Hi everyone, I just really need to get this out and hopefully hear from people who understand.

I’m 22 and I’ve been dealing with panic disorder, anxiety, and derealization for about 4 years now. Before that, I had no anxiety at all. It literally started one day when I woke up feeling completely off, like nothing was real. I had heart palpitations, I was scared to answer the phone, and I suddenly couldn’t function the same at work.

At the time, I had just started working full-time right after high school in a contact center at a school. The environment was honestly awful. Supervisors were extremely strict, and the students calling in were often mean and sometimes even threatening. It was a really stressful and toxic place to be. I stayed with the same company for a few years but moved around to different roles.

Over time, I started noticing physical symptoms too. I developed a smile tremor when I try to smile, and I get really anxious in social settings, especially with large groups like my husband’s family. I got married last September and we have a happy marriage, and his family is kind and safe, but I still get intense anxiety beforehand. Once I’m there, I’m usually okay, but the anticipation is overwhelming.

I left that job about 3 months ago, and now I work remotely, but I still have to interact with that company sometimes. Even that brings back really bad feelings and anxiety.

I’ve been in therapy for 2 years and did EMDR for childhood trauma, and I’m about to start EMDR again for what I think is work-related trauma that I didn’t realize was affecting me this much.

Medication has been really frustrating. I started Buspar and was on 15 mg twice daily for about 4 weeks. I felt some slight improvement but nothing major. My psychiatrist then told me to jump to 30 mg twice daily (so 60 mg total) without really guiding me through it, and the past 5 days have been really hard. I’ve felt super emotional, foggy, and honestly worse.

When I told him, he suddenly wanted to take me off Buspar and prescribed oxcarbazepine 150 mg to treat PTSD, without really explaining things or giving me a clear plan. The appointment felt rushed, and it honestly felt like he forgot details from my previous visit. It made me feel like I couldn’t trust what he was prescribing.

My therapist even said he increased the Buspar too quickly and that I probably should have tried 45 mg first before going up to 60 mg.

I also told him I was open to trying Zoloft since my mom takes it and has had really good results, and her symptoms were similar to mine. He kind of brushed that off and said he wanted to try other things first, which made me feel like my input didn’t matter.

Right now I just feel stuck, overwhelmed, and honestly hopeless. I miss who I was before all of this started. I just want to feel normal again and not constantly on edge or disconnected.

Has anyone actually recovered from this or at least gotten to a point where life feels normal again? :(

I discovered that anything with 4 is removed from elevators, I discovered over an incident on a live cam site requesting an offensive to God number in the Bible and it’s making life a hell to where I cannot wear anything by Calvin Klein as it ends with the 14th letter of the alphabet , a relationship with a girl was destroyed because of same thing, please help me to get over this as I exhausted every self help method trying to do this

I've been struggling really badly with anxiety and I'm hoping someone here can relate.

I'm currently tapering off clonazepam after being on it for over 6 years, and the last several days have been some of the hardest of my life. I've had panic attacks, cried for hours, barely slept, and I feel physically and emotionally exhausted.

The thing that's scaring me the most is these intrusive "what if" thoughts. They're not thoughts that I want to act on. They're more like, "What if I lose my mind? What if I snap? What if I hurt myself or someone I love even though I don't want to?" The fear itself is what consumes me.

The thoughts make me question everything. I keep wondering if I'm going crazy, even though I desperately want to live. I want to celebrate my birthday, travel, have a baby someday, be with my family, and enjoy my life. That's why these thoughts terrify me so much.

I even went to the ER because I was so scared, and they didn't think I was a danger to myself. I'm also seeing a therapist. But my brain keeps saying, "What if they're wrong?"

Has anyone else dealt with intrusive harm OCD or anxiety like this? Did it get better? Did you ever stop feeling like you were one thought away from losing control?

I'm not looking for reassurance that something terrible is secretly wrong with me. I'm hoping to hear from people who've been through this and came out the other side, because right now it feels like I'll never be normal again.

Thank you for reading.

A friend of mine is at a uni in a different country and comes back here maybe every 6ish months. I can’t say we had no contact since she moved we called a lot in the beginning,sharing tiktoks and stuff remained,but it plummeted since January. I kind of distanced from two of our mutual friends so it might’ve been that idk rlly.

Anyways she reached out saying she’s in town until October if i wanted to see her and oh gosh did that make my stomach drop
I know I’m probably overthinking most of it,but fuck
I just hate this feeling :(
I guess the lesser contact/no seeing each other + the friendgroup dynamic falling off is what made me think she doesn’t want me involved anymore
Heck i dont know

I'm not sure if this is anxiety related - I'm not sure whether I even really struggle with anxiety, to be honest.

I usually wake up around 7:45. recently, I've been sleeping in, so waking up around 9:30-11. whenever I wake up at this time, I feel very lightheaded. not dizzy as such, but as though I am sick with a cold or something. it doesn't go away after eating or drinking coffee, only after a few hours, but no consistent time.

I suspect this is as a result of anxiety since I have been experiencing various other somatic symptoms recently - twitches, shortness of breath, shaking - without any actual worry. if anyone has had similar issues or has got any advice, let me know.

I had unprotected sex with someone new and ever since, I’ve been stuck in this cycle of convincing myself I have something. Every little thing feels like a sign.

Literally the other day I was deep in my own head, fully convincing myself I had it, and then out of nowhere a reel started playing on my dad’s phone and said the exact word I’m terrified of. It’s just fueling my anxiety.

