[lottie_em]

Coming late to this thread but I wanted to add something that has really helped me. I have had general anxiety peppered with OCD for the past 10+ years of my life, about basically everything. It affected my work, my health and my self confidence.

I started seeing a hypnotherapist/NLP therapist, and one of the most useful things he told me was to stop beating myself up about my anxiety. The whole time I was blaming myself for and being hard on myself about how I was feeling, which was only making things worse. Instead, he explained that I was behaving the only way my brain knew how to behave given the tools and experiences I had had.

It sounds a bit like blame passing but it's not - there's no blaming other people. It's just accepting that you're no less 'normal' and you're not a bad, weak person or letting anxiety get to you. The anxious behaviour is a product of your environment and experiences, and somewhere in your life you learnt to react that way (more than likely subconsciously). This helped me a lot as it took away the additional pressure I was putting on myself to 'push through like a normal person', and the additional anxiety it caused.

It's also worth mentioning that sometimes anxiety can be caused by something else medical, e.g. thyroid problems, so it might be worth thinking about that too.

Good luck!