You can definitely learn to manage and minimize it better, with practice.

Go for a walk around the block! A nice brisk walk! Notice your life today.

How funny, for some reason, when I woke up this morning I was thinking of you and noting that you really did seem to feel better these days. That's good. Don't follow that thread of "OMGitnevergetsbetterdespair". It's a trap!

or it could be you do too many important things...

Thanks for thinking of me, Miko.

does anyone know a good forum to talk about this stuff?

Doing anything is most of the work. Overmastering all the traps you set for yourself and actually doing despite all these other fucking thoughts, that's the thing, and if you say you're "doing better," then feeling better doesn't really matter (inaction is the only devil and despair the only sin).

Fake it until it feels real. Doesn't seem like that'll ever happen, and maybe it never will, but faking it is how square pegs fit in round-hole society. Or maybe how people with mental hurdles deal with the blissfully clear-headed.

You can't bend anyone to your will but yourself. Once you master your own will you can start on others. Perfect health doesn't exist, it's just chipping away at a mountainous rock for some, shoveling gravel for others, ripping up turf for the lucky. Don't expect understanding, because the question at root is something like "How can I understand myself when I can't even understand my self?"

We live on a knife edge between wishful thinking and despair, and we know deep down inside that wishful thinking is a daydream, a waste of time, so there's only despair below and the knife gets sharp sometimes. I think the key is to make the knife dull, flatten the edge till it's a bridge you can stand on, because you're too smart to fall for the dog tricks of wishful thinking (no offense meant to you wishful thinkers out there; as a matter of fact, God bless you).

It is an existential matter, and will remain with you until you simply do it away, keep moving, don't stop to think. If you can climb a mountain you can jump out of a plane, up or down, slow or fast, walking stick or parachute, same difference.

Keep doing the doing, do less thinking, take a walk, breathe with your chest and not your face. Think with your eyes and your ears and not with the weight under your ribcage. You're so fucking money and you don't even know it. I'm serious when I say I admire you, but that doesn't matter when you cut off the oxygen to your brain.

I wish I could help you with the everyday hurdling. I guess it feels like the very first time you got in a canoe or climbed on a roof just about every time you do just about anything, at least that's what it sometimes feels like to me and usually feels like to someone I love, but I know it feels different to everyone, because it's not the exact same thing in not the exact same person.

Shit, By the Grace of God, I'd do anything for you. You help me hope, time and again. Stand before you walk, walk before you run, all that, but keep doing, doing, doing, even if it's nerve-wracking and exhausting. Because, well, I don't know why, except I've heard life is better without the battleship chains. Walk, breathe, do.

Seriously, you're important, and the thought of you relaxing, smiling, and breathing a little easier does us both a world of good.

Then again maybe I'm writing your hurdle larger than you are, if so, just take away my love and good wishes and leave the overconcern behind.

Check anxietyzone.com; I'm sure there are others, but I don't have any experience with them. Resist the urge to pin everything that bugs you on the same cause, but at the same time resist the urge to deny the abundance of parallel examples just because everyone's different.

Oh, how badly I need to listen to myself.

Anxiety is necessary in life; it alerts us to danger. So you don't want to think of the goal as "eliminating anxiety," just turning it down when it's being unhelpful rather than helpful. It sounds like you're sliding along that spectrum in the direction you want, which is a good thing, and it's really all you need to be doing. Anxiety or other negative emotions and thoughts may continue to pop up, and that doesn't mean you're failing or regressing, just that you're human. The only thing you need to do is cope with them, and continue to experiment with healthy coping mechanisms and see which ones work -- you don't have to defeat them.

That is to say, "anxiety about important things 2 to 3 days before they happen" may not be fun, and you probably want to find ways of coping with that anxiety, but I can't imagine myself *not* having some degree of anxiety a few days before important things happen. Some of that anxiety is what pushes me to do a good job, to make sure I have all my bases covered. But some of it is making sure that I'm correctly categorizing what falls under "important," so that I'm not freaking out about everything, and another part of it is recognizing what's in my control and what's not, and what I've historically excelled at (and so can shove aside that anxiety as "perfectionism" and unhelpful) and what I've historically struggled with a bit more (so I can use anxiety as an alert to focus my attention more there).

It's kind of a whole judo-esque thing, really. Take the energy and alertness that anxiety can bring and use it tactically to kick the racing-heart-foggy-brain-self-doubt part of the anxiety to the curb.

I was struggling with an important but not really difficult task, the way I can do sometimes. It was really bothering me how these anxious feeling get in the way.

So I wondered to myself, "What if it doesn't matter how I feel?" I just about fell over from the disorientation. I repeated the question every day since and thought about it a great deal.

I think that nervous/anxious feelings are the brain's way of stopping us. It thinks it is protecting us but more often than not it is just in the way.

What I've been doing is changing the belief that my feelings (regarding tasks and projects) matter at all, because they don't. At least, not any more! Part of that is working on the tasks in spite of any residual emotions. It has only been a few weeks but my expectation is that eventually the brain will give up trying to stop me when it proves fruitless.

What great comments!

Also, I think feeling better follows doing better. Doing, however insincere and superficial it feels at first, has to lead the way before changed feeling can come. And when it comes, it comes slowly - at least for me. But it does arrive. One day you look around and say "huh; I feel all right. Even good."

Well I will keep up on the doing. It's my job, I'm part of some history making shit, I want to make myself and my family and all the people who have supported me a tiny bit proud.. I get tired sometimes but it usually passes. I'm deeply grateful to all of you and send you all an imperial assload of hugs. It is an honour to know you guys.