A little bit about me......

My name is Alison and I am 45 years old. I live in Cumbria, England. I have suffered with Generalised Anxiety as long as I can remember, but was formally diagnosed by my GP around 10 years ago - I can't remember the exact date. I had a couple of rounds of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) - 6 to 10 weeks at a time, which I was able to grasp intellectually but ultimately weren't all that helpful.

I started to look for ways to help myself and have tried a great variety of things over the years with varying degrees of success. I want to document all these things here to raise awareness of these strategies for managing stress/anxiety and give you some idea of how effective they were for me, whether I am still using them currently etc.. Each topic will be a separate blog post and I would encourage readers to respond by sharing their own experience of these strategies or any comments that might help others to assess the potential helpfulness of a particular solution in their own situation.

The topics are not ranked in any way - they will just be in the order they fall out of my brain and onto the page. It is important to realise that none of these things is a silver bullet and what works really well for one person will have negligible effects on the next. The important thing is to never give up the search for what works for you. We only get one life. Anxiety in all its forms can make that life really miserable. Just realise that it is totally within the power of most people to take control of their anxiety and feel better than they do today.

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