If you suffer from serious anxiety, I highly recommend you work on any health issues you have. Low blood sugar in particular is known to promote anxiety by increasing the amount of adrenaline in your system.
I used to suffer a lot of anxiety. Getting physically healthier helped mitigate that enormously.
Proviso: n=1, "anecdata" and the usual dismissals that random internet strangers desperately try to apply as if I somehow misrepresented myself and claimed it was from a large scale study.
health issues can both directly and indirectly make your psychological issues worse (or even be the direct cause of it)
and also the other way around
I think many of the "dismissal" (assuming non troll) comments come from with health issues people being feed up with getting the force feed the same advice they long time now every time their health comes up without the person giving their advice understanding their health issues. (e.g. not you because you just wrote what helped you in a neutral way).
For example some absurd examples I have seen repeatedly:
- a person with serve enough clinical depression to just be a step away from getting suicidal getting told "just do sports it will help" for the thousands time in a situation where they frequently have issues to even eat because their brain just stopped caring about being hungry
- or a person with motion sickness from certain games being again and again told the same set of well known and years ago tried advice, potentially combined with "you must never try VR" even through they did try VR and depending on the title it's not an issue as long as movement in VR is done through motion tracking
- or a person which had to stop their masters degree because of sever depression and anxiety being told "oh it's you could have done the masters because I was able to do so" when that other person just had a mild depressive phase due to overwork
- or people which had Vitamin-D deficit (which is really good at making other health issues worse) now insisting that every time they meat a "sick" person they should take Vitamin D supplements because sure their trauma induced psychological issues are just a Vitamin D deficiency.
Just to be clear I appreciate your your post, this is not trying to dismiss it in any way. In different to many of the examples I listed you bothered to formulate it neutral in a "this helped me, fixing health issues can help, here is why it helped me if you thing this could apply to you why not try it" way instead of a "this helped me so it 'must' help you too way". Through the line between both formulation is thin, and not seldom a matter of tone which is often lost in writing.
Eat regularly, do physical exercise, go to bed at the same time, etc etc. All good advice of course, but when you're in that situation they're not easy. It takes self-discipline.
Also: Not necessarily the best means to work on your health. Sometimes you need dietary changes or to ferret out an unrecognized allergy -- allergy being another thing that promotes adrenaline -- and/or other changes to figure out what went wrong and how to walk it back.
I used to suffer a lot of anxiety. Getting physically healthier helped mitigate that enormously.
Proviso: n=1, "anecdata" and the usual dismissals that random internet strangers desperately try to apply as if I somehow misrepresented myself and claimed it was from a large scale study.