anxiety and aspergers

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what have been your experiences with anxiety?
what triggers it?
what do you do to overcome it?

I used to suffer from crippling anxiety. Prescribed medication helped for a time but long term it's about learning your triggers and finding a way to work through it. Don't aim for eradicating it as it's a normal emotion. The more you're able to tolerate it the easier it gets. Don't fall into the trap of avoidance as it will make it worse in the long run

I have Cptsd due to punishments before I could even speak and continuing for most of my 'growing up'. I rarely understood why I was being punished and became wary and hypervigilant. Fear has been my most common emotion since I was small.

See "reactions to trauma" Fight, flight, freeze, fawn repsonses. It explains a lot. I am always disproportionaltely afraid when anybody around me displays anger or aggression of any sort.
I fear trying anything new because I am so afraid I will fail, and consequently be punished, mocked, ridiculed, etc etc.

I am getting better but my first 30 years on earth were absolute hell due to expecting this rage and punishment no matter what.
I am conditioned from early on to this reaction.
Now I finally understand all that, it is getting better but I am 70 years old. Diagnosis at 68 helped me a lot.

My sister and I both have Generalized Anxiety Disorder much to the denial of our mom.

However, just to be clear, my sister is NT and not on the spectrum.

We both have seeing a therapist.

I also deal with extremely severe anxiety and am still working on finding a medication that can help make the thoughts come down a little bit. When my anxiety is at it's worst i'll have these racing thoughts going through my head that never end and i just want it to stop; which is hard because i've been diagnosed with ptsd, ocd, social anxiety, generalized anxiety and panic disorder. So, many times i can overthink little things for hours. Sometimes I feel like I'm an alien in my head and body and it's hard because out of my sisters i'm the one with all 5 major types of anxiety even though my sister has anxiety it's not nearly as severe and she doesn't have as many as me.

It's very rare that I get intensely anxious, but there's a lower-level nagging anxiety that follows me about wherever I go. It's usually fairly rational but I don't think most people are bugged by it like I am. It rather spoils my life because anxiety is obviously unpleasant and because it tends to make me avoid tackling things - I notice a proposed step in my plan that could go wrong, and so I daren't set the plan in motion. I try to find information that points to a way around the potential snag, but I often can't find it, or it's not reassuring enough. Failing to initiate my plans doesn't ease my anxiety either - I just get anxious about the consequences of inaction rather than about the consequences of trying to perform the task and having it go wrong.

I hate small risks of things going horribly wrong. I always feel that even a small risk of that is unacceptable, but it's not often possible to eradicate it. It's better when the risk is about something happening that would just be annoying or uncomfortable rather than really awful, because then I can talk myself into taking a reasonable risk, but what probability of something really bad happening is reasonable to accept? A 1% chance of a very bad outcome isn't the same as a 100% chance of something that's only 1% as bad as that.

I tried an anti-anxiety medicine once but it didn't help at all. The only thing that helped was to remove the risk I was worrying about. And if the medicine messes with my ability to think clearly, I'm likely to feel even more anxious because it would just plug into the feeling that I'm not up to the task of thinking my problems through rigorously and effectively. And as one of the things I worry about is my long-term health, I'd have the additional worry of whether or not the medicine was harming me.

There was a lot of general anxiety in early life & still plenty at this age.
Even though unable to document it I'm going to say that when taken on an overall scale, the anxiety has lessened a little bit.
Has also become more about specific things than a general anxiety.
And that anxiety about specific things can be quite strong depending on which thing it is about.
Okay, maybe the anxiety hasn't lessened but rather has moved from being a blanket over everything to being gathered at several specific locations; from being the entire landscape to being towns within that landscape.

Though from a different foundation than with Autisticelders situation, I was diagnosed cPTSD at beginning of 2000s.
That certainly explained a few things.

I went on keto diet. It got rid of most of the anxiety

I didn't know I was anxious b/c it was all quite normal to me. A provider enrolled me in an intensive outpatient program for anxiety and I learned quite a bit. I now am more aware of my physical symptoms, I am empowered to face my concerns, ride the waves of emotions and have tools for self-care, I also am trying a low dose of an anxiety med. Something is helping, recently I am ruminating much less. I've got a more relaxed "let's see how this goes" attitude that eluded me before. Wishing you get some relief.