[dionidium]

A few mental tricks I've mentioned here before that help me:

1. I once heard Sam Harris talking about this process. Most people sort of are their thoughts. That is -- this is tough to describe plainly -- their thoughts and feelings are primary, driving their actions as if mechanically linked. But you can in a certain sense become aware of your thoughts and view them as an outsider, as something that's happening independent of you, that you can see and choose how you react to. It's not just about self-assessment (although it is about that). It works during acute "attacks" too.

It's crazy, but hearing him say that made a huge impact on an anxiety problem that had been getting worse for me. Thinking of it this way has without exaggeration changed my life.

2. A second sort of ridiculous trick that works for me, for some reason:

There may be a billion universes in which I die this week, but it can’t be this one, because I am subjectively alive and experiencing this one. I can only experience the timeline in which I live. There may be other timelines, but I wouldn’t know about them, because I’m alive in this one. I can only experience living.

I don’t experience the timelines where I do/did die, by definition. I can only enjoy the one in which I don’t/didn’t.