Your best ways to combat anxiety?

[FreyasSpirit]

We tend to go on a walk and lightly dissociate and just let our thoughts flow. An uninterrupted 30-60m time period where our mind can freely wander tends to be very useful for finding light stuff that is causing anxiety and needs to be processed. We aren't sure it is conducive for processing things in detail, but it is surprisingly good at digging up things like "there has been more stress than usual at work over the last week" and "we are feeling anxious about the doctor's appointment next week". Once we recognize possible sources of anxiety, we can begin to work through them and work on mitigations.

For more serious anxiety building up over a week or more, we tend to catch ourselves heading that direction and work to mitigate it before it gets too bad. Often, this involves cancelling all social things, removing as many responsibilities as possible in the near term and giving ourselves space to go splat. This often involves lying in bed and just letting thoughts happen, allowing anxiety to be released, allowing ourselves to have flashbacks. This morning, we woke up after a bad nightmare and ended up spending 3 hours in bed, lying there, allowing thoughts to flow freely, allowing ourselves to feel all the pain of the thoughts. By allowing ourselves to feel the thoughts of worthlessness and the pain of feeling like we are causing more harm than good in this world, we were able to process, or at least release those thoughts and at the end of the three hours, we woke up much more able to handle existing and even felt good about existing.

We suppose the biggest thing for us is to not try to postpone or bury the anxiety and to just let ourselves feel it. Sometimes, this means allowing ourselves to have a panic attack at work, but we have found nobody notices and believe this is the healthiest option for us.