Thank you Rick for the very interesting post.
I will digress a little and deal with the subject in a more general way.

In most cases, anxiety, which is really a disguised or undisguised fear, starts in very early childhood (in some cases even before birth) and often the problem runs in families.
Children will develop this malady as a result of one or more traumatic experiences but more often it happens in “ideal” families over many years. The core of the problem is not so much due to the severity of the physical or psychological hurt that is inflicted on the child BUT rather on weather the family environment allowed the child to cry out the pain or suppress it.
Suppressed pain changes the brain circuitry and haunts the person all his life.
Often the person with neurotic anxiety may appear quite calm and pleasant but that is only achieved by always overworking the brain to suppress the painful memories deeply imbedded. The normal stresses of life are exaggerated by the anxious person because, subconsciously, it threatens to bring to the surface tightly imprisoned and guarded pains which were conceived in childhood to be life threatening.

I am afraid that it is a lost battle with anxiety. Because even when adopting the least stressful life style, the person will invent stress from normal or trivial incidents.

I have suffered myself from this problem and became aware of it since my teens. I have read many books about it. But I am afraid that understanding this problem does not help a bit in resolving it!!

In a superficial way, it may appear that I have conquered anxiety as I have managed to lead what appears to be a normal life ..2 university degrees ..happy family .. children and grand children, etc. but I guess that my brain had to fight an internal battle all along. Parkinson’s disease, I knew, was a cry of an overworked brain demanding a holiday or even retirement!

By the way, I took Beta blocker (Inderal) for 5 years, 1990-1995, as treatment for hypertension and high BP with no side effects. It is also used as treatment for tremor, and I am going to ask my neuro to prescribe it for me.

cheers
Imad