How to manage anxiety? Tips and tricks – Anxiety Part 4

If your anxiety is mild to moderate it is possible that one of the following strategies (or a combination of them) can be sufficient to help manage your anxiety. Even if it is severe, it can be good to combine these strategies with your treatment and in fact they are often recommended by therapists to add some of these into your routine.

Managing anxiety is also about your mindset, from the book by Russ Harris – the happiness trap, a book prescribed by my therapists, I learned that you need to make room for the feeling, disassociate from the thought (not fusing with it) or in a sense defusing it, and then to act on the things you can change and let go the things you can’t… (ACT therapy). It is difficult to put into practice; however, and it always starts with awareness that you are triggered.

Understanding what triggers you, and working on not avoiding triggers is important. I need to practice this a lot more to manage my anxiety better. Keeping an anxiety and worry journal can help find your triggers and you can list them in order of severity and the journal can also allow you to better do the following strategies. I really need to start this, but it makes sense to do it, no matter how hard it.

Things to avoid if you are anxious

Certain things in our environment can make our anxiety worse: alcohol, drugs, caffeine. I’m not certain how much these have an impact, but in almost every article I read it mentioned to remove these from our lives if we’re anxious. However, I love tea and chocolate and coffee, perhaps too much, but I’ve realised that if I am careful of when I take it (no coffee after lunch) and only herbal teas after supper, and chocolate in moderation (not every day) I can still enjoy the things I love. I also associate the feeling of that to excitement rather than to anxiety, so I get triggered less often than I used to, and I realised that my heart pounding was just the caffeine kicking in and not an anxiety or panic attack. So, make sure you understand how these things can affect your anxious state before taking them or avoid them altogether.

Anxiety management strategies

1. Belly breathing

This is a technique also used in stress management since essentially it is the same physical effects that are triggered. You use your belly and diaphragm to take slow steady breaths, rather than breathing using your rib cage. If you put your hands on your stomach, you should feel it rise and fall with every breath. This type of breathing helps to de-activate the stress response. Singing, saying mantras, prayers or playing a wind instrument can all help and are all forms of belly breathing if you feel like changing it up as well.

2. Exercise

Every physician, psychotherapist and source I’ve read include this as a way of managing your anxiety and stress. You are mobilizing the extra energy your body is generating in response to your anxiety and/or stress. Our problems usually occur with long term exposure when this energy is not used. The brain tries to adapt but usually badly to a stressful environment. The normal reaction is that stress triggers the response, we fight, or we flee, and use up that energy and then the body goes back to rest. If we don’t use it, then the body takes much longer to return to rest.

Of course, when we are anxious, and our stressor is in our heads, we actually have nothing to run from or fight so that is why exercise comes in. I find it very difficult to get started because when you exercise you can trigger the same physical symptoms as during an anxious episode (that is what our bodies are preparing us to do) but the association I have made between the symptoms themselves and the feeling are sometimes enough to trigger me. I have to slowly desensitize myself and realise that being hot and having my heart race are not indications that I am having an anxious episode. Starting is the hardest part as well and keeping up the motivation to do it regularly, but keeping in mind “why” you are doing it is important.

3. Meditation and mindfulness

Being in your thoughts is enough to trigger an anxious episode depending on what you are thinking about. What meditation and mindfulness try to teach is how to let go of the thoughts like shooting stars in the sky, or leaves on a stream, and concentrate on the breath and the feelings of tensions and strain in the body and using the breath to loosen and relax. There are a few free applications for guided meditation that I recommend to start with, if you want to try but have not idea how to start (links at the end).

4. Journaling

Whether it is a worry journal, a stream of consciousness journal, or a gratitude journal, getting thoughts on paper helps free up headspace. In particular, the gratitude journal and the positive things you have done in the day/week/month can help with anxiety because the more we look for the positive in our lives no matter what is going on can have a positive impact on the rest of our lives. Even if it is as simple as, “I got out of bed and faced the day.”

5. Mind mapping

Mind mapping is taking a thought, a concept, an idea and with colours and bubbles adding all sub-ideas around in an expanding web, linking connected thoughts and concepts together. This can help clarify concepts, better understand problems and therefore potentially find better solutions.

6. Grounding: (3-3-3 method or 5-4-3-2-1 method)

When we are extremely anxious, this method can help alleviate or reduce the intensity of the symptoms. The first method is focus on 3 things you see, three things you hear and 3 things you touch, the second method is 5 things you see, 4 things you can touch, three things you hear, two things you smell and one thing you taste. This as the technique stated can help to get us out of heads and into the real world.

7. Defusion techniques

This will probably end up as its own articles because it’s an important technique and more complex than a short description like this can convey. Essentially, it is a technique used with the ACT (Acceptance and commitment therapy) and it is creating distance between your thoughts and yourself. For example, instead of thinking “I’m going to fail” you would think “I’m having the thought that I’m going to fail” and so creating a distance between you and your thoughts which aren’t always true. Thoughts are not facts. Then you can thank your mind for the thought, it is only trying to protect you and ensure your survival after all. Then with this newfound distance, you can learn to let go of these thoughts rather than holding on to them. But like any skill it takes practice to learn to do.

8. Gradual and consistent desensitization

Learning not to avoid or fight but face and understand our fears and anxieties is a good way to learn to manage them. They might never disappear entirely, but if we learn to manage them, we can have a life more in line with our values and less ruled by our fears and anxiety. This is a hard technique to master, but an effective one. This allows us to face our fears and anxiety triggers gradually and consistently, and slowly get used to them. Because anxieties are usually about things that may or may not happen and we tend to avoid or fight them we don’t spend enough time with them to realize that they are in fact false alarms, and we are reinforcing them by running away. The brain will think “You are avoiding this, so it HAS to be dangerous”.

The trick here is to go slowly. List all your anxiety and triggers and rate them from least anxiety inducing to most anxiety inducing. (You can rate from 0 to 10 or whichever scale you choose). Once you have this list, start with the least stressful, the least anxiety inducing, and gradually expose yourself to it for at least 30-45 minutes so that you can see that whatever you were worried about doesn’t actually happen. Do this consistently for a period of time for it to affect you less and less. Then do the next item on the list in the same way. Don’t go too fast and if a step is too difficult, break it down into an easier or smaller step or for a shorter duration. The goal here is to learn that often what makes us anxious isn’t the likeliest of scenarios and it will help to boost your confidence as well. Knowing that even if you feel anxious, you can still do the action is very freeing.

Next week, I will be wrapping up the anxiety series with a final article on the subject. Of course, it is only final for now. I will probably dig deeper into the topic in future posts.

Which of these techniques have you tried (if you’ve tried any)? Has it helped you? Are there other techniques you use to manage your anxiety? Please leave a comment below!

Thank you for reading!

“Don’t believe everything you think!”

-Robert Fulghum

Sources (not sponsored)

https://positivepsychology.com/anxiety-tools/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/in-practice/202207/4-ways-practice-self-care-when-you-feel-anxious

https://www.healthline.com/health/anxiety-exercises#counting

Applications

As mentioned in the list here are two guided meditation application that can be helpful to start if interested (not sponsored).

Smiling Mind

Petit BamBou