Do any of you hate it when your mind can't relax?

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I can't understand why I can't learn to relax because I have anxiety. Anyone have the same problem?

Yes, and it gives me a headache.

Anxiety is caused by stress. So to relieve anxiety, one must remove stress.

The brain is composed of different components (brains). There is the inner core brain. This is like the brain of an infant. So if you replicate the actions of your mother when your were crying, these techniques are stress relief tools:

Pressure Therapy - Your mother placed your hands tight up against your body and held you tight or she wrapped you in a tight blanket. This is why Temple Grandin's "Squeeze Machine" works. It is also why weighted blankets work.

Sleep Therapy - Sleep is very important in recharging the body. One needs around 8 hours of good sleep each night. During restorative sleep our blood pressure drops and breathing slows allowing blood to flow to our muscles, repairing tissue. “A bad night’s sleep" can also cause an increase in cortisol, the stress hormone. Many times your mother gave you a warm bath before she put you to bed. It was almost like a ritual. So you might try a warm bath before bedtime. Also control your sleep environment. Minimize noise and light and interruptions.

Music Therapy - Many mothers sing lullabies to their child to calm them. Listen to music to relax yourself.

Touch Therapy. - Many mothers caressed their child to soothe them. Touch is a very important sense. Find someone who can hold your hand for a few minutes. If that person is calm they can transmit that calm to your body. Also massage therapy, even electrically stimulated massage can be helpful.

Motion Therapy - Many mothers rocked their children back and forth, back and forth. That is why many children like playing on a swing and why many grandparents would rock in a rocking chair on the porch of their home, peacefully watching life go by.

The next level up has a brain that is described as "fight or flight". When you encounter a threat, you either flee or attack. Unused stress energy builds up in your muscles and nervous system. This stress energy needs to be purged or it will slowly damage your body. This can be done by exercise but there is a secret here. Most exercise only reduces stress for a few minutes or hours. You need to purge this energy so that the effects last for days, week, and months. In order to do this it requires an extreme vent. You need to simulate being chased by a tiger, literally chased by a tiger. To vent stress from your legs long-term then do ten 6-second maximal sprints (around a 50-yard dash, running like a bat out of hell) with a 30 second recovery between each sprint. These are maximal or supramaximal exercise. This is exercise where the intensity or individual’s maximal oxygen uptake (percentage of VO2max) is 100% or greater. A similar approach can be used to vent long term stress from the arms. Use a punching bag and move your arms/hands so fast that they become a blur. (6-second burst) with 30 second recovery times in-between. You don't need to punch the bag hard, a light touch will do. It is the intensity and speed that counts. And then there is your fifth limb. You need to vent the stress in your neck muscles, vocal cords, and jaw. The best way is to scream at the top of your lungs several times. But you have to do this in a socially acceptable manner. I live in the country and my dog is a free range dog. When it is meal time, I call my dog, very loudly. My voice carries about a mile. It gives me a sense of great strength, like I could split a mountain in two just with my voice alone. You might try howling like a wolf at the moon. There is a person on this site that howls at the subway cars as they pass by deep down in the subway stations in New York City. But there are other ways to scream in a socially acceptable manner. A singer can do this if it is a very powerful song. A barker in the county fair can do this. Or find yourself a soundproof room.

Then the third layer, the outer layer, is your social brain. You will need to figure a way of relieving stress from this layer. Sometimes avoidance will work. Sometimes you need to confront the issue head on.

Remember stress is cumulative and the stress from these three layers add together to produce great stress and anxiety. So work on relieving stress from all three layers.

Yes I can't stop obsessing over:

Structural engineer
Autism
Homophobia
Former precious lil "friends"


Scrutinize choice of words ("we would rather not have you doing yoga. It's distracting."). Everything is either grounding, neither, or distracting . It is also "distracting" when I continue living. "We would rather not have you continue living. It's distracting.". In 35 years , over two people found it "distracting" when I continued living. So what?

This precious lil "person" told me that, in 2011 and now it is 2018 , and I still can't get over it

(Entitled lil attitude. )





Fat
Suicide
Depression

"Excuse me" , not "what"

Yep I can totally relate, I find it really hard to relax myself. I give myself a headache and find myself exhausted when I'm struggling with anxiety.

I had that problem pretty bad sometimes before I started anxiety & OCD medication. I take Buspar/Buspirone for my anxiety & I take Neurontin/Gabapentin for my OCD.

Anxiety lately has been going amok

Don't know why

Once upon a time... It's more or less a fuel for action, for a control freak side of me who does all the screaming and pointing, that most of my inner voices are cut off or silenced because of it's intolerances.

Now, it was but a distant memory.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Almost ready for tranquilizers

This is the best case scenario

And I still feel edgy and uptight

Broken brain

Obsessive compulsive disorder

Surprised that I ever got into structural engineering in the first place

I guess so. I'm not sure what relaxing would look like.

My mind is always awake and active, I don’t even know what relaxation looks like for me.

Absolutely. I think to myself that I wish I could just "clear the cache" all the time. My mind insists on stressing about all kinds of pointless stuff that logically I know doesn't matter. As brilliant as the human brain is, it's also pretty dumb.

yes! i have troubles switching my brain off, i find i can’t relax and sometimes i can’t even distract myself.
i can focus on something and still have my anxieties racing in the background. it’s frustrating.

I have an interesting situation. When I've been doing a repetitive activity (cutting tree branches with a chainsaw, for example) I keep seeing "echoes" of what I've been doing. When I would be talking to my wife later, I'd still be thinking about chainsawing, sometimes "overlaying" the situation at hand visually. Same thing happens when I'm trying to sleep. I suppose that being on the spectrum and always doing repetitive things without really thinking about them, they become ingrained or imprinted in my memory and keep repeating. Sometimes this memory advantage I have becomes a curse.