing.

In my day it was Z cavaricci jeans, they were quite in fashion when I was in junior high school and you just weren't cool with out them. Being that my parents were immigrants, they thought a pair of sweat pants and a bowl haircut was fashionable enough. Luckily they grew out of that mentality over the years.

I begged and pleaded for that pair of jeans, just so that I wouldn't be looked at like a social leper. Finally they gave in and got me a pair, I wore them out of style, just matching the same pair with a different sweatshirt, pair of socks and the same bowl haircut. I did anything I could think of to disguise the fact that I only had a single pair to my name, not considering that I was lucky enough just to have a pair at all.

It was just so important for me to fit in, and while it seemed that everyone at school knew who I was; which wasn't that hard when you stand 6'0 feet tall in the 8Th grade, i still felt alone and isolated and not as "cool" as the other kids. Maybe that was the beginning of it all for me. The fact that i had this desperate need to be accepted and wasn't comfortable in my own skin.

It's this constant need to feel accepted by others which keeps us from being who we really are and are born to be. We put on a facade to the world around us and fail to be proud of our differences; whether good or bad, nobody has the right to judge us. We keep hiding all our best kept secrets about ourselves instead of standing up and shouting out what makes us unique in character and spirit.

It's only in time that you start to realize that it's the differences that we demonstrate in our character and personality that makes us special. When I say special, i don't mean it in a negative and condescending way, I mean it distinguishes us from the crowd, that's where we should all desire to be. Eventually those who we share commonalities with will enter our lives and appreciate and admire us for who we truly are.

It took a long time and courage to tell someone that I suffer from anxiety, it took just as long to be able to admit it to myself. I was worried that I would'nt be seen in the same light and be considered to be less of a person. I didn't say it to gain sympathy, I did it to finally hear the words and make a vow to myself to suppress it and find a better coping mechansim. Popeye says " I am who I am" , that's all any of us should dare to be!! Have any of you readers out there ever felt that way?

_The People_