how does one feel anxiety?

Its important to realise that anxiety is something most people have (eg. job interviews), but it can be difficult for autistic people to regulate thoughts and feelings - so having an anxious thought about one thing can lead to floods of anxiety about other things, or getting stuck in a thought loop about an anxious thought/situation.  Autistic people also tend to like to be in control of things, and letting go of control can be difficult.

Exposure therapy can work, if you just face the things that make you anxious and 'feel the feels' (as said, feel the fear and doing it anyway) - however, if your thoughts/feelings race out of control then you would need to work on controlling them for the anxiety to reduce.

Anxiety is worsened by avoiding the things that make it worse. Desensitisation is the was to go… gradually exposing yourself to the object of fear such that it no longer makes you anxious. A specialist behavioural psychologist could help but Isometimes, you are completely right, something like Citralopram as a short term solution will help you get through whilst you are desensitising yourself but you risk psychological dependency.

Anxiety comes from the mind, not from things outside the mind. So if you were scared of lifts, it’s not the lift causing the problem, it’s your relationship with it. If you hide from everything, soon enough even the place you are hiding in becomes a source of fear. If you were training a dog not to be frightened of other dogs, it wouldn’t work to pick it up every time it passed another dog. It needs to face the other dog, distracted by tasty food, gradually getting nearer each time so that it becomes calm when another dog is nearby. From a behavioural psychologists viewpoint, humans aren’t much difference.

In other words:

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway!

frankly, reading your post, i really can't say we experience anxiety that differently... idk.. you seem more aware of it. i think i just am able to avoid all situations - but then i worry over all that.  you can't avoid things forever. bedtime and evenings are pretty low for me - i've kind of used up all my 'good' energy for the day, and so in the evening and bed is when anxiety has been - until now - kind of hard to 'feel.' but i think it has affected me so much...

i listen to asmr stuff almost every night, usuall sounds of people doing things, but sometimes non people sounds (rain, trains, what not). but often people doing mundane things. currently i like listening to guys solder electronic kits together...

i do feldenkrais, which is similar to meditation. but i hate meditation; feldenkrais i've had to do for twenty years. it hasn't been easy. i think i have ehlers dandros syndrom also... 

best of luck with your anxiety....

I went to a reterat a few years ago. It was only then, as I was walking around the grounds taking my time and deciding to unpeel the mask that I felt anxiety leave my body. Anxiety which I hadn't really known was there.

I almost wish I could relate to your way of experiencing anxiety (not that there's any 'right' way), but I cant imagine it ever becoming hidden from me, even in the sanctuary of my time alone at home. For me, anxiety is ever-present. At the very least, there is a seemingly irreducible minimum of it just being permanently there, diffusely present like bachground radiation. Layered over the top are undulating levels of anxiety which can have different flavours almost and which can spike massively from triggers (and resultant ruminations and post-mortems) that to many NT people would I'm sure seem very slight and dismissable. But could last for hours, days, or weeks for me. Right now, and for several days now, I'm in the middle of a prolonged period of anticpatory dread - awaiting formal confirmation of a specific change in staffing in my workplace that could massively impact how I feel about coming into the office each day. Part of me just wants the bad news over and done with. I hate change in any case, this one would just be more personally unpleasant to deal with it than many others. But even then there will then be the confirmed reality to start feeling sick about instead. The cycle of anxiety never ends, it's just a question of where it reaches that critical mass of overwhelm... or doesn't. My batteries are almost always flat because of it, and I've experienced at least two significant (what I now know to be called) shutdowns in the last three years when things have just become too much. Even then, the anxiety didn't leave me. It's just that I had literally no ability to process anything else other than a quiet room, a ticking clock, and the looping of a hope/despair cycle and all assocuiated thoughts that went with it. 

I think I experience the true absence of anxiety in only two or three contexts:

1. For about 30 seconds to two minutes after waking up from a sleep. In other words, before thoughts truly begin.

2. To some extent, if I've set aside time to try and meditate. Not that I really do that much, and if it gets too routine I seem to become resistant to it.

3. When I get really ill with a flu or something. It's almost a blessed relief in a way because fighting the virus seems to steal any surplus mental/emotional energy that  is normally earmarked for anxiety, and lets me take a brief holiday from myself in the land of delirium. Once recovery properly begins, back the anxiety comes.