May 3, 2024: Holistic Health for Calming Anxiety

Today the peer-support leaders led the group through reflection of common symptoms of anxiety disorders.  We learned that we each experienced our anxiety in different ways. For example, symptoms of panic attack could be immobilizing, and particularly bad if you had one while driving your car … a thing to “worry” about if you do get panic attacks. It was a busy day as the group reviewed a menu of 50 goal ideas (ideas) for holistic health. The point was that anxiety needs to be managed on multiple fronts, and looking into a menu for managing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and… Continue Reading

May 8, 2024: Breath Training

Yesterday, a guest group-support leader took a group of a dozen of us through a story of his experiences leading groups and a 20 minute breathing session.   The session included varied patterns of breathing with rising intensity (accompanied with and paced by drum music).  The breathing included a focus on somatic awareness (body awareness) to “feel” the breathing as it flows into the abdomen and then up into the chest before before exhaling.  The trainer stressed his preference for breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, and drew a parallel with the power of breath control (including… Continue Reading

May 1, 2024: The “Wave of Anxiety”

Yesterday at the group support meeting, we talked about the “wave of anxiety.” Our anxiety peer group support leader talked about his experience in traffic. The frustration being delayed getting to an important meeting was his trigger. The longer the delay the greater the anxiety. The physical symptoms of the anxiety become intense. Now he realizes he is able to call in ahead of the appointment and explain his situation, and this brings relief. The group shared experiences navigating traffic and about ways that they try to feel a sense of control in a situation that they cannot directly control…. Continue Reading

April 23, 2024: “Anxiety Trigger inventory”

Yesterday, the anxiety support group explored a worksheet from MyleMarks to get a conversation going about our different anxiety triggers and our responses to them.  The worksheet took a few long minutes for each of us to navigate, and it wasn’t an entirely plesant trip.  It is probably not a surprise to learn that some of us were asking ourselves “Oh, should I have been anxious about that too?”  This was a source of a bit of humor.  Trying to analyze our triggers pulled our triggers out of ourselves (a bit) and allowed us to look at them at arm’s… Continue Reading

Alex’s Story

My son Alex did not live a tragic life.  But he also did not live an easy life.  From his early years, Alex struggled for three decades with an invisible and progressive illness that was as deadly as an undiagnosed cancer.  Alex excelled in physical activities, particularly skateboarding and dancing.  And Alex excelled verbally with an incredible vocabulary and a fantastic ability to mimic the voices of cartoon celebrities.  Marge Simpson was one of his funniest.  Alex was a fun and funny guy to party with.  He could get people to laugh.  His apparent social ease and apparent openness and… Continue Reading

An open letter to do better with anxiety

Do you ever wonder why, as a parent, it is so difficult to help a loved one who is suffering from anxiety?  Anything you might suggest to reduce the anxiety can set up the fear of possible failure, which in turn can feed the anxiety itself.  I’d like to get together with people who grapple with this problem here in Warren. This is important to me because I know that when anxiety is not well managed horrible things can happen. My son Alex suffered from undiagnosed anxieties throughout his youth, his teenage years, and his early adult years. His self-medication… Continue Reading

Find ways to respond to the local and global anxiety crisis that threatens us all

Anxiety is very common.  Situational anxiety is adaptive.  It revs us up and can bring us to higher levels of performance.  Even so, we all need to know how to calm ourselves too.  It is basic human nature to presume that others experience emotions pretty much as we do.  This is usually the case; however, more than 40 million adults have anxiety disorders.  Said another way, if you have a dozen friends, one of your friends probably has persistent anxieties that can disrupt their lives. In normal situations (such as speaking in public or taking tests), anxiety involves an elevated… Continue Reading