managing anxiety - tips please

Get your anxieties down on paper. Keep a notebook and both list the anxieties and details about individual anxieties.

This does two things. It puts the anxieties somewhere else other than just in your head. Also you can go through the written list regularly to see if there are anxieties you can readily resolve. That might involve asking someone for advice on a specific incident or talking to a therapist.

The thing you need to avoid is negative reinforcement. This is part of the mechanism of spiralling anxiety. You start exploring outcomes or consequences of something you are anxious about, and start visualising all the worst possible scenarios, overr and over again. It is important to convince yourself that most of these outcomes are never likely to happen

The old adage "count your blessings" may be useful here. Every evening find a quiet moment and think through the day, and think about what worked out well. In other words look for positives in each day to offset the negatives.

Also watch who you discuss anxieties with. Some Neurotypicals take enormous pleasure in making depressed people more unhappy by focussing on the negatives. I don't understand the mentality of these people but you need to be on the look out, and if they are making you more unhappy avoid talking to them.

I usually suggest "interrupts", but recently the Moderators put a dampner on this by suggesting I was endorsing self-harm. But things like flicking your ear can stop you thinking negatively, even for a short time, and if you use interrupts regularly you can substitute a phrase like "stop this now", just enough to interrupt the worry cycle so you forget where you were and have to start again.

No doubt the Mods will come along and suggest something else is wrong with this advice - I do wish they knew more about living with autism.

Get your anxieties down on paper. Keep a notebook and both list the anxieties and details about individual anxieties.

This does two things. It puts the anxieties somewhere else other than just in your head. Also you can go through the written list regularly to see if there are anxieties you can readily resolve. That might involve asking someone for advice on a specific incident or talking to a therapist.

The thing you need to avoid is negative reinforcement. This is part of the mechanism of spiralling anxiety. You start exploring outcomes or consequences of something you are anxious about, and start visualising all the worst possible scenarios, overr and over again. It is important to convince yourself that most of these outcomes are never likely to happen

The old adage "count your blessings" may be useful here. Every evening find a quiet moment and think through the day, and think about what worked out well. In other words look for positives in each day to offset the negatives.

Also watch who you discuss anxieties with. Some Neurotypicals take enormous pleasure in making depressed people more unhappy by focussing on the negatives. I don't understand the mentality of these people but you need to be on the look out, and if they are making you more unhappy avoid talking to them.

I usually suggest "interrupts", but recently the Moderators put a dampner on this by suggesting I was endorsing self-harm. But things like flicking your ear can stop you thinking negatively, even for a short time, and if you use interrupts regularly you can substitute a phrase like "stop this now", just enough to interrupt the worry cycle so you forget where you were and have to start again.

No doubt the Mods will come along and suggest something else is wrong with this advice - I do wish they knew more about living with autism.