How to manage my anxiety until I can get to see a therapist?

Set a timer. You've got 10 minutes to stew, to google horrible diseases, to perseverate and worry. Ding! Now you're done. If (when!) you start worrying again, congratulate yourself for noticing! Then say to your anxiety, "no, I'm done that for the day" and redirect yourself. You'll have it on your to-do list for your 10 minutes tomorrow when you can gross yourself out on Google Images to your heart's content. Spend the rest of your evening doing something else. Doing something else can be the difficult thing. Podcasts can help if you pay full attention to them. Meditation is hard, but active meditation (eg Zentangle drawing, walking meditation, learning something complicated that requires focus) is less difficult and gives you a break from the anxiety obsessed time. http://ask.metafilter.com/277819/Good-body-weight-exercises-that-need-minimal-no-equipment Go for a walk and notice the things around you. Count the birds or the signs of spring or tattooed people or whatever strikes your fancy. Give that busy brain a job. Finally, cultivate compassion for your anxiety. Talk to it, not about the specifics but about the overall. "Oh hello, anxiety. No, I'm sorry, we already spent our 10 minutes on that today. We're doing a jigsaw puzzle now! Yes, I know you're trying to look out for my health, thank you. I hear you and I'm going to take care of us." I learned these things mostly from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy which I stumbled upon from the book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572247118/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. Best of luck to you. You can do this.

To be honest sounds like you are reacting very well - proactively trying to change your life rather than just flailing around. Mediation: Falling asleep during meditation isn't something you should worry about. It shows you are relaxing. If you are finding it difficult then try a shorter time (and build it up) or try a guided meditation tape. A comment on the idea that it's "not working." From my very novice perspective mediation is really about "failing" and picking yourself up again. Your mind will wonder. You can't force that to stop happening. Instead just notice that it's happening, let go off the thought and go back to what you were focusing. Other strategies: You can try some self help materials/CBT in the interim: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/pages/self-help-therapies.aspx Breathing: When you feel anxious try and breath in a slow relaxed way, into your abodomen. Stress diary: Keep a record of times when your anxiety peaks. What the situation was, where you were, what your thoughts, feelings and body were like, actions you took and their outcome. Worry plan: When you feel anxious about a problem try and break it down on paper and come up with a very concrete plan to solve it.

One more thing: You mentioned exercise but not much else about your body. Anxiety is a very physical thing and if you can't get at it via thinking you may be able to get at it through the body. When I am anxious, my shoulders are up and tight. My jaw clenches. My brow furrows. My breath is shallow. My stomach is held tight. My body is curled up, coiled. Drop my shoulders. Loosen my jaw. Elongate my neck. Relax my face. Deep breath. Loose stomach. Big stretch. My brain begins to quiet. Get in the habit of checking in with your body. How are you holding it? Is it tight? Is it uncomfortable? Can you unclench anything? Would a stretch feel good? How is your breathing? Is it shallow? Remember to breathe in day to day life! People with anxiety are often found to breathe less often and not as much, and this changes the resources available to your body and brain. A couple resources: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercises.htmls including the famous 4-7-8 exercise http://www.helpguide.org/articles/stress/relaxation-techniques-for-stress-relief.htm including a body scan

I see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1626252157/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ recommended here quite frequently, and my own therapist suggested it when I first started seeing her for anxiety as well. Definitely helped me, especially when I was first starting to figure out how to formally address my anxiety. Good luck!

Since you're already meditating, you might find this book very helpful: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1606234641/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ It has a lot of fantastic meditation exercises that focus on dealing with anxiety, and it completely changed how I think about anxiety and emotions in general. Highly, highly recommended.

You say you're exercising, but are you really getting that heart rate up? Just wondering because while a calm hour-long walk does very little for my anxiety, an hour of cardio pretty much destroys it. At least 4-5 hours a week is kind of the sweet spot for me. I'm a big girl and it took me a while to get to that point but now that I'm there, it has been life altering. Cut out the sugar. Sugar compounds my anxiety and I notice my jaw clenching gets worse when I have been chowing down on the sweet stuff. Ditto caffeine. I could drink coffee 24 hours a day if it didn't make me feel like I wanted to climb the walls. I have had to seriously cut back or risk being a jittery mess. I see Citalopram (aka Celexa) recommended above. I was on it for a couple of years and it really helped me stop being gripped by fear so I could get out there and do stuff! I'm no longer on it, but it was an important stepping stone on the road to managing anxiety. From what you have written here, you're doing great. Keep going. Anxiety is part of your personality. It does not own you or run your life.

