Talking about anxiety seems like an appropriate way to follow my recent post about moving through depressive feelings.
Today I’d like to share my top ten best practices to live with feelings of anxiety. For anyone who faces anxiety, you know that it’s a tricky beast of an emotion that can come up out of the blue sometimes or presents itself in full force at expected times. Everyone is different and anxiety feelings can vary widely from individual to individual. I feel it is important to note that I am not a healthcare professional, rather I’m simply someone who discovered in adulthood what anxiety is, feels like, and that I’ve likely experienced various levels of anxiety from childhood and never knew it.
First let’s talk about what anxiety is. Anxiety is normal to have and is your body’s response to stress or stressful situations. What is abnormal is when anxiety and it’s symptoms become troublesome to normal living. A heightened anxiety response can be more cerebral such as with inner thoughts, overwhelming fears and mental spirals. Other forms of a heightened anxiety response could be felt more physically in the body; with various systems (cardiovascular, muscular, nervous, digestive) experiencing irregularities – sometimes simultaneously. I believe that some anxiety is good to have and helps us out in life, however too much of it, and it can become troublesome! For extreme anxieties that persist, and help is warranted, please reach out to your nearest healthcare professional. Counselling, therapy, groups, friends and family can all be a valued support system. Of course, in an emergency, dial your local mental health support lines or emergency services immediately.
Now, I do want to share that, YES – an anxiety attack can feel like a perceived heart attack, so if you feel that you’re having an anxiety attack, try any tools you know to move through the heightened feelings and bring them down before needing to be carted off by the ambulance. Why do I say this? Well, let me share a little of what I would call a ‘grand mal anxiety moment’ and what it felt like for me… it crept up slowly over a couple hours and I thought I could continue to push it down or ignore it and it would go away, but it still kept on coming up (and my inner systems seemed to feel like they were shutting down)… at its peak all 4 of my limbs were entirely numb! This was a clue that no ambulance was needed for me because it was felt on both sides of my body 😉. I had to stop my (then) current activity, lay down, breathe, tune into my senses with at 5-4-3-2-1 technique, continued breathing patterns, ate some food (yes, chocolate! Yay), went for a walk, took some photos and eventually returned to regular activities. I was also blessed with “an anxiety coach” there beside me that walked me through each step of what to do and I will be forever grateful to this life guide. Afterwards, I kept it light for the rest of the day, continuing self-care and good hygiene habits with an early bedtime all to reset myself from the insanely intense experiences of the day.
Other times that anxiety has curbed my daily experiences, were when it felt like anxiety had a hold on my guts and was wringing them out to dry – during those times, the bathroom was a needed best friend! Or when I can’t seem to stop my inner mind whirl – this one usually only affects my sleep. Although, on occasion, inner anxiety dialogue can creep up too far, disrupting daily tasks, causing an experienced ‘brainstorm fog’ almost.
In moving forward from these experiences, I have learned what anxiety feelings feel like for myself and how reduce them on an ongoing basis. First and foremost, learning to recognize and identify (or label if you will) that the feelings or thoughts happening are of the ‘anxiety variety’ is a big step forward. From there you can choose how you move through the feelings. *Bonus tip for my empath friends, your step one would be to identify if the experienced feelings are yours or someone else’s, then release what is not meant for you. The next step, when it is possible, would be to identify what triggered the response. For some, this follow-up step will happen quickly (even immediately) and for others, it can take a while to sort out what was the true cause of the anxiety response. For myself, the faster I can pick out what “made me tick”, the faster I can get back to my regular sunshiny self! 😀
There are SO many ways you can reduce or eliminate anxiety in your life, too many to list them all at once, so today I will give you my top ten favorite ways to reduce and move through heightened anxiety feelings. I think an interesting irony to note is that often what can bring about anxiety fears, is the thought of a future anxiety or panic attacks coming on – so, anxiety can trigger anxiety! This is highlighted in Mayam Balik’s Breakdown podcast, when Sarah Silverman is talking about anxiety. Just knowing this can happen, and that I have a plan of attack if needed, is super helpful when I feel anxiety start to creep up.
