5 Easy Ways to Deal with Anxiety

1. Journaling.

Therapy is a great outlet for getting anxious thoughts off your chest. The only issue is therapy only lasts for one hour every week, what are you going to do during the other 167 hours!? Journaling serves as a great outlet to hold you over until your next session. Anxiety thrives in ambiguity. When you ruminate on scary thoughts in your head, you allow them to get bigger - which sometimes can lead to your thoughts spiraling out of control. When writing words on paper (or a laptop if that’s more your style) it forces us to think linearly, making our thoughts more concrete and thought out. Anxiety HATES when we think logically. The big scary monsters in our head tend to get a lot smaller and a lot less scary once we think logically.

Furthermore, journaling allows you to track your progress throughout the therapy process. You can see what kind of thoughts you had during the week, as well as what may have triggered these thoughts. This not only helps you to realize your patterns, but it can also be a helpful tool to bring into the therapy room. You can review your journal with your therapist to help them gain a better understanding of your patterns, and what may be contributing to your anxiety.

2. A Healthy Lifestyle.

Sometimes, we underestimate how our physical well-being can affect our anxiety. However, how we are doing physically often has a large influence on how we are doing mentally. Ever notice how anxious and overwhelmed you feel after a night of little sleep? On the contrary, you ever notice how great you feel after a good, hard workout? Taking care of our bodies is not only important to our physical health, but also our mental health. Working out regularly results in the release of endorphins into the bloodstream. These endorphins help us to feel good! They are nature’s anxiety medication.

Getting good sleep is also important. Anxiety thrives when we are brains are sluggish. Being tired hurts our cognitive functioning. Instead of thinking in a logical, well-organized manner, when we are tired we usually have lapses in judgment - which clouds our thinking and allows for anxiety to take over. Getting good sleep, eating healthy, and being active are all ways to keep our body functioning at its full potential - which in turn allows our minds to function at their highest potential!

3. Meditation.

Life is stressful. Everyday, our head is swimming with thoughts and worries. When was that bill due again? Whose turn was it to handle the carpool duties? How am I going to reach that deadline in time… better yet, when was that deadline again!? It’s estimated that we think between 60,000-80,000 thoughts a day. Thinking that much is enough to make anybody feel anxious! All that chatter in our heads can quickly turn to worry, which is all anxiety is. Our minds need a break. That’s where mediation comes in. You may have heard of it, its popularity is on the rise. There are so many apps, so many YouTube guided meditation videos, meditation is everywhere. And that’s because of one simple reason: it works! Numerous scientific studies have provided evidence that meditation is effective in reducing stress and anxiety.

So what is meditation and how do you do it? That’s the best part, meditation is so easy and anybody can do it! All you need is a comfortable chair, and a few minutes. There are multiple ways to meditate, and no one way is the ‘right’ way. One of the most common ways is to focus on your breath. You can pay attention to the rise and fall of your belly as you breathe in and out. You may also count the number of breaths you take, as that is helpful to some people. There is also an abundance of guided meditations available for free on YouTube that you can follow. Meditation is so beneficial, and I work to incorporate it into my work with all my clients.

4. Having Fun.

Sometimes our anxiety can get so overwhelming that we forget to enjoy life. Balance is so important to managing anxiety. Often, when our lives get out of balance; whether it is due to work, taking care of others, or just poor time management, we can become overwhelmed. We start to focus on all the negatives - all the things we need to do, that we forget such a crucial part of living a healthy life: having fun! Having fun can feel impossible when you are feeling anxious. You may feel guilty for taking time for yourself when you are responsible for caring for others, or maybe you tell yourself that you don’t have the time. I’m here to tell you that having fun should not be a guilty pleasure.

Having fun is necessary for our well-being! Having fun also does not mean you have to take a two week vacation to Hawaii (although that does sound really nice!). Fun can be as simple as phoning a friend you haven’t talked to in a while, curling up on the couch with a good book, or getting active (going on a jog or playing pickleball). We all know how to have fun, we just have to allow ourselves the time and the permission to do so.

5. Going to Therapy.

If you like some of these ideas, but feel that you need more to escape your anxiety - then therapy might be the right fit for you! Therapy allows us to dig deeper into your roots of anxiety and determine what is causing you to be stressed. Furthermore, we can work on techniques that you can employ in your daily life to help cope with stress. These techniques could be breathing exercises, thought stopping, recognizing cognitive distortions, or one of the techniques I mentioned above. If you want to start controlling anxiety, instead of letting anxiety control you, then give me a call today! Together, we can manage your anxiety, and allow you to become the best version of yourself.