Constant feeling of dread

Where the hell does this come from? My missus calls it the “chicken little” side of me

Seem to have a constant feeling like something bad is going to happen. Things are going relatively right and nothing to make me think the sky is going to fall in, but I can’t seem to shake this at all.

Already been to the docs and they’ve referred me, so I just have to wait on the NHS, but does anyone have any suggestions in the meantime. Been going for more rides and that takes the edge off for a while

As general starting point consider this book

Its quite easy to dip in and out of. Its clever in that its broad. No assumptions about what might work for you or what your issue is

loads of practical advice and real world examples

When you go for your rides take it easy really concentrate on the beauty of it all….when you start feeling like this put on your favorite music, go for a walk or eat something nice and make a conscious effort to focus on what you choose to do…look up mindfullness…..allow yourself to feel this fear, acknowledge it, thank it then do something you’ll enjoy…it will take practice….Best of luck….

Anxiety is the repetition of negative affirmation to yourself. When you keep repeating “I am scared” or “something bad will happen” you will create situations and people that will make you feel scared and anxious.

The more you affirm negative beliefs, the more anxious you will become.

The more you repeat positive affirmation of yourself and or a situation, the more relaxed you will become.

To overcome anxiety, simply affirm the opposite of the fear that you are repeating to yourself anmd you will release yourself from fear. All anxiety is fear and fear itself, is an illusion.

It takes practise.

Go well and good fortune.

I used to have this which I put down to drug use over the years. Had CBT and it sorted it out, basically I just focused on it and the more I did the worse it got, learned to stop fixating on stuff and not dwell on things which previously made me feel uneasy. Thought it was nonsense at first but after a while it damn well worked. Feel right as rain these days.

Slackalice puts it perfectly above, that was me in a nutshell, anxiety, bad paranioa, several panic attacks. Suffered with it for years and thought i always would. All gone now though. It is just self fulfilling and you need to learn to break the cycle. I needed CBT to do it for me which it did. I was on citalopram too though I’m pretty sure they didjt make a blind bit of difference to me.

Forget all of that stuff that people have written up there. Just go out and do some exercise. Clinically proven to be just about the best treatment.

Forget all of that stuff that people have written up there. Just go out and do some exercise. Clinically proven to be just about the best treatment.

I’m afraid you’re confusing anxiety with depression.

I don’t deny that exercise is the best medicine, going out riding a lot more, but it seems to be very much a short term solution and it’s effects wear off very quickly

redsox – Member

I don’t deny that exercise is the best medicine, going out riding a lot more, but it seems to be very much a short term solution and it’s effects wear off very quickly

Just that, I feel great for 12 hours or so but then the doom devils in my head chip away at me.
I would be great if I could shake the bastids off

I used to suffer with chronic anxiety.. it literally drove me crazy, as above, mine was initially caused by drug abuse..

after years of being clean, taking medication, admissions to a psychiatric unit, therapy, even more medication and even more years of being clean, it wasn’t really abating..

I got sick of it all and dived right back off the rails for a few years, hung out with reprobates and got up to all sorts..

Obviously that kind of lifestyle isn’t very sustainable long-term, and when I came out the other side I was surprised to note that the anxiety had decreased to a much more manageable level, almost certainly linked to the stuff that Slackalice was saying above..

As a famous crazy once said:

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

Hunter S. Thompson

Forget all of that stuff that people have written up there. Just go out and do some exercise. Clinically proven to be just about the best treatment.

🙄

Just because you might know a fair amount about a tiny area of health doesn’t give you expertise about others and justification to bad mouth others. Someone with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail is not good for patients.

OP: It’s a recognised feature of GAD. Look at CBT and the other approaches suggested above.

Didn’t bad mouth anyone. Just said that exercise is about the best treatment. Sky falling in can be interpreted in many different ways – is it anxiety, or is it depression, or is it a mixture of the two as these things most often are.

Yes I’m a physio, but I’ve also suffered from depression and anxiety for the past 20 years or so and have managed them both with a healthy dose of regular exercise.

Stoatsbrother – making incorrect assumptions is never a good way of dealing with health related issues – you should know that by now.

I’m afraid you’re confusing anxiety with depression.

They’re very similar, two sides of the same coin. When I had very bad anxiety it would switch occasionally into Depression for a day or so and then back again – was a very odd experience.

Glupton. Well good for you.

But 2 posters have told you that the approach which works for you doesn’t work for them. Different people need different approaches. Trashing other evidence based options isn’t helpful. So don’t you make the assumption that what works for you is the only valid approach.

Pretty poor.

OP , good luck. Ignore Glupton. Good luck. Must be horrible. I’m out.

Care to point me in the direction of people saying that exercise doesn’t work for them to some degree?

If you put off doing things which are causing you upset by going out riding your bike you are not solving the problem really are you.

Exercise is indeed one of many coping mechanism’s that can help people deal with their negative feelings about themselves and/or their world. The release of dopamine among other chemicals released within the brain resulting from exercise is well documented.

Exercise alone though, will not get to the root cause of either anxiety or depression. Nor will a ‘pull your sock’s up’ or MTFU approach. As many of us have experienced, anxiety is hard work at best and is debilitating to the extreme at worst.

As is pointed out above, it’s not depression. They come from different places within us; anxiety from our own internal ‘chatterbox’ and depression from not following our true purpose. Each require different approaches, although positive mental attitude ( mindfulness as scarcat says), is for many, the road to recovery.

