Tag: anxiety
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ANXIETY & THE BODY
When you have anxiety as a child, you lack the words for what you feel inside your body, and what you feel inside your body is so acutely awful, so wretched and horrifying, most anxious kids will spend their time actively looking for ways to avoid feeling the percolating dread filling their chests, bubbling into […]
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Anxiety & REALITY
I’ve had a hard time writing blog posts about mental health this past month. There’s more than enough to write about, but I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by reality. Anxiety is basically a fear of feeling fear, which means it’s a fear of experiencing and facing reality. And the reality of living in this world is […]
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WHAT IS A PANIC DISORDER?
In the past year, while I’ve been traveling and talking about my memoir LITTLE PANIC and my life long panic disorder, I’ve noticed something interesting: a lot of people claim to have something they don’t actually have. Do you have a panic disorder? Probably not. Do you have an anxiety disorder? Perhaps. A panic disorder […]
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SECOND RESPONSES
Whenever something feels off in my body, it’s cancer. Whenever someone says they “have to talk to me,” they’re going to end our friendship. Whenever something even slightly out of the ordinary occurs, I respond the same way–with an automatic over-reaction. This is anxiety. It’s the most reliable feature of my personality and if you […]
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SIGNS YOUR CHILD HAS ANXIETY
This is a quick one because the paperback of LITTLE PANIC comes out tomorrow and I’m juggling a thousand tiny things. Anxiety in kids manifests in a variety of innovative ways. I want to go over some of them so you know what to look for. Some of these ways don’t register to parents as […]
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Teachers, Stop calling on students whose hands are not raised.
When you have an anxiety disorder, your entire sense of self is thwarted by your anxiety’s sense of self. Imagine anxiety as an adult arm-wrestling a baby. Your true sense of self is that baby and it’s always losing to the preternatural strength of anxiety. A haughty glance from a stranger doesn’t stick to the […]
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HOW TO HELP YOUR CHILD WHEN THEY’RE HAVING A PANIC ATTACK
When your child is having a panic attack, do you know how to help them? Do you tell them that they’re okay? That they’re fine? Do you tell them to breathe? Yes? Okay. Please stop doing that. When your kid (or your sibling or friend or loved one) is having a panic attack, they are […]
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Why Being positive is bad for worriers
As a professional worrier, I feel I have the authority to say that telling a worrier to think positively is as helpful as telling a sniper to loosen up. This is not only useless advice, it actually makes worriers more worried. You see, worry is a strategy we use to adapt to reality, which to […]
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LoCKED OUT
It’s easier to be a good parent when you are not a parent at all. I think if I actually were a parent (to a human child and not a dog child) I would not be able to respond to the daily traumas as rationally as I can with someone else’s child. A couple of […]
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A New Model for Being Human
We are solitary creatures whose lives are as unknowable to others as they often are to ourselves. The messages I received early on suggested that there was a right way to be a person and I wasn’t being it. So, I others as my barometer for how to be, or how not to be. This constant looking out to define myself based on the world’s idea of what was good and right was my attempt to become “normal”; to fit inside the world’s standards. Continue reading