Looking for some advice over anxiety

drivingahead wrote: »

The last week or so I have been feeling so anxious and sick. I’ve no interest in food but forcing myself to eat as many daily calories as I can. The doctor has prescribed me an anti depressant but I understand that may take a few weeks to kick in. I’m not sleeping much and just constantly feel shaky and nausea. Any suggestions I can try to combat this? I am starting counselling next week.
Thank you x

Have you ever used a meditation app, like Calm or Headspace? You should be able to stay with the free guided meditations without paying for a subscription to tide you over until your first appt at least. I find guided meditation/breathing exercises help, also reading fiction helps me to shut off my brain and focus on the story, much better than watching a show or movie.

For calories, a shake or smoothie can help, if you have access to either a premade or the ingredients to make your own. Hang in there!

Have you started the antidepressant already? Those all sound like side effects of my antidepressant when I first started. I ended up quitting caffeine completely because it was amplifying the effects of it.

When I’ve had anxiety-induced nausea in the past then there were usually some foods that didn’t seem to bother me, like pasta with parmesan, toast with butter, or oats with some brown sugar. Not sure if you have any safe foods but maybe that will help too.

Hang in there. I too had really bad anxiety years ago. I had little interest in food but when I did eat I couldn’t keep it down. It was terrible. Try soup and yes smoothies. Sleep is important. If you have trouble sleeping try visualizing a safe happy place to help you relax so you can fall asleep. I hope you feel better soon.

I have had anxiety induced insomnia in the past. Its really hard. Some things I tried:

No light in the room. Cover your windows and clock. Do not ever look at your phone in bed.

Try white noise in the background.

The bedroom is for sleep and sex only. Don't read your book, work, watch TV, etc in bed.

If you really can't sleep, get up and go read in a calm room somewhere else (again no screen time at least 1 hour before bed).

These things may not solve it for you. They may not even help. They helped me a bit but in the end the only thing that made the insomnia go away was my anxiety going away. But I was suffering from post partum anxiety so I had the benefit of my hormones eventually rebalancing on their own, especially once my child stopped nursing at night.

I'm having some anxiety and insomnia again now as a side effect of going off some medication for something else... but that I increased the dose back up a little and plan to go off even slower. Again hopefully that will do the trick. But when I am not hungry because of it, it helps to make myself eat high fat food.. they're high calorie and good for hormone health... are there any meds you stopped recently that could be a factor?