Is ignoring your anxiety unhealthy?

I suggest you stop doing edibles

You gotta learn how to surf it as best you can.

I'm not being flip. Anxiety, depression and all the related issues, they have a certain tidal nature. There's highs and lows. The key to living with it is to ride the worst waves until things settle back down a little.

If you ignore it, you get swamped.

Doesn't really matter what methods you use to do it. Breathing, meds, exposure therapy, CBT, yoga, whatever. You practice them when things are good, so you can stand on them when things are bad and make it back to shore.

I gotta warn you though, anxiety that's induced or worsened by chemicals is a shit ton harder to negotiate. You can't rely on your normal inner perception of your self. Normally, once you're used to anxiety, you can learn to recognize when it's going to spike, and that alone gives you some empowerment. But when it's external chemicals causing things to worsen, you can't feel when it's getting better or worse in the same way unless you also get used to that chemical and how it influences your anxiety. Which, seems like a pretty bad idea to keep using something that's making anxiety worse.

Although its a meme, its based on truth: Touch grass.

Go for a walk somewhere green, burn off some of the adrenaline your anxiety is producing.

Depends on what school treatment you're trying to implement.

In metacognitive therapy you learn to live with the feelings of anxiety. To get used to them, that they aren't dangerous. When I went through it it reminded me of exposure therapy, but to anxiety and negative outlooks/triggers.

This is of course only one of the many different schools of treatment. Where metacognitive focuses on acknowledging and existing with triggers, cognitive therapy can focus on identifying the train of thought leading to anxiety, and interrupting it before it leads to anxiety.

In any case it's not something you'd want to attempt on your own or without consulting a mental health specialist, psychologist, psychiatrist, what have you.

Also you have to find the approach that's right for you, and be prepared that getting a handle on anxiety might be a long and cumbersome journey.

Source: chronic anxiety and depression.

I feel like your title, text and spoiler are talking about three different things. There are many types of anxiety that can be tackled differently.

You already got good tips for most, so I'm going to concentrate on your spoiler text: When you are too high, I recommend chewing coffee beans. They act calming on those cases.

As for your existential anxiety: You might want to continue that train of thought to it's conclusion: Eventually everything ceases to exist. Nothing is permanent. Everything is in flow. All that is, all that matters, is now. This moment. And all you need to do is live it.

You can have mental and physical complications from unmanaged anxiety. It depends on how it affects your life right now. I would say that if you're feeling okay with it, then it's fine, but if it is a major thing in your life you might wanna get help with that.

You can go through cognitive behavioural therapy, or take the meds route with SSRIs or benzodiazepines for acute anxiety crisis (I always have benzos when I do edible to kill the trip if i get anxious). For the record some people react very badly to SSRI and they're not as magical as health professionals think they are (I did very bad on them).

The answer to your title is yes, it is unhealthy.

Get Waking Up app, do the practices and listen to the talks.

Congrats, you've touched reality, from the haze of the rat race and the world designed to keep you distracted from the big scary pointlessness of it all. Yes, everything and everyone will die and then something else comes along and eventually dies and so on. Most people don't want to realize this and rather numb themselves out, and encourage others to do the same as a shared delusion is easier to keep up. But the fleeting pointlessness is very beautiful if you let it be, scary if you resist it - makes no difference to the end result though, the truth is nice like that.

Very. If you’re not careful, it will take over and destroy you.

Emotions are just information your body sends fo you. So the goal is to figure out the meaning behind it and then determine/overcome the root cause. If you’ve always struggled with anxiety, it started in your childhood - could be trauma related, could be your temperament, could be a chemical issue. Anyway, it sounds like it’s bringing up your abandonment issues. I use inner child work for this kind of thing - so I would try to remember the core wound and then process the grief. There are many ways to do this kind of work though but nothing else has helped me.