Ways To Manage Your Anxiety
Anxiety really sucks!
For many, the feeling of anxiety can be so unpleasant that it is almost as physically uncomfortable as living with chronic pain.
Chronic pain is a horrible feeling that the sufferer wishes would go away; anxiety is also a horrible feeling that the patient wishes would go away. In this sense, pain and anxiety have something in common.
Once we have come to terms with the fact that we have chronic anxiety, the next thing most of us realise reasonably quickly is that there won’t be a single “magic bullet” to resolve our anxiety disorder and anxiety attacks. Instead, we need a holistic approach and involve various strategies and tools. Combining ways to self-manage anxiety symptoms with professional help, and maybe even some help from technology, is often what is required to feel better in the long term.
The idea of putting together a whole bunch of different treatments and approaches can feel a little daunting, but it need not be because it really is just a matter of working our way through some different options and just seeing which feels best and most valuable over time. Unsurprisingly anxiety treatment and reducing anxiety symptoms is not ‘one size fits all.
An effective self-management tool that works to help with anxiety is always preferable to a tool that we need someone else’s help with. Taking control of our own physical, mental and emotional well-being is the ultimate goal of treatment after all.
So what are some ways to manage your anxiety and anxiety disorders on our own terms, in conjunction with whatever professional and fraternal help we need along the way from others?
1. Morning Routine – Ways to manage your anxiety
Many people who suffer from anxiety are entirely oblivious to how important the morning is; and what a golden opportunity the morning presents. But also, people with anxiety often don’t realise what a big problem or risk the morning represents if we don’t go about it in a careful, kind and deliberate way.
After we sleep, the brain pathways and patterns that are involved in anxiety are a lot quieter and more subdued than they are later in the day. This means that any effort we make to reduce anxiety in the morning will tend to bring ten times the benefit and results compared to things we do later in the day. You could think of this as trying to get out in front of your anxiety and slow it down before it gathers momentum later in the day.
We can use many tools like meditation, mindfulness and visualisation to help reduce and manage your anxiety over time. They are all far more beneficial in the morning, before business and momentum kick in. Regardless of whatever tools you choose, there has to be a morning routine for them to fit into; otherwise, it’s like trying to plant seedlings without any soil.
1. Morning Routine
Many people who suffer from anxiety are entirely oblivious to how important the morning is; and what a golden opportunity the morning presents. But also, people with anxiety often don’t realise what a big problem or risk the morning represents if we don’t go about it in a careful, kind and deliberate way.
After we sleep, the brain pathways and patterns that are involved in anxiety are a lot quieter and more subdued than they are later in the day. This means that any effort we make to reduce anxiety in the morning will tend to bring ten times the benefit and results compared to things we do later in the day. You could think of this as trying to get out in front of your anxiety and slow it down before it gathers momentum later in the day.
We can use many tools like meditation, mindfulness and visualisation to help reduce anxiety over time. They are all far more beneficial in the morning, before business and momentum kick in. Regardless of whatever tools you choose, there has to be a morning routine for them to fit into; otherwise, it’s like trying to plant seedlings without any soil.
A morning routine to reduce anxiety, manage your anxiety disorder, and anxiety symptoms over time is only possible if you allow time for it. This means moving away from any tendency that you might have to jump out of bed and launch straight into activity. A morning routine means allowing some time to care for your brain before you throw it into coffee, email, social media, parenting, work tasks and even exercise.
Developing a morning routine is a big topic and one that has been written about extensively, and it’s worth researching it in some depth. If on reading this blog, you can make a decision that you are going to develop one, that alone will be a giant step towards resolving anxiety long-term.
So the basic question is whether you can either get up 30 minutes earlier or rearrange your morning so that you get 30 minutes to care for yourself and your brain activity.
Growing a morning routine has been the single most life-changing thing I have ever undertaken. And for all the countless things I have tried over the years, the one thing that never goes away for me now is the morning routine. I just don’t know how I could live without it. That’s how important morning routines become once you realise what they can do for you.
A morning routine to reduce anxiety, manage your anxiety disorder, and anxiety symptoms over time is only possible if you allow time for it. This means moving away from any tendency that you might have to jump out of bed and launch straight into activity. A morning routine means allowing some time to care for your brain before you throw it into coffee, email, social media, parenting, work tasks and even exercise.
Developing a morning routine is a big topic and one that has been written about extensively, and it’s worth researching it in some depth. If on reading this blog, you can make a decision that you are going to develop one, that alone will be a giant step towards resolving anxiety long-term.