I feel like I hear or see that word everywhere. Sometimes it’s not even there, but my brain thinks it is. If it is there, my eyes lock onto it instantly. I even catch myself avoiding saying certain things because my brain is convinced I’ll somehow manifest it.

I’m getting tested after the window period, but the waiting is honestly the hardest part. Just wondering if anyone else’s health anxiety is fixated on something right now too.

Ive posted it in one other subreddit already but I wanted more people to help..Im 16yo. I've been having nightmares of missiles flying etc and it keeps me up at night all the time.

Russia-ukraine, Israel+Usa-Iran..and recently even Germany raised their safe levels to high-risk..I'm from Slovakia. But I'm very scared that one day there will be missiless flying. I really want not to worry.

Cause right now I'm very safe but I mean, what if usa will attack all europe? And China will get involved..in my country, we don't have any military base for them to even destroy, but they could still attack us, right? I just have a bad feeling that something horrible will happen. *I just want to feel safe in my country. Yes they dont have a reason to attack such a small country but..*

Been happening the most in the mornings but my anxiety makes me feel the feeling after running a mile after you’ve finally caught your breath but you can still feel it in your chest. my physically body also just feels exhausted just the same, like i’m struggling to put 1 foot in front of the other, bc my whole body just feels worn out.

dos anybody experience this and now how to deal with it?

I've always had terrible anxiety, for as long as I can remember, but this is some of the worst I've ever felt. I don't know why, or what started it, but about three weeks ago I couldn't sleep because I just kept thinking about the fact that one day, I'm going to die. My partner is going to die, so will my parents. And I got cold and shaky and overwhelmed in the way I always have in the past when I think about it all a little too hard. But it. Hasn't. Stopped. Normally I'm fine by the next morning. It's been nearly three weeks. I'm mostly okay during the day, mostly (except I'm scared of near everything giving me cancer, or being a sign that I already have cancer, more than normal), but it gets bad as soon as the sun starts to set. I can't sleep until the sun is up, so I've basically become nocturnal (shoutout being unemployed and not in school atm so. Not as bad as it could be) and that's... Not ideal. I can't really watch or read anything that has any sort of themes that are related to mortality like, at all, so I've literally been playing animal crossing and watching MLP until the sun rises and then sleeping until late afternoon. I'm on meds, I'm taking them, but nothing is really helping. Does anyone have any idea how to help, I'm getting desperate

I’m writing this as I am currently coming off of one of the worst sleeps I’ve had lol. The title is sort of what it is, is that when I have things that I know I need to get done or things that are just on mind, no matter how much I tell myself that I will get it done or that I don’t need to worry about it, my anxiety still goes through the roof. When I first go to sleep, I usually feel fine because I tell myself that everything is fine and that I don’t need to worry but then I guess my subconscious after a couple of hours tells me otherwise because I’ll wake up with my heart racing and head pounding, and sick feeling in my stomach that doesn’t allow me to sleep soundly again or sometimes even go back to sleep.

So I’m sort of just wondering if there is anything I can do to sort of help myself lower my anxiety or just reduce this from happening because it makes it so difficult to do anything in the day after with the way it leaves me feeling.

I have chronic vestibular migraines with bad anxiety. I want to go on a beach vacation so bad. But it scares the living hell out of me to get through the airport to get an Uber to get to where I need to go. And all out spend my vacation by myself making all the decisions by myself.

Has anyone with anxiety, panic, pvc, pac gone through an endoscopy (with sedation)?
Please share your experience and safety regarding that!

I recently left a toxic job that I think, over time, really wrecked my nervous system. For the last year ish I have had really bad anxiety/OCD thoughts and tendencies. Mine is specifically health related (heart palpations, overanalyzing every feeling), but I can remember a time where I did not feel like this. When I am distracted, I do not have the symptoms, which leads me to believe it is anxiety related. Has anyone else felt something similar to this? I know everyone's body reacts to stress differently but it is like I cannot just calm down. Coloring and relaxing helps, but I am looking for other recommendations to help calm me down when I feel the symptoms come up. I just want to feel like my old self again!

Title is pretty self explanatory, i just started experimenting with different things like mdma, shrooms, that sort of thing this summer with a bunch of my friends that I’ve been raving with for years, but I’m about to go back this fall for my junior year at my SEC school that’s pretty conservative about this kind of stuff.

Before I began experimenting, I would hear of people doing cocaine here and when u heard of someone doing it, it was incredibly frowned upon and was “big news”. Granted I know of a bunch of people that do shrooms here, smoke a lot of weed, lots of people have drinking problems, but coming back to school after going to all of my raves this summer I have a lot of anxiety.

When I’m with my friends and in the rave scene, I’m pretty comfortable because people don’t judge u there, but going back to school for some reason I feel like everyone’s gonna be looking at me with a giant sign that says I do drugs on my back.

I guess this anxiety really is honestly ramping up because I just took a few friends from college who don’t really rave to a wooli show because they’ve been telling me they wanted to go to one of these things for a while, and I asked them if they wanted to try any of the things I had, and they said no, but the way they said it kind of threw me off, and then later in the night I asked if they wanted to go to afters and they again turned it down but they seemed kind of uncomfortable in the way they said it despite seeming like they had a super fun time throughout the night.

I’ve never dealt with this kind of anxiety before, because usually I don’t care what others think, I mean this is my life not theirs why would I limit my experiences because of a select few people’s judgement, but now that I’m actually going back knowing people from my school have been talking about my festival and rave goings (my Instagram stories always get 100+ reshares when I post me at them, but there’s never any suspicious behavior in the videos) I feel like everyone’s gonna think something bad of me or I’m gonna feel isolated from groups.