Anxiety

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I’m an undiagnosed Aspie.
I have some typical symptoms such as, don’t like intimacy, social chit chat, touch, many foods, and especially change! lately i have been going through alot, and have anxiety. whenever i dont have anything to do i get anxious!! ! i need to be continually engaged in something to keep the anxiety at bay. sometimes i will just pace back and forth when the anxiety hits. i just dont know how to deal with this. i was on benzos for years but tapered off of them 10 months ago. really dont want to go down that path again. hell to get off of! i use cannabis in edible form which helps for a bit.
but it makes you too spaced out
to do much. help me!! !! !

You need to consult an appropriately-trained and licensed mental-health practitioner -- one who will render a definitive diagnosis one way or the other.

Then, if you're diagnosed with an ASD, you can seek more help from the mental-health community.

Good luck.

You could try the med Buspar. It's specially for anxiety & isn't a benzo & meant to be taken long term. It helps my anxiety a lot. It can also be taken with most other psych meds.

Buspar requires a prescription. A prescription requires a diagnosis. A diagnosis requires an appropriately-trained and licensed mental-health practitioner...

It doesn't require a prescription from some online sites. I did that when I 1st tried it because I didn't want to deal with a doc or psych for it if it wouldn't work. I got my GP to prescribe it to me shortly after by saying I've been on it before which was the truth in a way. I had seen a psychiatrist for a 5 years. I find I have much better luck by researching meds & getting my GP to prescribe them to me than I did in the 5 years I was seeing a psych. I would not recommend the online route thou. It's much better & safer to do some research on treatments & then see a GP or see a psych.

Then it is being sold illegally on those websites. Illegal drug websites often sell stolen, adulterated, contaminated or diluted drugs, and some of the "drugs" they sell are no better than placebo -- some are even dangerous.

Never trust a website that sells prescription-only drugs without a prescription.

I have more severe generalized anxiety than anybody I've ever met. I struggle to breathe most of the time. I've tried different drugs and therapies but have come to learn that, aside from obvious strategies like not fretting over the future (easier said than done!), the only hope is that things will get better as I get older.

What I will say is that I strongly recommend that you avoid psychotropic drugs unless you've very seriously considered the dangers, doing your research on alternative as well as mainstream sites (which have a vested interest in selling psychotropic drugs to the population because they're often funded by pharmaceutical companies).

Sonomel: I don't know if you're still reading this thread, but I have pretty bad (sometimes emotionally paralyzing) anxiety and I've been on Zoloft for several years now. It has definitely helped me at least to "take the edge off", it even helps me sleep and I've been finding it hard recently to sleep without it. It's also non-addictive and I'm taking it at the moment with a mood stabilizer which has helped me control my anger to some extent at least. I think it is also needs a prescription, but it might might be one option to consider.

These two things are a flat contradiction; if you need a drug in order to function, you're addicted to it, by definition.

Take low THC high CBD cannabis oil instead, you won't feel spaced out as you would with normal edibles. Oil made from cannabis works better than oil made from hemp as the low amounts of THC work synergistically with the CBD and other cannabinoids. I mainly use cannabis oil made from cannatonic which is a high CBD low THC strain that I get from my licensed Canadian medical cannabis producer. It is a popular CBD strain should be available in most legal states if you wanna make your own edibles out of them.

Is there any sort of activity that reduces your anxiety?
I like to work in the garden.

When surfing the web I find it helps to listen to music--looping the same song over and over again.

I've had ongoing issues with anxiety for years.

Anything involving crowds will bother me, but it is surprising that a crowd so big that you can get lost in it doesn't bother me as much. A college football game with an attendance of 70,000 or more doesn't bother me nearly as much as a high school football game with an attendance of 2,000.

Some things that do bother me:

* Going into a mall. This isn't too big a problem for me because I haven't actually been in a mall in about twenty years. The last time, I entered a store at a mall from a side entrance that didn't require actually going into the mall.

When I lived in Houston, going into a mall bothered me much more because of the number of people. I'd go in to the book stores back then, but usually during parts of the day when they weren't as crowded and the whole time I wanted to get out of there.

* Filling out forms. I was wanting to go into the Peace Corps after college, but I never could get the entire form filled out. Tax forms always scare the hell out of me.

* Picking up mail. I never know what is going to be there. Fortunately, with the Internet, I can pay everything on-line without picking up my mail. So I only pick up my mail about once a month.

One worry is about getting a jury summons. A bigger worry is missing jury duty because I haven't gotten my mail.

* Going to church. We only have about 30 to 50 people on average Sunday. I've known most of them for years, but I typically can't identify more than about 10 of them because of prosopagnosia (face blindness).

Probably the part about going to church that bothers me most is that once you are there, you are typically expected to stay for the whole service. I usually want to leave as soon as I sit down but brace myself and make it through to the end. But not always -- when I went to the Christmas Eve service in 2017, I lasted about 20 minutes before heading out the door.

* Taking a trip. There are years that I don't get more than 25 miles from either my home or my office. Now, with my thyroid gone and taking blood pressure magazine, I have to go the 50 miles to the doctor (70 miles from home) once or twice a year for test.

There is a big city about 80 miles from the office. I typically only go there for medical reasons -- usually to drive a certain relative to her eye doctor. When I take her there, I usually take care of the few things I need to do such as going to my preferred choice of western wear store to buy some new clothes and to a bookstore.

Except for two trips to another large city 200 miles away, both for medical reasons, the last time I was more than 100 miles from home was in the summer of 2001.

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When I was in my 20s, none of this bothered me at all. It has gradually gotten to be more and more of a problem. If I was wealthy and didn't need a job and could hire someone to run errands, it would likely be rare for me to leave the farm.

Some people have trouble leaving the house. I've never had that problem, but if I go outdoors on the farm, it's not like I'm going to have to deal with someone else. My nearest neighbor across a field is half a mile -- my nearest neighbor by road is a mile.

Working in a vegetable garden, for example, is not an issue for me. I've thought about building a poultry house and getting some chickens and some geese (different enclosures, of course). Going out every day to take care of chickens and geese would not be an issue. I no longer have a horse, but going out to feed the horses and check their water never caused any anxiety.

Prometheus: Actually no it's not, not according to mainstream psychiatric definitions of "addiction". If you want to disagree w/those, be my guest, I'm just telling you what the professionals say. I'm not addicted to Zoloft b/c I could technically stop it w/o having withdrawal symptoms. The same applies for the other two medications I'm currently on. My need to use them to function is perfectly normal for someone w/ASD and ADHD. They HELP me deal w/anxiety and some of my other issues, but they won't cause me to go through the sort of physical feelings from stopping the use of an actually addictive substance would, for example, cocaine, heroin/opioids, tobacco, alcohol and a very long list of other substances.

Apologies for the distraction from the thread, but I don't like to see misinformation going unchallenged.
From my understanding, antidepressant meds are not addictive in that you don't have cravings for them, but you do develop a dependency (because they affect your brain chemistry) and hence you are likely to have withdrawal symptoms once you stop taking them.
That's why you're supposed to taper off over several weeks.