So the basic question is whether you can either get up 30 minutes earlier or rearrange your morning so that you get 30 minutes to care for yourself and your brain activity.
Growing a morning routine has been the single most life-changing thing I have ever undertaken. And for all the countless things I have tried over the years, the one thing that never goes away for me now is the morning routine. I just don’t know how I could live without it. That’s how important morning routines become once you realise what they can do for you.
2. Name that feeling – Ways to manage your anxiety
So many of life’s problems require challenging and complex solutions that it can be easy to live under the tyranny of assuming that significant struggles will not likely improve with simple and easy means. But the great news is that this is a total falsehood.
Millions of people have found mental health struggles to be massively improved by some shockingly simple solutions. An excellent example of this is that researchers have found that exercising 30 minutes a day can be as beneficial to chronic depression as antidepressants. Hopefully, we can agree that 30 minutes of exercise a day isn’t a particularly complex or difficult thing.
What could well be the simplest and most effective self-management tool of all during an anxiety attack or anxiety-inducing event is to simply tune into the feeling and give it a name. And if that sounds a little strange, that’s okay; just bear with me.
Have you ever had the experience of talking to someone and the subject of better posture or better breathing comes up, and you instantly realise that you weren’t sitting up straight, or you weren’t actually breathing at all? Then you do sit up straight or take a deep breath.
Our ability to suddenly notice and correct our posture once prompted shows how many of our issues are caused by a simple lack of complete awareness of what’s happening inside. And in some sense, anxiety can be a lot like this. The less fully conscious we are of the feeling, the more uncomfortable and messy the feeling is. Which can seem almost like a contradiction until you actually try the following exercise out, and you’ll realise it’s actually kinda true.
So to make your anxiety more manageable and way less uncomfortable, all you need to do is tune into it when you realise it’s there and just name what it feels like. And this might be as simple as just noticing the unpleasant feeling in your chest or your tummy and saying to yourself, ‘anxiety, I’m feeling anxiety. Or you might find that when you tune into this feeling, actually ‘fear’ is a better label or ‘queasy’ or ‘pressure’ or some other word that best describes the specific emotion you feel when you’re anxious. Whatever that word is, tune into the feeling and say the word as if you’re identifying the feeling and labeling it. This leads to an immediate decrease in discomfort and an immediate increase in the sense of the manageability of the sensations.
I totally get that for some of you reading this, it may seem a little too simple or a little bit too random to actually be effective. Just naming the feeling can lead to such an improvement in the experience in the moment. And in all honesty, I can’t really explain properly why you’re how it makes the big difference it does; maybe someone else can. But the beautiful thing is, it costs you absolutely nothing, and there are no risks to trying it out.
Recheck after you’ve labeled the feeling and be mindful of how you feel. Otherwise, there is a tendency to have it work, and then you feel so much better that you forgot how anxious you had been and that you found a way out of it.
If you can be conscious enough to acknowledge that it worked, It’ll probably make you want to use it again and again.
3. Using Technology
Technology is funny stuff. There are so many amazing things that technology can do to make life convenient for us. There are also so many ways it can make life worse for us and reduce our quality of life and even our health.
There are things in life that technology should probably just stay out of, and it may be that anxiety and anxiety disorders are among them. Technology often messes with nature more so than it assists it, after all.
What if reducing anxiety is like growing spinach, for example. The more technology you try to apply to a task like growing spinach (FYI, spinach technology is pesticides and fertilisers), the worse the spinach gets. Conversely, the less technology you use with the growing spinach, the better the spinach ends up being. So this is an excellent reminder that technology isn’t great for all outcomes.
I would definitely count myself amongst those who tend to be highly sceptical of technology for mental health and emotional healing. I understand that technology is excellent for developing electric cars and building bridges, but I find myself naturally suspicious about using technology to try and get happier. Because I inherently know that happiness is probably a lot like spinach in these respects.
Furthermore, we know that the use of medications and electric shocks (healthcare technology) for treating mental health disorders, depression disorders and anxiety disorders is a severely mixed blessing. Some go well with the support of pharmaceutical technologies. And many, many others have been made much, much worse. And countless others have been denied an opportunity for some real healing due to numbing of the pain. So we can probably agree that mental health technology (pharmaceuticals) is something we can be open to; it’s also something that we should be a little cautious of at the same time.
With all this being said, what I have learnt frustratingly late in life is that there are actually some technologies that can make a very dramatic difference to how we manage anxiety and anxiety disorders. These are technologies that also have no measurable risk attached.