My therapist taught me a technique called 'worry deferral' which has really helped. The trick is to schedule 30 minutes a day, every day, in which to be anxious. When you start feeling anxious at other times, you quickly write down what you're anxious about, and imagine putting it aside, knowing you will come back when it's time. I find this really helps me stop spinning. Once you are in 'worry time' there are a few more techniques. First, think about which things are 'solvable' and which aren't. Example of solvable worries: I need to do my taxes; I'm not in shape; I'm stressed about a big project at work; I feel exhausted right now. For these worries you spend time figuring out strategies that will help you solve them, and then you actually do it. You can spend some of your thirty minutes on solving them. Un-solvable worries are things like 'what if I get cancer', 'what if I get fired from my job', 'how will I ever find meaning in my life', etc -- they are big, abstract, all-encompassing, and impossible to do anything about. For these, the technique is to see if there is a solvable item inside -- i.e. if you're worried about cancer, think about quitting smoking -- and then when you have the big nebulous blob left, just spend some time with it. I have found that when I am worried about 'big things', trying to solve them doesn't really help, because it's impossible. But setting aside time for the big things does help. These worries always arise for a reason and it's important to honour that, and to reassure the part who is worried that they will be taken seriously and given a voice. Just being heard seems to be calming, it takes the urgency and panic away. But limiting worry time also helps contain the worries, and helps keep them from expanding, taking over, and getting in the way of day to day life.

These are the three best things I do to alleviate the physical symptoms of anxiety for myself. Heat has a verifiable calming effect (can't find the studies right now, as I am at work). A hot bath or shower can really help when you're in acute need. Even a hot water bottle or heat blanket can do wonders. As far as food, avoiding sugar and caffeine are pretty much a MUST at this point. No coffee or soda for you! Even if you feel exhausted. Even if you feel like there's not a correlation. None. (If you're very caffeine dependent, do step it down over a few days instead of cutting it out cold turkey.) Adding extra protein and green vegetables will also help. Protein is very grounding, and can help you feel better in your body. A final suggestion - go to the local Whole Foods (or other fancy market) and go to the essential oils section. There should be a huge bank of oils to smell. Smell them all until you hit on one that makes you feel better. Buy it and keep it close. It could be totally placebo, but I don't care why I feel better after smelling nutmeg, I just do. (I think it's probably because I have a subconscious memory that's pleasant and comforting that it hooks into.) Learned this from my therapist, and it really does work.

I'm past a couple of really terrible period of anxiety in my life, and looking back on them (which is of course much easier than being in the middle of them) the thing that helped both cases was a little bit of resignation. Not a lot! Just that after months of thinking (correctly!) "This job is terrible, and I am bad at it; every day I wake up and immediately start thinking about how bad I am at it, and then I work on it until it's 3 AM and I'm done with what little I can manage and I go to bed," I got a little better at appending this to it: "Eventually I will quit or be fired, and then I will find something to do that I'm not so bad at. The worst part will be my boss telling me this isn't working out, but that will be over fast." Eventually I quit; I gave sufficient notice and took a small pay cut to work a job I enjoy. The couple of minutes in my boss's office were extremely uncomfortable for me, but it really was over fast. (Now it exists only as an intrusive thought my brain sprinkles on for taste when other things are making me anxious.) I can't speak for anybody else, and I was really lucky that things resolved themselves so smoothly. But for me the really crippling periods of anxiety cropped up in moments when the world around me was making my limits abundantly clear, and I was refusing to accept them as a part of me. Realizing that they were—that I was, to some degree, my limits, and that it was OK to not be a famous writer or a young, handsome prodigy—actually made me feel much less bound by them. I don't know if that sounds helpful to you or not, but on the off-chance it is I figured I'd mention it. Walker Percy, whose lifelong anxiety was a family history of suicide and early death, explained it in that much different scenario like this:The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.Also, and probably more importantly, a Benadryl. Just when things get particularly bad.