In no order of importance, here are my top ten tips to reduce heightened anxiety feelings:
- Cut out caffeine! Yup it’s a tough one but reducing or eliminating caffeine really helps my nervous system stay calm. Albeit hard, after a while it gets easier choosing to drink a half cup of coffee, switching to herbal tea, or selecting other non-caffeinated drinks.
- Get enough sleep! I do love to slumber but sometimes procrastinating before bed leads to a late-night owl. When I’m low on sleep, I find my body has a harder time relaxing and can easily get wound up and stressed out.
- Eat regular meals and snacks. Not only do I get “hangry” when I’m low on energy reserves, but I find that anxiety feelings creep up much faster when my body doesn’t have enough fuel to cope.
- In an non-anxious moment, create an “last minute anti-anxiety” self-care routine that consists of 2-4 small self-care tasks you can easily step through when emotions are high. Such as: take 10 deep breaths, tune into each 5 senses, touch the ground for 10seconds then repeat. Your routine can be anything you want. Try to make it simple and easy to remember and what you may think can be easily done (almost) anytime anywhere.
- Repeat words of affirmation to yourself, either quietly or out loud if you can. Enforce positive self-talk. Many times, anxiety can stem from a negative or perceived negative experience or negative inner dialogue. Consciously shifting to positive self-talk can curb feelings from being exasperated. It is a challenge for sure! Find ONE positive to start with, keep repeating it and adding in new positives as you can.
- While we are talking self-talk, let’s talk about gratitude. I feel they go hand in hand as shifting to a ‘gratitude attitude’ will have a ripple effect on subduing anxieties. For example during the infamous NZ lockdown during the 2020 pandemic, I had a hard time getting to sleep due to “mind-whirling” fears and mental spirals that wouldn’t slow down when my head went down. The only exercise that worked (among many tried) was expressing gratitude. Each night I’d lay in bed and tell myself alllllllll the things I was grateful for and just kept listing things, on and on and on until I fell asleep. It helped me not think about all the other things I was anxious about and eventually I’d be out like a light.
- Another good pairing is regular exercise and sunshine. Sometimes you can’t get them both together but I feel they are equally as important to try to get in during a day or week.
- Distracting activities that keep your mind occupied and diverting repetitive body motions. Just be careful that the distracting activities don’t continue endlessly to become avoidance overall. I would say games are great for a bit but not for endless hours or days. Anxiety symptoms can sometimes come out in ticks, shakes, twitches, or other irregular movements – these motions can be distracting (and can be harmful at extremes) so finding alternative “body distractions” is key to curbing anxiety activity. For me, at certain times, shaking my entire leg was an anxiety symptom that was socially intrusive, so I eventually learned how to divert my attention and instead make smaller hand movements or grab a worry stone or other fidget toy until I could release the movement altogether.
- Changing sensations for the senses. Grab something super cold for a while, put on some calming essential oils, eat foods (as mentioned above especially when low on energy), play music, have a bath or shower, etc. Introducing an alternative sensation makes your brain and body re-route some attention which can allow for “anxiety fires” to be put out.
- Practice grounding exercises! Meditations are hard in heightened anxiety however if you build up a regular meditation practice, even as little as 5-10mins a day, over time it will become much easier to move from heightened anxiety to carrying on calmly. One of my past favorite meditation apps was Calm. Nowadays I try to tune into my body and feelings daily with regular grounding practices.
Added bonus tip: for my fellow empath friends, body testing, is one of my ultimate friends through heightened anxiety feelings. It helps my mind tune into my body and find the answers I need without ‘having to think about it’. So much stress alleviated from decision making.
Try out some of these tips and see if you can make your daily living easier to navigate, find the joy in waking up each morning all the way through to going to sleep at night.
Talk with your friends and family as you can. Personally, I’ve found that sharing my experiences has helped those around me with their anxieties and/or helped them help me when I’ve needed it. Perhaps in sharing my experiences in this post, it may help a few others through some emotional moments to come.
Feel free to leave a comment with your favorite anti-anxiety tools or exercises. Want to help others? Then share this post with a loved one who also experiences anxiety.
Go forth and find your joy with anxiety. 😀