In the past, I've experienced anxiety in new situations whether that be unfamiliar places or unfamiliar people. The symptoms I experienced were uncontrollable shaking, heart racing, inability to think, and general uneasiness. Now I experience anxiety when there's a break in my routine or something I expect to happen doesn't. The symptoms I get now are heart racing, worrying, and crying. I hate how my anxiety makes me feel because it happens most often in situations involving my boyfriend and I don't want to be that overdramatic girlfriend who cries to get what she wants, even if I know that's not why I'm doing it. It wasn't until an anxiety attack I had quite recently after a miscommunication, where I heard my boyfriend saying he was coming over on a certain day and then on that day he didn't come over, that I realized I wasn't being an awful person it was just my anxiety acting up.
I think the realization that I'm not being crazy or unreasonable and that it's my anxiety that is causing me to react strongly helps me to calm down when I'm in those situations. When it happened and I thought I was just crazy, the attack would go on for hours until I either cried myself to sleep or distracted myself with something else. Now that I can think a bit more rationally about what is causing my reactions I can calm myself down a lot faster. I think taking the blame, guilt, shame, etc away from my anxiety attacks has made a big difference in how I can handle them. I'm currently still trying to find new coping techniques but for now, I've learned not to give myself such a hard time when I experience an anxiety attack.
