The How to Get Rid of Things Blog

You probably didn’t know this, but you can actually get rid of mental illness. Well, actually, it depends on the particular illness, but I’m pretty well versed in the psycho-babble concerning anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. (Natasha wrote the depression article.) Been there, done it. I’m still having panic attacks some seven years after a short stint at the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate. Yeah, apparently college at large university is stressful, which is why I left and attended Bemidji State University where I started “How to Get Rid of Things”, inadvertently.

Oh, I have to update the sitemap. Thanks for reminding me. You’re welcome.

I’ve been living with an anxiety disorder ever since the age of 19, when I had my first panic attack. Since then I’ve learned how to deal with and how to get rid of anxiety, both the common anxieties of everyday life, and the overwhelming anxieties that leave me lying in bed, awake, gasping for air. I’ll tell you, it’s not easy to overcome the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety; they can wreak havoc on you and those close to you. In the following article, I will outline several of the strategies that have helped me to cope with anxiety in the hopes that you can learn from some of my experiences with the disorder, but keep in mind that each anxiety disorder is different and may arise from any number of causes. Keeping that in mind, here are some basic treatment strategies for your common anxiety disorder (or GAD, generalized anxiety disorder).

Since I suffer from panic attacks and make no attempt to hide the fact, a lot of people ask me: what are panic attacks and how do you get rid of a panic attack? how do you stop a panic attack? Well, first I’ll tell you that some people think a panic attack (also known as an anxiety attack) feels a lot like having a heart attack; all of the symptoms are there, but you’re not dying. I’d characterize it as this: what your reaction might be if you went skydiving and suddenly realized half-way through your descent that you forgot your parachute on your seat in the airplane. That is what a panic attack feels like.

There isn’t really a known cause for panic attacks, but basically it is your brain’s inability to turn off your instinctual fight-or-flight mechanism, that mechanism which controls adrenaline and other hormones that keep you alive in the middle of a crisis. This sends you into a hysterical state that keeps building because when people have panic attacks, and they don’t know what’s going one, they start freaking out about being freaked out. A panic attack or series of panic attacks can cripple a person–make them afraid to leave their home–and can sometimes lead to suicide. That’s how I felt until I sought counseling and learned how to cope with panic attacks. Don’t bother with sites like www.panic-anxiety.com, they’re just trying to sell you shit. These are the things you need to know and act on if you’re having panic attacks:

How to get rid of stress is not an easy do-it-yourself guide to write. It’s not easy to reduce stress because reducing stress would imply knowing that stress is there, but stress is that scentless, tasteless poison you don’t know you’ve ingested too much of until you start to see the symptoms–really a cocktail of physical and hormonal reactions to an overwhelming sense of nervousness. Gritting your teeth, tightness in your chest, lack of concentration, pains in strange places, muscle twitching, muscle cramps, blurred vision: these (and much, much more) are all symptoms of someone who is dealing with too much stress. So, what to do about stress? Well, here are some suggestions from a person who’s dealt with an anxiety disorder for the past seven years: http://www.getridofthings.com/get-rid-of-stress.htm

I’ve recently discovered the joys of the Yahoo! Answers program, and I think there’s some potential here to keep How to Get Rid of Things advice in the public eye. I signed up a couple of weeks ago, and not too long ago I was picked as a best answer for the service they offer in the U.K. Here is the question and my answer. Apparently spiders are a problem in the United Kingdom as well. I offered her a link to a book I’d bought about spiders in Minnesota (the north woods), not thinking that she would actually appreciate a book detailing spiders only found in the most northern parts of North America. I also linked here to the wikipedia article about spiders, and back to How to Get Rid of Things–which brings me to my point.

If you happen to be all about answering questions and getting pseudo-rewards for them, I strongly recommend that you  check out the Yahoo! Answers program. It’s easy to sign up for, and it’s actually a bit of fun. Not only that, but you can brush up on your rhetoric skills by seeing just how many times you can lull a couple of readers into thinking you really do have the best answer to their problem.

Oh, and if you find the occasion to link back to getridofthings.com at the bottom of your Yahoo Answer page, please do.