It's called masking and it works as far as making other people think I'm not having an active anxiety attack.

Nobody wants to hear it: exercise.

Walk up a steep hill for an hour or two a day. Rate your mood every day. Watch the results form clear as day.

I used a mood tracker for over 5 years. Every May I would hike a nearby trail every morning. Looking at 5 years of mood tracking data, I was always happier than average every May. It lasted into June. Was gone by July. Every year.

If you push your cardio to the point where all you can think about is your next breath, it forces you to meditate. It forces presence. It trains you to break the ruminative thought cycles.

So, again, no one wants to hear it. But exercise is by far the best solution to anxiety. Plenty of research backing this up.

I know the article says depression. It's a meta analysis. Anxiety is also covered in some studies analysed here.

Edit,: literally the reason I prefaced this post was for all responses received this far. We've found the folks that don't wanna hear it. I would t have opened with what I opened with I'd the rough percentage of naysayers weren't the exact humans I am talking to.

Get a clue. Go walk up a hill. I'm not here to argue. Write something to the folks the conducted the hundreds of studies that contributed to this meta-analysis.

Or don't, and continue to insist you're special.

It's all you.

Letting people finish talking and thinking about what to say after that. Not while they are still talking, or even in the shower the morning before.

Finding an effective anti depressant after 40 something years. It's much easier to function without the feeling in my chest telling me everything is wrong.

Talking myself out of it because it used to be based on imaginary stress. Now it's real. Yay.

Weed.

I give guided tours of the Nile. Spend a good amount of time navigating denial.

Eating salads, and being socially and physically active.

I would classify myself as a person with an unusually tough mental resilience formed from a really messed up childhood. However, I once worked a job so stressful and anxiety inducing that I actually vomited during work hours from anxiety just being there, I even had big clumps of my hair falling out! The stress and anxiety were so alien to me as most things in life compared to my childhood seemed so trivial but there I was vomiting on the floor at work..

The only thing that really helped me get through it was people watching. I would leave work to grab food at the local food court in a nearby shopping center and just watch the ambient crowd while I ate my food.

Hearing, seeing, and simply existing around all those other people living out their lives, chatting, laughing, shopping, eating and generally going on about their day, really helped me to realize that there's way more to life than my stressful job.

It helped to put it into perspective and I vividly remember saying to myself, "See there's lot of life happening outside and people are doing just fine without my job" Something about that helped me immensely and got me through that job. Almost like a feeling of "Everything is going to be ok" would come over me.

Might not help everyone but it really did wonders for me, I hope this helps someone else.

Keeping my thoughts in the moment. Framing all my worries as minor inconveniences with contingency plans. For attacks, go ahead and do something inconvenient like sit in the shower with your clothes on.

I mean in fairness we're being a few different people and it's going swimmingly, sooooooo.

Depending on your situation what I'm about to tell you might not work, but it worked for me.

If you spend a lot of time in your thoughts thinking about the future in bas or catastrophic (involuntarily for the most part), this tip helped me a lot. It use the analogy of the cinema. When you are watching a movie at the cinema you can be fully immersed in the stories and the emotions of the characters. But, if there is people chatting, eating popcorn, or if you focus on the real actor name, the real place this is filmed, a continuity error (channel your inner annoying Cinema Sins), etc. you are no more "in" the movie. The projection and scenario you making when imagining the future in a bad way, are well, you imagination. You are in a way the projector and the spectator in this imaginary cinema. You can make the scenario worse of you want or better. Try it with what's on you mind right now and causing anxiety. You are in control of this mental projector, it's not premonition (even if it feel like it). And like a cinema, you can nitpick at the artifice of these vision and escape the emotional rollercoaster they can bring. You are not in this imaginary future right now. You are right now and the rest is fabrication of your own mind. I don't know if it will help you like it did me, but it helped me detect that I was in my mental cinema and stop the projector. It's not fail proof, but it help get some respite.

Grounding exercises, anything that promote attention is good. The classics are breathing exercises, body scan and 54321. But overall any meditation is good as meditation is an exercise about focusing you attention on some physical sensation of you body. As long as attention is activated (and it is hard and require training and regularity to get good at) your default mode network is not. And the default mode network is where, among many other things of course, your prediction about the future happen.

Good sleep hygiene helps a lot. Regular exercise help a lot. Meeting people in real life can help (but social anxiety can be a hard step to take sometimes).

If things are really too hard, and they absolutely can be unfortunately, you can always seek a professional and get drugs like alprazolam. They can be a game changer but you have to be careful about them.

If a doctor is out of reach because you live in a country like the USA, but I would be very careful about this, one magic mushrooms session kills anxiety for months. Can also trigger schizophrenia if you are at risk (check you family history but they will always be a risk). Risk/rewards, inform yourself before any drugs.

Good luck, be nice to yourself and have a nice day 😊

I have a dear friend that I think very highly of. I often think how they would act in certain situations. It's just my projection of them and I'm almost 100% certain that they would never act like this but it really helps me decide on things and how to act.