I was a panic attack and agoraphobia sufferer for over twenty years. During that time, having shared my life with this terrible twosome, I worked out a few ways of making my life more tolerable if I had to venture out into the big wide world. And I’ll share a couple of them with you here.

One of the things that I noticed about my anxiety related illness is that it seemed to turn the brightness on my vision up to the top. So much so, that viewing something like a large area of concrete on a sunny day was physically painful to me. But even on a dull day the sky seemed to be way too bright.

One way I used to combat this was simply by wearing sunglasses. I used brown ones and found them to suit me the best. I once tried gray and they were of no benefit whatsoever. An easy and inexpensive way that I discovered to pick a suitable color, that didn’t involve me leaving the house, was to order some transparent film from an arts and crafts store and I just held the different colored films up to a window and looked through them until I found one that had a calming effect. In my case this was brown or green, However, I also found that blue made me feel sad and red made me feel agitated. So I knew to avoid these colors at all cost.

Something else that worked for me was wearing a baseball cap. I found that the peak protected my eyes from the brightness of the sky and in situations where I felt particularly uncomfortable, I would pull the peak down so that only the ground directly to my front was visible. A combination of the sunglasses and the baseball cap made my journeys into the outside world tolerable. I did, though, get some strange looks on rainy days.

There was one other thing that I discovered, quite by accident. I was once on a camping trip and, whilst sitting in the tent, looking out through the window, I noticed how uncomfortable I felt. However, if I looked out through the tent’s mesh kitchen window/vent, the discomfort went away. This inspired me. Once I got home I went onto the Internet to see if anyone made mesh spectacles. It appeared that no one did and I even toyed with the idea of making some for myself. After some thought, I gave up on that idea due to a lack of the necessary wherewithal.

I never forgot the benefits that I’d seen by looking through the mesh and a couple of years later I did the same search again to see if some bright spark had had the same idea as me and started selling them yet. Still my search came to nothing. However, whilst carrying out that search I did happen upon the website that gave me the information I needed to eliminate my panic, anxiety and agoraphobia altogether. Can you imagine how I felt? After all those years of trying therapies that didn’t work for me, I’d actually found the cure.

If you would like to know more about what I used to retake control of my life, please visit my website. There’s a link in my “About the Author” section below.