How to Decrease your Anxiety in Five Easy Tips
How to Decrease your Anxiety in Five Easy Tips
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is an intense, excessive and persistent worry or fear about every day life and circumstances. While we recognize that some anxiety can be normal, anxiety disorders are on the rise. Anxiety can feel like it is taking over everything, everywhere, all at once. From migraines to stomach issues, to excessive sweating, heart palpitations, and clenching your jaw, to chest tightness and restlessness, anxiety can be a full body experience.
While we recognize that anxiety is a diagnosable disorder than can be incredibly disruptive to work, relationships, friendships, school, and sports, we are not completely helpless. Here are five tips to help reduce your anxiety.
Relate to it differently
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), we learn to relate to our anxiety differently. We know that the experience of anxiety is never fun, but when you look at it as information rather than a problem, we can pull what our bodies are trying to communicate. For example, if you are feeling anxious about a job interview, it probably means that you care about leaving a good impression and want the job because it matters to you. If you don’t experience a feeling of nervousness or anxiety when going to a job interview, you might not want the job that badly. Our anxiety usually tells us what we care about. Steven Hayes, one of the founders of ACT likes to say, “We hurt where we care.” So can we learn to relate to our anxiety differently? Instead of going down a rabbit hole of doomsday scrolling, can we slow down, notice the signals in our bodies, and see what matters the most to us? My guess is if you take the time to figure out what part of the anxiety is taking over, you can learn to decrease the experience of anxiety.
2. Focus on your Breath
Along with relating to it differently, we can learn to self-regulate. Anxiety likes to make us think that we are not in control. So what do we do? We begin to take back what is in our control. And what’s in our control? This breath. We start by noticing our breath. If you are feeling anxious, chances are that your breathing is fast and shallow. Can you take a few moments to slow down your breath and focus on your exhale? By creating an exhale that is longer than your inhale, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, or the rest and digest part of your response team. By slowing down the breath, we feel a sense of being in control again; that our world doesn’t have to feel like it is spinning out of control. We come back to the breath because it is with us from the moment we come into the world until the moment we pass. Our breath is ours, and we can learn to use it effectively.
3. Break it down
Anxiety can make us feel like things will never get better. Anxiety can be a liar and make us feel like things are worse than they are. However, if we can remember to break things down from moment to moment, then the anxiety begins to feel more tolerable. For example, if you are feeling overwhelmed by a demanding week, take a few moments to breathe and break down the tasks ahead. When we don’t have a plan, it can feel like things are spiraling out of our control again. But developing a roadmap for the week, and then breaking it down day by day can be helpful. Once you do that, it can be helpful to mentally chunk the day down hour by hour, or even shorter if you need to. Notice getting through the next 15 minutes, then 30 minutes, and so on. Then notice that those minutes or hours were tolerable.
4. Link it to a positive experience
As previously stated, anxiety can be a liar and make us believe that things will never get better. But we can override that. Take a moment to journal about a time that things were difficult, but you got through them. Even if it wasn’t a great experience, notice that you survived a found a way to get through it. I know it’s a cliche, but you have made it through all of your bad days. Use that as proof that you can get through this too. It might not feel great, but you can move through it by using some of these tips. Additionally, can you remember when you didn’t feel anxiety? When you had even a moment of bliss? What did that feel like in your body? What were your thoughts at that time? Who was around you? What were you doing? While we can’t recreate that moment, we can lean into what worked for you at that time. Do you need to spend time with someone who helps you feel grounded? Can you go for a walk? Can you take a soothing bath or a warm shower and notice the water on your skin? What would feel good for you in this moment? It doesn’t mean that we are avoiding whatever is going on, but by slowing things down and remembering that we know how to feel better, we can regain that sense of control in our own lives.
5. Prioritize what is in your control
Ultimately, there are so many things that are out of our control. Sometimes it feels like the world is taking off without us and we have to run to try and catch up. It can feel like we are always trying and never succeeding. So what if we just stop trying so much? I don’t mean that to sound dismissive, but by prioritizing what is in our control and what truly matters to us, we can let go of the nonsense. It really doesn’t matter what your ex boyfriend’s girlfriend’s friend of a friend thinks about you on instagram. Can you tuck those worries away and focus on who is there for you? By not giving our control away to those who don’t matter to us in our every day lives, we can focus on what truly matters. Who do you want to be in the world? Let’s build on that.
For anxiety disorder support, please contact us on our contact page. We would love to support you.