Dont Underestimate The Powers of Anxiety.

I've written about this before, or rather the subject of Panic Attacks but I wanted to go further into the extent of Anxiety so that people might realise things and hopefully somehow calm their anxieties before it gets to an overly unhealthy stage.
   I didn't want to do the awful thing and research just how common anxiety is because really there's no need to, it's a lot and we don't need graphs and charts to tell us that. Dealing with it is the important thing, but in order to deal with it you have to realise just how affected YOU personally are.
   The plethora of people affected by anxiety are not all the same, there could be millions of anxiety sufferers and each one has something that makes it a little unique to themselves, so you need to home in on that specific element of anxiety in you. Allow other people to tell you they understand, accept that people will understand and accept their help, but whatever dependency you have on people you still need to kind of sit down and work out what is going to calm things down for you personally.
   Anxiety stretches from losing breath and heart racing to full on physical weakness and pain. Depending how much you're worried about obviously affects what extent you get to, but if you get to the worse stage where you literally feel ill, not just mentally, but physically ill and achey, weak, hurt then that's really when the reins have to be brought in and control has to be taken.
   One of the most overused lines to an anxiety sufferer is "Calm down" sometimes it'll work and sometimes it won't and most of the time you can bat it off as useless, however when you start becoming physically affected "calm down" becomes an order, not a suggestion or a light offering of dialogue. Once physical affects start happening its even harder to cope with, it can come in the form of shakes, pain, headaches etc and stress on top of this starts to put you in a cage, that gets trickier to get out of and eventually reclusiveness can happen.
    No matter how dependent you are, you always need someone at some point so being reclusive is very very self destructive. I guess it's alright me saying "stop when it gets hard" "don't become a recluse" but how do you actually succeed? I find these three things help even a little bit;

1.  Forceful Desensitisation - If your anxiety is connected to something specific, for example a bus and the claustrophobia of a bus then if you feel you can, try and go on buses more often, try to get used to the hustle and bustle and try and lose the entrapment feeling by making it become a regularity. Put buses or whatever the source is in a routine that's happy. If it's transport, go somewhere happy then the mode of transport will be connected in your mind, no longer as a source of anxiety but a means to become happy.
2. Calming Techniques -  Sometimes all it takes is for you to look into ways of calming yourself down, whether its controlling your breathing (often the way to stop anxiety spiralling from the beginning) breathing in a steadied and structured way, where you concentrate on it can often relax you. Also the internet is amazing (with exceptions) and there are tonnes upon tonnes of techniques.
3. Selfishness - Arrogance and general selfishness is one thing I cannot stand, but in terms of anxiety you sometimes need to be more selfish, if your stress is brought on by other people, limit it. Don't limit the amount of times you see them, just try to limit the stress you have for them by telling yourself that YOU will become worse, which will only make things worse for your friend anyway. 

Anxiety is a [take your pick of swearwords] but there are ways of dealing with it. Just find the one thats best for you.