Still here and need support 2

[SH_]

poschan, try not to dwell on determining what the triggers are. It won't change the feelings.

What things are you doing to enhance your emotional state so that the sad and depressive feelings are more manageable.

I have been reading much about feelings and emotions and an interesting thing I have picked up is that they are not one and the same.
Feelings are something we can not really control as our brain and body react based on the way we humans are created. So the feeling that we call anxiety can be triggered by things that can be considered dangerous, like a bear running across your path. Or they can be triggered by something that we encounter that is uncomfortable like say, public speaking.

Now bear with me as I do have a point here.

What we call emotions, are actually the labels that we slap onto the feelings. The part that I want you to pay attention to here is this.
The feeling that hits us when we are in actual danger ( the bear). Is the same feeling that hits us right before we get in front of a crowd of 500 people to speak.
Would you label these with the same emotion. Probably not because one is dangerous and life threatening, and the other is embarrassing, but safe from true harm. But the feeling is the same.

So this weekend, my d18 was pretty uptight Saturday evening. When I asked her what was up, she said that she was feeling an anxiety attack coming on. I asked her why. She said she was nervous and scared to go to the new church meeting the following day with the single folks. She struggles with some social anxiety. So I suggested she not go so she could calm down. Now I did not, not want her to go, but I wanted to try and apply the above learning with her.
She said that she needed to go as she had committed to it, and she knew it would be good for her to get out of her comfort zone and meet some new people.

I then proposed that she repeat back to me her reason for feeling the anxiety attack coming on, only I asked that she swap out the words nervous and scared with excited and anxious.
She did so. We discussed it for a few minutes with the positive emotion labels.
About 10 or 15 minutes later she was giddy like a school girl and chatting about the fun things she looked forward to. No anxiety attack came on.

My anxiety attacks went from running through me daily and all day ( see my threads) to subsiding all together when I got tired of trying to figure out triggers and decided to label the shakes with common things like being tired, consuming caffeine after not doing so for several months, and several other things. I did not realize at the time I stumbled across the secret until I have been reading up on this. No anxiety attacks since and my anxiety media are collecting dust in the medicine cabinet.

So way longer ramble than I had meant to, but hopefully some of this can help you poschan.

Smiles. Smiles are another trick. Smile even if you don't feel like it. Your body shoots off some chemicals that help.
If mustering up a smile seems to hard to do, then google the following.
F*ck that A guided meditation.
I guarantee at least a little smile.