7 Tips and Techniques to Reduce Anxiety

Anxiety shows up in the body before you can talk yourself out of it. Your pulse quickens, your heart seems to skip, you sweat or go cold, and a dull sense of dread settles in. Some people feel like they might pass out or that a heart attack is coming on. The techniques below draw on advice from Henrik Edberg and are meant to interrupt that spiral once it starts.

The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate. A 2012 report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness put the numbers this way: roughly 6.7 percent of American adults, about 14.8 million people, live with major depression. Anxiety disorders reach further still, affecting around 18.1 percent of adults, or about 42 million people. That category covers panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety and phobias.

Start with your breath. Fifteen to thirty slow belly breaths, pulling air in through the nose and letting it out through the mouth, can shift you toward calm surprisingly fast. The slowness matters as much as the depth.

Go looking for information. A lot of anxiety grows out of feeling powerless or unsure of what happens next. When you actually learn something about what is troubling you, or about the ways other people have handled it, the fog thins out. Read a book or an article, pick up a self-help title, search online. Knowing the shape of the thing is better than imagining it.

Turn your attention toward what is working. Negative self-talk feeds on itself, and the glass-half-full reframe is harder than it sounds in the moment. Still, steering your thoughts from the dark side to the brighter one changes both direction and mood. If the thoughts are too loud to redirect, break the loop another way: a TV show, a movie, music, a workout, an evening with friends.

Food and sleep do quiet work here. Eating well keeps blood sugar steady, and steady blood sugar keeps mood from swinging and stress from building. Seven or eight hours of sleep gives the brain and body time to reset. None of this is news, yet it gets neglected exactly when anxiety is highest, which is also when sleep gets hardest. Deep breathing, a short meditation or a warm cup of tea can loosen the grip enough to let rest come.

Ask whether your thinking is actually getting you anywhere. When thoughts start racing, pause and question them directly. What am I telling myself? Is any of this realistic? Is there a fix I can act on? Often you will catch yourself in a familiar trap, assuming the worst, or sorting everything into all-or-nothing terms. Once you spot a thought as negative and going nowhere, you can swap it for a better one. Some people call this thought replacement.

Name the feeling instead of fighting it. Acknowledging that you are anxious does not mean you have to enjoy the sensation; it only means you notice it is there. That small act of awareness is what lets you set the feeling down. You let yourself have the experience, then you take back some control by releasing it, and with it out of the way you have more room to work toward a solution.

Stay in the present. A fair amount of anxiety is really regret in disguise, the could-have and should-have ache, mixed with worry about a future that hasn't arrived. Keeping your attention on what is happening right now eases both the backward pull and the forward dread. Mindfulness meditation is one reliable way to anchor yourself there, and plenty of guidance exists online for learning it.

Releasing tension and easing worry is not optional for your emotional and physical health. Find whatever helps you unwind. We are each wired a little differently, so try several of these and see which ones fit you. (Noted by Kim B.)

One reader, Bergen, shared his own version of this. His family of five was pulled, fairly suddenly, out of a life they had spent more than ten years building. They left their home, crossed into another state, and moved in with his single mother. The trauma touched everyone, the five of them plus the family dog, and his mother and her dog too. The new place was smaller and offered less privacy, and he felt it stall their growth, both together and as individuals.

He put it plainly to anyone who might recognize the shape of it: imagine leaving all your friends behind and moving four states away into a house with your mother-in-law, then imagine waking up to find that was no dream. They walked away from jobs they liked and arrived with nothing lined up. It took him five months to land a temporary role paying less than a third of what he used to make. His wife needed another five months beyond that to find something close to her old work. He called the whole stretch humbling.

Their oldest daughter took the hardest hit. Uprooted in her junior year, she left friends she had known for more than a decade, more than half her life. She couldn't picture her new existence as anything but miserable. The ordinary teenage ambitions fell away. She stopped caring about school, lost interest in getting her driver's license, and kept her distance from the new students when she enrolled. She retreated to her room and hid even from her own family, choosing to be alone, which wore on all of them.

What he eventually saw was that her withdrawal mirrored his and his wife's. The two of them had gone standoffish with the world, dodging new friendships, protecting the circle of their 'fab five' while quietly closing off their own chances to grow. They went to church, went shopping, went to the movies, did more or less anything they pleased, but none of it involved anyone outside the household.

The turn came in an ordinary conversation. His wife told their daughter she was worried, that the girl was letting life slide past her, choosing not to take part in it. The daughter answered that neither were her parents. The reply stung and it landed. If she needed to step back into her own life, so did they. He takes that as the point of the whole thing: living in the present, actually participating, is what a full life asks of you, and the family is still working on that together. (Shared by Bergen.)

Source: Edberg, H. (n.d.). Put a Stop to Your Anxiety with These 8 Simple Tips. Retrieved January 8, 2015, from positivityblog.com.