A calm structure for everyday exposure practice.

I built Anxiebuddy because I wanted a simple way to keep exposure practice visible. When anxiety is part of everyday life, it can be hard to remember what you tried, what changed, and how far you have actually come.

My hope is that Anxiebuddy can make the work of facing anxiety a little easier to stay with. It cannot do the work for you, and it cannot promise results, but it can help you keep a clearer record while you keep showing up.

Anxiebuddy was born from my own experience with anxiety. In 2010, after a long period of extreme stress and almost no sleep or food, I had my first panic attack in a university auditorium. I was 23. At the time, I had no framework for understanding what was happening, and it took years before I understood it as anxiety.

Over time, it developed into severe agoraphobia. Grocery stores, public transport, planes, meetings, travel, and social situations could all trigger panic. I learned to hide it, push through, and pay the price afterward. Very few people knew what was really happening.

For many years, I still did things that looked possible from the outside: speeches, presentations, work, and everyday commitments. But almost everything came with a plan B, an excuse, and a long recovery period afterward. Anxiety shaped more of my choices than I wanted to admit.

After another period of extreme stress, the anxiety returned in a wider and more frightening form, together with tinnitus, health anxiety, and panic that could appear even at home. That was when I understood I needed to work with it in a more systematic way.

For a long time, I tried to understand anxiety on my own. Professional help was not realistically available to me at the time, so I read, tested, tracked, and paid close attention to what seemed to affect me.

I explored many different approaches: relaxation techniques, time in nature, journaling, mental exercises, alternative methods, body work, medication, and treatment models I learned about through books and online courses. Some things helped a little, some helped for a period, and some did not help me much. That does not mean they will not help someone else.

Over time, I came to believe that what changed things most for me was facing the anxiety directly. Not randomly, and not only when life forced me into anxiety-triggering situations, but deliberately and repeatedly, with enough awareness to learn from each exposure.

I also learned how much stress and anxiety can settle in the body as tension and physical discomfort. Working with that tension became part of the process too.

Over time, I stopped thinking of anxiety as something I could solve with one insight or one technique. For me, change came through repetition, experience, and small choices made again and again.

One of the most important lessons was that progress is rarely linear. The early phase can feel slow, chaotic, and discouraging. Often, the work you do today only becomes visible later, when the pieces start to connect.

I also learned how strongly anxiety can live in the body. Stress, tension, stimulants, lack of sleep, and daily pressure could all make symptoms stronger. Calm environments, rest, nature, and recovery did not solve everything, but they helped create better conditions for the work.

The biggest change came from exposure. I had to learn that anxiety could be present without meaning I was in danger. Staying with discomfort, instead of always escaping it, slowly taught my mind and body something new.

I also had to change how I looked at the process. The goal was not to win every situation or feel calm every time. The goal was to keep learning. Every attempt mattered, even when it felt small, messy, or uncomfortable.