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Whether acute or chronic, all of us have experienced anxiety at some point in our lives.
It’s that moment when you get your credit card bill in the mail and realize the damage you’ve done.
Or when your company announces that they will be doing lay-offs, specifically in your department.
Or it’s that gnawing, dreadful feeling you feel in a crowded room when there are too many bodies and it feels like you might just suffocate.
To experience anxiety is to be human, and no one is immune to stress and its complicated symptoms.
However, there are ways you can combat your anxiety, and even reduce your symptoms. Read on to see how you can more effectively manage your anxiety with these 8 useful hacks.
8 Useful Hacks to Calm Your Anxiety
1. Don’t resist what you feel. Often when you resist any type of psychological distress, the worse it gets (e.g., blushing from embarrassment). With anxiety, the same holds true. Don’t fight your feelings, as this will likely induce further stress. Instead, acknowledge how you feel, and talk yourself through it. For example, “This makes me feel uncomfortable and the stress is almost unbearable, but I can hang on and get through this.” Use positive self-talk like this to get through your most anxious moments, rather than denying what you feel.
2. Cool things down. Experience immediate relief from stress by stimulating your senses through ice cold water. Splash cold water on your face and neck, or run your hands and wrists under ice cold water. Not only will you feel immediately cooled off from any panicky feelings, but it will also help to bring your cortisol levels back down to a normal level.
3. Ball up those fists. While exercise is perhaps one of the best tools you can utilize to fight anxiety, sometimes it isn’t always feasible to get up and start jogging or doing jumping jacks during a stressful meeting or conversation. Instead, perform less obvious, yet effective exercises. Clench your fists as hard as you can, inhale and count to five, then slowly let them relax while exhaling. Repeat this cycle until you start to feel relaxed again. You’ll notice that the tension you felt earlier will have dissipated with this simple, yet useful exercise.
4. Focus on your surroundings. Distracting your mind can help to sidetrack your feelings, especially if you feel a panic attack coming on. Focus on something tangible and concrete, like the colors in the room, a notice sign posted on the wall, or count the number of square or rectangular shapes that you see. By diverting your thoughts, you’ll be able to calm your racing mind.
5. Cry it out. Anxiety often results from trapped feelings that have been unable to be healthily released/expressed. Crying is beneficial for you in more ways than one, primarily because it helps to relieve tension and anxiety, and reduce overall stress. Give yourself permission to cry, and you’ll find that it not only significantly reduces your anxiety, but also offers a cathartic release.
6. Use journaling as a means of self-guided therapy. Committing your thoughts to paper offers a multitude of mental health benefits, especially if you’re prone to feeling anxious. When you write down how you feel, you can better understand what your triggers are, while learning how to more effectively manage your symptoms. Plus, you can also more easily check where your self-talk becomes negative, and hence challenge those thoughts.
7. Face your fears head on. Anxiety is only exacerbated by avoidance. So while you may think you’re doing the right thing by avoiding what makes you feel stressed or anxious, you’re ultimately building an increasingly insurmountable wall of fear in your mind. The next time you’re in an anxious situation, rather than giving into your fears and retreating, try to tolerate the situation for a few minutes. Push yourself until you’ve reached five minutes, and then try adding on an additional minute every time you face that fear again. Eventually, the anxiety you feel will not only become more tolerable, but also easier to control.
8. Incorporate exercise into your daily routine. Research has proven time and again just how effective exercise can be in not only reducing anxiety, but also preventing it long-term. So whether you go for a 10 minute walk everyday, or do a couple sets of stairs on your lunch break, or even a short yoga video on Youtube every night before bed, make sure exercise is a part of your life everyday to keep your anxiety in check.
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