Beat Anxiety with These 8 Simple Concrete Strategies

Beat Anxiety with These 8 Simple Concrete Strategies – Anxiety can be at times truly debilitating, making it hard to go about your day. However, feelings of unease, worry, and fear whether mild or more severe can be dealt with.

In the moment of an anxiety attack or any feelings of uneasiness, there are ways to step back and bring yourself back to a more comfortable feeling.

Short-term tools to lessen your anxiety

1. Distance yourself from your anxieties

Bouts of anxiety often begin with catastrophic thinking about an upcoming event. You start imagining the myriad ways you’ll make a fool of yourself on a first date; you picture yourself tongue-tied during an interview, or you conjure vivid images of the various ways that an airplane can malfunction.

One way to dampen anxiety is to calm these racing thoughts. Don’t do this with brute mental force simply trying to stifle the thoughts and push them out of your mind is unlikely to work and could even backfire.

Instead, try to create some distance from the thoughts, to help you realize that thoughts can be wrong and are not self-fulfilling.

Say to yourself: “I am having the thought that I am going to embarrass myself on this first date obviously replace this with your anxious thoughts”.

Having created this distance, calmly weigh the evidence for why you might make a fool of yourself, and then spend as much effort listing the ways that you might not. Also, remind yourself of times in the past when you’ve coped well.

2. Ground yourself

If your mind is racing with catastrophic thoughts about what’s going to happen, your body responds in kind: the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, bracing you for a threat your breathing becomes fast and shallow, and adrenaline races to your muscles, which can cause you to tremble and feel faint.

A great way to dampen this reaction is to practice exercises that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which has opposite effects on the body system, such as lowering your heart rate and blood pressure and slowing your breathing.

One exercise is called ‘grounding’, which helps you connect with the present moment and the environment around you, rather than being consumed by fears about the future.

One popular way to do it involves pausing and naming five things you can see; naming four things you can feel; three things you can hear; two things you can smell; and one thing you can taste.

3. Regulate your breathing

Another way to calm your body down, promote parasympathetic nervous system activity, and break the anxiety cycle in which your body’s fear reaction to your thoughts makes you even more anxious is to practice a controlled breathing exercise.

There are many different exercises you can try, but one of the simpler and more effective examples is known as ‘box breathing’ or ‘square breathing’, so called because you breathe in, pause breathe out each for the same amount of time.

To do it, sit somewhere comfortable and focus on your breath.

• Inhale for four seconds
• Pause for four seconds
• Exhale for four seconds.
• Try to repeat this for at least 30 seconds and continue for as long as you feel comfortable or for as long as you need

The idea is that this will help to get your breathing rate and depth back under control, which is an effective way to calm the entire body.

4. Plan a ‘worry window’

If you find that your worries keep coming back, even after you’ve calmed your mind and body, it can be very unsettling and give you the sense that you’re stuck in a loop.

You might even come to form unhelpful beliefs, such as that you need to engage in worry to try to ‘solve’ a dilemma or to prevent a bad thing from happening these are known as ‘meta-cognitions’ because they’re your beliefs about your thoughts.

However, unless you’re forming genuine solutions or constructive plans in your mind, then churning the same worries around and around is futile, like a car’s wheel spinning in the mud. Trying to banish these worries from your mind is unlikely to work.

The rest of the time, whenever your worrisome thoughts surface, you can remind yourself that you’ll be turning your attention to them later.

This can be an effective way to break out of a perpetual worry loop and allow you to get on with your life.

Long-term tools to lessen your anxiety

1. Confront your fears

It’s natural to want to avoid the situations that make you anxious but, in the long term, this is only likely to fuel your anxiety.

When you avoid anxiety-provoking situations, not only do you risk missing out on opportunities in life, but you never get to ‘reality-check’ your worst fears  for instance, going on a date without it being a disaster, or flying on a plane and finding that it stays in the air.

In contrast, when you face your fears and find that the worst doesn’t happen, psychologists call it an ‘expectancy-violation’. You burst the baleful balloon.

By undermining your negative expectations like this, you gradually teach your brain to be less anxious. The technical term for confronting your fears and anxieties is ‘exposure’.

2. Exercise regularly

Building opportunities for physical exercise into your lifestyle isn’t only good for your body, it’s good for your mind too.

Studies have shown that exercise can boost mood and stave off depression. People who are more physically active also tend to show benefits to their personality traits years down the line, including keeping their neuroticism in check.

Other research shows that regular exercise can help prevent the risk of developing an anxiety disorder.

There are many reasons why exercise has these benefits, including distraction, camaraderie, and improvements in physical health – which can break the known links between poor health and anxiety.

Yet another reason why exercise especially vigorous exercise  is a great tool for beating anxiety is that it can get you used to the kind of physical sensations that fuel anxiety, such as a racing heartbeat and a feeling of breathlessness.

3. Go easy on the caffeine

Whether it’s in your morning espresso or an energy drink at the gym, caffeine might be such an integral part of your routine, that you don’t stop to think that it’s a psychostimulant  a drug that acts on the brain.

Specifically, caffeine acts to block the brain chemical adenosine, which usually serves to calm us down physiologically, such as by lowering our blood pressure and slowing our breathing.

So, one modest lifestyle change to make over the long term to reduce your anxiety levels is to consume less caffeine, remembering that it’s also present in chocolate and tea.

4. Consider your long-term relationship with anxiety

If you come to believe that being anxious is a fundamental, permanent part of who you are, then whenever you’re confronted by situations that make you feel uneasy or afraid, you’re more likely to succumb to the discomfort and withdraw as quickly as you can.

In contrast, if you can try to see anxiety as a temporary, fleeting state – one which is part of being human and can affect anyone at any time – then you’re more likely to find the motivation to ride out the discomfort and seek more constructive ways to deal with it.