4 Ways to Begin Calming Your Anxiety Today

Anxiety is a common experience. It feels like:

• racing thoughts,

• self-doubt,

• worry,

• difficulty controlling the worry,

• anticipating outcomes or conversations,

• replaying events/conversations over and over in the mind,

• self-critical statements about not doing or saying things just “right,”

• perfectionism, or

• procrastination.

Anxiety is something everyone feels and it is manageable.

It exists on a continuum. Without anxiety, we would die. We would have not survival instincts to move us away from danger or protect our children. When anxiety is out of balance, it can feel like it’s taking over. The emotional black out can be overwhelming and totally preoccupying.

Anxiety can come from our biological influences (what is trickling down in the family DNA tree), our psychology (how our brains are wired to think and process the world), or our environment (what we learned growing up and all the internalized messages including what was modeled for us).

People with anxiety don’t know what it’s like to feel calm, to have one thought at a time, or no thoughts at all. They struggle to relax and feel comfortable in their minds and bodies.

Fortunately, there are some tools that help. To better manage the energy, it’s important to remember that feelings are not facts. Feelings are transient; they come and go, changing like the wind. When people get stuck in an anxiety spiral, it starts out as a general sense of dread and can quickly escalate to a worst case scenario fear or even panic attack. In this heightened state of emotion, it’s hard to reel it in.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is one method that teaches people to recognize anxiety and begin redirecting it.

Some simple exercises to practice include:

1.      Thought stopping. Recognizing an automatic negative thought and hitting the brakes in the mind can sound like, “No. I’m not going to feed this thought. It’s just going to continue to upset me.”

2.      Problem solving. Recognize the anxious though and then ask, “If this were a real problem right now, what could I actually do about it?” Sometimes we don’t like to face our options, but we still have options.

3.      Evidence-based thinking. Make a list of any evidence that makes the anxious thought true or possible. Is it real evidence? Or is it more fear? What does the real evidence look like?

4.      Solution-focused thinking. We actually have all we need to solve our problems. Draw on the past: “Is there a problem like this I have already solved? What did I do?” If we don’t have the skills to solve the problem, we have the skills and ability to ask someone to help us learn new tools so that we can.

These are some basic ideas.

Anxiety treatment takes a deep dive to the root of the anxiety, where it comes from, how it developed, and what to do about it.

In anxiety therapy, I teach in-depth models that are well-developed, easily understandable, and very useful in slowing down the momentum to change the internal experience. Everyone deserves to channel anxious energy into more productive thinking and find the calm within. If you’re suffering from anxiety and need some reliable tools, feel free to reach out.