I have been taking small steps all my life. If you know me or know of me, you probably think this health gig comes easily. But that’s just a topside?view. Like seeing the stillness of the ocean early in the morning. While deep below the surface?things are churning, building up, breaking down and transforming.

I don’t often tell this story, not because I don’t want to, but because it’s behind me now and not something I think about that often. But it’s what helped me get here so let’s take a trip down memory lane.

The year is 1982. I am 19 years old. I graduated from high school seven months ago and I’m a new mom to a two month?old baby girl.?Like most kids graduating from high school, I didn’t have a vision for what came next.

If my grown up self could give advice to my younger self I’d tell her, “Don’t worry. You didn’t make a mistake. This is going to work out so much better than you ever could have hoped.”

Instead I was left with disappointment in myself, stress and overwhelming anxiety at being responsible for a sweet soul when I had never even had to?take care of myself. The anxiety was a constant, unwanted companion. It often overpowered me so that I couldn’t make simple decisions or plan for a future. And it got worse. The anxiety would often morph into panic attacks leaving me paralyzed with fear. Anxiety and panic are?very?isolating. We don’t tell people how we feel. We suffer alone.

The weird thing with?panic attacks is you never know when or where they’ll show up. You could be going about your business and all of a sudden there it is. Sometimes it’s triggered by anticipation anxiety. The worst part for me was wherever it happened, I didn’t want to return to that place for fear it would happen again. It could be the grocery store, movies, restaurants, anywhere. No place was out of bounds for this insidious interloper. The world gets smaller as more and more places become associated with a panic event.

Like most people with a health problem I went to the doctor. He?shrugged it off and told me I was just hyperventilating and to blow into a paper bag. Then he pulled out his pad and wrote a script for anti-anxiety medication. That’s where my journey truly began.

I didn’t take the meds. I tried, but was unsuccessful. I took one pill and it triggered a panic attack. Go figure. At the time it seemed like the worst thing imaginable. I was drowning under the weight of single parenthood (which really should come with a manual), a health condition that I didn’t understand and limited resources?financial, mental, and emotional.

What I couldn’t have known then was there was something stronger inside me that wasn’t about to let me give up. A small voice that somehow communicated to?me, “Ok, now we know what we have to work with. Let’s start here.”

If you weren’t around back then, let me remind you that we didn’t have the internet in the 1980s. We went to the library, read a newspaper or asked other people if we needed answers. So I took my first of many small steps towards wellness and read a book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Dr. Susan Jeffers. Then I started researching anxiety and what triggers it. Here’s what I learned along the way:

• Stay hydrated. We feel stressed when we’re dehydrated which can cause us to feel anxious.
• Avoid caffeine. The amount of caffeine in a 12 ounce cup of coffee is enough to raise Cortisol (a stress hormone) by 30 percent.
• Learn to relax. Meditation, massage, acupuncture, and acupressure are just a few?things we can do to help hit the reset button.
• Ask for help. Trying to do everything by yourself can be exhausting and stressful. It’s ok to have help.
• Consider holistic medicine. I saw a homeopath who analyzed my symptoms and gave me a homeopathic remedy. Homeopathy is a?natural system of healing that works with your body to relieve symptoms, restore itself, and improve overall health. I was so inspired by my results that I later studied homeopathy at two different institutions and became a homeopathic practitioner.
• Exercise.?Physical exercise became a lifeline for me. We have the ability to exercise our stress away. So that’s what I did. I created a habit of exercising three times a week since I was in my twenties. Not because I wanted to lose weight or look good. I wanted to feel well?so that became part of my routine.
• Eat real food.?This was one of the more difficult things to learn because no one I knew back then associated what we eat with health. Gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, and processed foods can all trigger anxiety and lead to?Leaky Gut. The best way to find out if something triggers you is to eliminate a particular food for two or three weeks and see how you feel.

Thirty three years later, here I am. I’ve turned a bad situation into an opportunity to help others who struggle with stress, anxiety and panic disorder. It didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. Small steps got me here.

I’d love to be a resource for you if you?struggle with stress, anxiety or panic disorder. You’re welcome to?take advantage of my free health assessment by calling me or filling out my confidential health history questionnaire. Please feel free to?share this information with anyone you know who might be interested in learning more about stress and stress related health problems.

And in case you were wondering, my daughter turned out to be a beautiful young woman who attended South Shore Christian Academy, graduated from UMass Amherst, married her college sweetheart, gave birth to my two amazing granddaughters and is a teacher for special needs children in the public school system. It really did turn out better than I ever could have planned.