How to Cope with Anxiety
Overview: This article provides practical tips for managing anxiety
How to cope with anxiety in the moment
Cognitive and mindfulness strategies for anxiety
Behavioral patterns that make anxiety worse
If you’re reading this, my guess is that anxious feelings are all too familiar to you. That feeling of wanting to escape the situation so you don’t have to feel sick to your stomach or trouble sleeping at night because you just can’t shut your mind off. Or maybe it’s that chronic tightness in your neck, back and shoulders causing you pain and the thoughts like “I just can’t handle this”. Maybe you’re recognizing that you often avoid doing things that others seem to enjoy, like going shopping, going to parties, getting your haircut, or calling people on the phone. Whatever your story may be, these anxious feelings are causing you some distress and you want relief. Here are some practical tips for dealing with anxiety.
Challenge negative thoughts
When you notice those anxious feelings, it’s not uncommon to feel frustrated with yourself. Let’s say you’re anxious about going to a party and an hour before you’re about to leave you start to feel sick to your stomach. You might start having thoughts like “Ugh…Why can’t I just be normal?” “Why does this always happen to me?” “I SHOULD like to hang out with people” “Just stop. You’re being ridiculous” and so on.
When you put pressure on yourself to think, feel or behave differently, it makes your anxiety worse. I mean if it were that easy to just stop, you would be doing that already. Sometimes just giving yourself permission to have your feelings can stop it from escalating. Rather than thinking “I have to stop this from getting worse”, try replacing it with a thought like “It’s ok to feel this way. This isn’t going to last forever”. Another great way to do this is to imagine someone you love coming to you with this issue and how you would respond to them. Most likely, you would say something kind and hopeful, not degrading and hurtful.
Practice self compassion or mindfulness
Letting anxious feelings wash over you is sometimes the best way to manage them. Instead of focusing on taking the feeling away, focus on trying to make yourself more comfortable until it passes. This will look different for everyone, but it could be something very simple like:
Taking a break from whatever you’re doing to walk or get outside.
Sit in a dark room and focus on slowing down your breathing.
Put on some calming music or a soothing TV show.
Slow down your movements — walk slower, breathe slower, slow down your pace, focus on reading something fully instead of skimming.
Release physical tension
The fight, flight or freeze response plays a major role in anxiety. When your stress levels start to escalate, your body responds physically because of the release of cortisol and adrenaline. The more stressed a person becomes, the more the body is preparing itself to respond to the problem. Whether it’s to leave, confront, or freeze in some cases, your body is ready for action, not for logical thinking. This is why it is sometimes difficult to calm down when you’re highly anxious, even though you can see sometimes that your thoughts are not logical.
So when you’re highly anxious, it is sometimes better to release that built up tension in order to help the body relax itself. Going for a walk, a run, doing jumping jacks, playing sports, riding your bike, cleaning the house—it doesn’t matter, just move your body and get your heart rate up for a little while. You can also work on slowing down with more mindful movements like yoga, stretching, or tai chi.
Poor boundaries trigger anxiety
So far we’ve focused more on how to handle anxiety in the moment and I hope that you’ve got some fresh ideas. I’d like to shift more towards common causes of anxiety, one of which is having poor boundaries.
Boundaries are the limits we put on relationships to keep ourselves happy, safe, and satisfied. When we have good boundaries with people, we are able to communicate our feelings, say no to things we don’t want to do, and accept the emotions of others without feeling the need to fix or change them.
If you have poor boundaries, you start to feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. You take on projects at work that take away time from friends, family or hobbies. You follow our spouse around and keep asking “What’s wrong?” despite them telling us they feel fine . You spend money to go to events you have no interest in going to because you don’t want to disappoint your friends.
While these things are totally okay to do from time to time, when you start doing these things too much you start to get anxious. When you sacrifice your needs, you often start to feel angry and resentful. This can cause anxiety on a regular basis because you become torn between what you want and the pressure to please others.
Too much avoidance will make your anxiety worse
Another cause of anxiety is engaging in avoidance behavior. This is when you find yourself avoiding things that cause you stress in an effort to reduce the anxious feelings. Avoidance can be something obvious like turning down an invitation to hang out with friends because you fear being awkward and it can also be more subtle, like not expressing your feelings because you don’t want to upset someone else. You get some relief in the short term, so you might be wondering why this is a problem.
Well, it’s because avoiding things on a regular basis to manage short term anxiety becomes a long term problem. When you don’t force yourself to work through your anxiety and see you can handle stressful situations, you start to think you can’t possibly handle it the next time it comes around. So the next time you get that invite to hang out with friends, you are going to feel even more anxious because you haven’t practiced those social skills in awhile.
While these tips can certainly help, don’t be afraid to seek professional help if anxiety is causing you problems. Whether it’s something you deal with daily or if you’re going through a short period of it due to stressful life events, talking it out with someone can really be beneficial. You don’t have to manage it all by yourself.