A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.
This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.
You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.
People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.
In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.
Therefore, I present to you:
THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS
–Go on a walk
–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.
–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching
–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind
–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift
–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:
–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.
–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.
–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.
–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)
–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.
–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.
–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:
–List the capitals of all the U.S. states
–List the capitals of all the European countries
–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.
–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.
–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.
Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.
(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)
Anonymous said to @ask-drferox: Hey Dr. Ferox, I was wondering if people should actually feed
peanut butter or cheese whiz to dogs, like they do in movies/cartoons. A
quick google search informed me that xylitol, found in some peanut
butters, is fatal to dogs, but other than that it is ok. Is that
entirely true? The internet seems disputed on it.
Xylitol is toxic, but like everything else on the planet, it’s the dose that makes the poison.
It’s naturally occurring, you can find it in low levels in various foods like corn and blueberries, but will also find it in various dental products. And at really tiny doses it’s unlikely to do much.
But it is now a more common additive in human cooking, as it’s not toxic for primates, and it is lately a more common additive in peanut butter spreads.
Peanut butter, like chocolate, contains a particular mix of carbohydrates and fats which is addictive and makes you not want to stop eating it. It’s why you’ve always got room for desert, and why fast food add sugar to things that should be savory.
At least, I’m told peanut butter tastes like that. I don’t actually know, on account of being allergic to it. I have a different reason to be nervous when a dog is working on a peanut butter filled kong in my consult room.
Dogs are typically not allergic to peanuts like humans can be, but those peanut proteins remain on the dog’s tongue for quite some time, and that might be a risk for an unknowing human. Presumably a dog owner isn’t feeding peanut butter to their dog if they themselves are allergic, but a person in the park who likes dogs but doesn’t know what it’s eaten today? Who knows.
So the xylitol toxicity is dose dependent, and when it’s in food that an animal is inclined to eat a lot of, such as peanut butter or cookies, or it’s in high concentrations such as in gum, which isn’t meant to be eaten anyway, it’s not a good idea.
A lot of cheese will make your dog fart heavily and may upset the stomachs of some more sensitive dogs, but a little bit now and then is fine.
Peanut butter is perfectly safe for dogs when it’s a more natural kind that’s not full of all kinds of artificial sweeteners. Most nuts are safe. My grandfather’s dogs like to eat pecans just straight off the ground. It should be a treat rather than a frequent snack, but it’s harmless.
A werewolf film written by a woman wouldn’t be as interesting because they know how unrealistic it is to be caught by surprise by something that happens regularly every damn month.
And then there’s that werewolf who goes three full moons without transforming, then transforms one night during a waxing crescent moon.
Now I’m imagining some on the werewolf form of the pill and having to regularly keep up their schedule and one werewolf telling another that they used to have such irregular changes but the pill now makes things so much easier and the other werewolves being like oh man I should talk to my doctor about this.
All i imagined is some poor fucker that’s like “you think you have it bad. I got my first change at 9 and change sporadically every 4 months or so. For 2 weeks. Sometimes it happens randomly so i just gave up.”
Wake up pissed and agitated with a headache and slam some aspirin with no real thought to the matter because it must just be a shit day. Halfway through the day they just “…oh shit that explains so much fuck fuck fuck”
Switch to a new kind of transformation control and spend the next three months awkwardly half wolfed-out
This is a really interesting idea. I never thought a beardy would be interested.
Basically any vertebrate you can think of (and potentially some invertebrates) will be interested in something like this. A ball which dispenses food when moved and shoved at is perfect enrichment for a wide variety of animals, from horses, to cats, to chickens, to lizards, to fish.
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