Sky falling feeling? Have you thought about hooking up with goosy loosey and drakey lackey… Just keep an eye out for foxy loxy as he’s always up to no good. Sorry, absolutely nothing else constructive to add.

Stella Artois or Peroni!

Could it be stress related? I’ve heard that what you are describing is one potential symptom.

TBH, this might come as a shock … I think many people live in a constant state of dread/ what is going to go wrong.

Some compartmentalise it and see it as being the stress of life, some thrive on it and make it work for them, and some can’t cope.
It makes people get up in the morning, and go to work, and plan and live life …
But you are not the only one who feels it

Constant feeling of dread

You’ve met the Mother-in-Law then?

Lots of advice above, try it all, but mine would be to get to grips with the idea that feelings are self generated; you can, with effort, with practise, begin to understand that the way you feel is a response which can be altered or coped with.

Medication can help to give you breathing space, talking therapies can help to get you to state and understand stuff, beer can help blot it out for a hour or so.

±1 slackalice..

I don’t really know whether you mean it in the sense that you feel something bad is going to happen at one point in the future, ie luck going to run out, or if something might happen at any time, ie constant paranoia type feeling, to me they are two different feelings. The latter would certainly suggest an anxiety problem, I don’t know if you smoke weed or have previously smoked a lot of weed but cutting that out will help. Probably correct to seek help if it is affecting your quality of life but you may feel better eventually without. Slackalice has got it right in my experience, stop focussing on that feeling of dread and when the thought arises instead focus on the fact that nothing has happened to you every previous time it has arisen, try and build a defence to the feeling that way. Kind of telling yourself to stop being silly man, you are perfectly capable person.

If it is more the feeling that something bad is going to happen at some point, it probably doesn’t help but I also had that for a long time, and eventually I was in an accident with a car, and I now no longer have the feeling! Not that that means anything at all….

Mayby you see this symptom as a threat to you, which makes you worry (seen the docs) and this is enough to keep you on alert, checking on it to see if it has gone. For me the way it goes away is to accept it, allow it be there, stop seeing it as a threat and go on with your life. It fades away.

Have you been under some stress lately? That probably brought it on.

For me cbt was useful if you had a specific, defined problem. Sometimes you may have been under too much stress, you have experienced a symptom of excess stress and now this symptom is stressing (worrying) you.

http://www.moodjuice.scot.nhs.uk/ might help, if your area is anything like mine the wait for a counsellor will be around 3 months.

exercise is temporary relief, not a cure – for me at least. It also provides a high from which the resulting come down can be terrible.

what slackalice and loddrik said is a more permanent approach to manage your own mind and essentially what I’m learning right now. This has come from reading The Chimp Paradox[/url] – it’s a bit abstract but actually makes me think about it rather than saying “you’re anxious, so do this”. I’ve read it in dribs and drabs but every time I get through a chapter it has had a really positive effect. It can be remarkably simple to overcome anxiety and / or depression but you need to face up to it and tackle your own mind.

Google ‘cognitive behaviour therapy’ (CBT).

I get it all the time but I reckon it’s cos of my job as a prison officer. I keep thinking I’m going to get a TV or a bucket of pish on me head. It shouldn’t happen though as I am Mr Barrowclough. 😆

Also reduce the caffeine/booze until you reduce the anxiety.

I’m afraid you’re confusing anxiety with depression.

They’re very similar, two sides of the same coin. When I had very bad anxiety it would switch occasionally into Depression for a day or so and then back again – was a very odd experience.

Had loads of anxiety/paranoia etc, never had anything even encroaching on depression symptoms in all the years I’ve suffered with it.

Moodscope[/url]

I find this helpful when I get feelings of what I call ‘the jitters’. A feeling I’m going to screw something up and get publically ridiculed for it. I think it’s just a follow-on from way too much job stress over the last 10 years.

With Moodscope, over time, you start to link your routine and behaviour with the ups and downs you experience.
I’ve found lack of sleep, eating poorly and alcohol to have a clear correlation with low mood.
Not an alternative to the suggestions above, but maybe something complementary which will help

Also reduce the caffeine/booze until you reduce the anxiety.

yeah, caffeine is a strong drug, don’t think people realise the side effects it can have.

did you leave the iron/oven on?

I’m only really repeating what others have said above, but having lived with anxiety and depression for twelve years now, I’ve found CBT to really help me to understand that – for anxiety, at least – it’s just a cycle of negative thoughts that perpetuate themselves.

I genuinely thought I had lost my mind when I had my first panic attack in 2001, and for maybe six months I lived entirely inside my own head, micro-analysing everything that came into my thoughts and putting a negative spin on it.

I am much better equipped now at recognising when I’m starting to have unhelpful thoughts, and telling them to bugger off. The Steve Peters book mentioned above is worth a read, although it’s really only a different way of telling the same story that you’ll read if you have some counselling sessions and take away the worksheets.

In my personal experience, I tend to look at anxiety and depression a little like alcoholism; I’ll always suffer from the illness, but I can control it and lead the life I want to lead, rather than it controlling me.

Best of luck with getting better.

Although no substitute for professional advice, the Steve Peters book about the chimp paradox made a hell of a lot of sense to me.

Agree with the point that plenty of good quality sleep, eating well and not drinking heavily all play their part in maintaining a good mental state for me. Also getting outside in the daytime to get some sunshine and vitamin D also helps a lot.

Good luck