Two excellent examples of technologies that have shown great promise for anxiety care and anxiety management are biofeedback and brainwave entrainment.
Biofeedback (which is what they use for lie detector tests) is being used extensively. It shows great promise for teaching people with anxiety to cope better by increasing their awareness of it using external feedback forms. In simple terms, if I can give you a visual representation of your heartbeat increasing, you can learn to breathe through it better, which means that it will inevitably tend to settle down. In a way, you could say biofeedback helps people unlearn their anxiety responses. This is big because responding correctly to a feeling of anxiety can make all the difference between a full-blown anxiety attack and a barely perceptible feeling of uneasiness.
Brainwave Entrainment is a tool that many people have found to be a huge benefit in enabling them to gain some more control over their anxiety. It is quite different from biofeedback. Brainwave treatment uses high-frequency LED lights, which pulse at the same frequency as the cells in a happy, relaxed brain, which adjusts your brain activity. This helps to reduce the brain signals associated with anxiety and also helps to release the buildups of anxious brain activity that so many of us with anxiety disorders suffer with.
3. Using Technology – Ways to manage your anxiety
Technology is funny stuff. There are so many amazing things that technology can do to make life convenient for us. There are also so many ways it can make life worse for us and reduce our quality of life and even our health.
There are things in life that technology should probably just stay out of, and it may be that anxiety and anxiety disorders are among them. Technology often messes with nature more so than it assists it, after all.
What if a way to manage your anxiety and reduce it is like growing spinach, for example. The more technology you try to apply to a task like growing spinach (FYI, spinach technology is pesticides and fertilisers), the worse the spinach gets. Conversely, the less technology you use with the growing spinach, the better the spinach ends up being. So this is an excellent reminder that technology isn’t great for all outcomes.
I would definitely count myself amongst those who tend to be highly sceptical of technology for mental health and emotional healing. I understand that technology is excellent for developing electric cars and building bridges, but I find myself naturally suspicious about using technology to try and get happier. Because I inherently know that happiness is probably a lot like spinach in these respects.
Furthermore, we know that the use of medications and electric shocks (healthcare technology) for treating mental health disorders, depression disorders and anxiety disorders is a severely mixed blessing. Some go well with the support of pharmaceutical technologies. And many, many others have been made much, much worse. And countless others have been denied an opportunity for some real healing due to numbing of the pain. So we can probably agree that mental health technology (pharmaceuticals) is something we can be open to; it’s also something that we should be a little cautious of at the same time.
With all this being said, what I have learnt frustratingly late in life is that there are actually some technologies that can make a very dramatic difference to how we manage anxiety and anxiety disorders. These are technologies that also have no measurable risk attached.
Two excellent examples of technologies that have shown great promise for anxiety care and anxiety management are biofeedback and brainwave entrainment.
Biofeedback (which is what they use for lie detector tests) is being used extensively. It shows great promise for teaching people with anxiety to cope better by increasing their awareness of it using external feedback forms. In simple terms, if I can give you a visual representation of your heartbeat increasing, you can learn to breathe through it better, which means that it will inevitably tend to settle down. In a way, you could say biofeedback helps people unlearn their anxiety responses. This is big because responding correctly to a feeling of anxiety can make all the difference between a full-blown anxiety attack and a barely perceptible feeling of uneasiness.
Brainwave Entrainment is a tool that many people have found to be a huge benefit in enabling them to gain some more control over their anxiety. It is quite different from biofeedback. Brainwave treatment uses high-frequency LED lights, which pulse at the same frequency as the cells in a happy, relaxed brain, which adjusts your brain activity. This helps to reduce the brain signals associated with anxiety and also helps to release the buildups of anxious brain activity that so many of us with anxiety disorders suffer with.
Conclusion
As I said, any tool that helps manage and/or heal your anxiety on your own terms is really the ideal tool. At the deepest level, we all want to feel better and be happier, but we also want to be able to achieve it consistently on our own terms without relying heavily on others or heavy drugs. This is an intrinsic part of the journey. If there’s any way I can heal without being dependent on someone else or something else and work on my well-being, that’s preferable to me. I’m sure it’s the same for you.
The methodologies and technologies listed above all have an excellent track record for assisting people in gaining more control over their anxiety, reducing their anxiety disorder symptoms and improving their quality of life. But none of them are that “magic bullet” mentioned earlier, and none work in a single go. If you are willing to try things out and be really careful and honest with yourself about whether they’ve made you feel better over time, you may find that much of the suffering you go through becomes more manageable than you ever thought possible.
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