Attack!!

Anxiety:  The state of being uneasy, apprehensive, or worried about what may happen; misgiving.
From the Latin anxius < angere, to choke, give pain.


I think I had a full blown anxiety attack today, which is a profoundly unsettling thing if you've never had one.  I try not to give advice but I'd recommend avoiding them; they're profoundly unproductive.  And just to be sure that my sentence structure isn't causing any confusion the anxiety was attacking me, rather than the other way around.  Wouldn't that be something . . . me marshaling all of my willpower and going on the offensive against my anxieties.  That sounds like a good 12 Step program.


"Take THAT, you formless, nameless, frequently baseless generalized fears," I'd shout, waving around a little plastic sword I found somewhere.  "Fie thee hence!"


I usually start my anxiety attack by focusing with great concentration on something that I'm upset about.  It's not always an important thing, either, and a lot of the time I understand that I'm being shaken by something that is unimportant.  That self-knowledge doesn't do me much good, usually.  Nor does the knowledge that I'm worrying about something that I've worried about many, many times in the past without having any effect on the root of the worry stimulus at all.  I'm vaguely aware that I'm not helping anything by worrying and that I'll worry again in the future about many of the same things, with the same results.


A good anxiety attack will quickly sweep a whole bunch of additional stuff into the sewer of fear.  A really good anxiety attack will pull in a lot of minor crap of no significance that I can also worry about.  Pretty soon I'm inundated with fear and anxiety and apprehension and there's a momentum going on that I'm powerless to stop.  That must be the "attack" part of the anxiety attack.


So I sat down and did some writing.  I started out with all the stuff from the sewer.  Generalized anxiety stuff.  I listed it down and looked at it and saw how silly most of it was, how powerless I was to change most of it.  Then I made a list of solutions.  Ah, yes, the solutions.  I wrote down those mothers, too.  Then I took the first thing on the list and I did it.  I don't know if it'll work or not but I don't care.  I took an action.  I got moving.  I tried to solve the problem instead of embracing the problem.


I did some work and I got some relief.