How to Eliminate Anxiety: Body, Mind, and Spirit
Your stomach flips the moment you step onto the sidewalk. Thoughts won't slow down. Palms go damp, breath turns shallow, and there's that low electric hum somewhere behind your ribs. Most of us know the feeling from a bad day here or there. For some people, though, it arrives every morning and refuses to leave. Getting to work or to class becomes its own ordeal when panic sits on your chest like that. Anxiety has roots in the body, in the mind, and in the spirit, which means it can be answered on all three of those fronts at once.
Start with what you eat. Refined sugar is worth cutting. Research has tied long stretches of heavy sugar use to a weaker ability to shake off depression, and other work points to a dopamine imbalance in the crash that follows a sugar high, which feeds anxiety. In its place, reach for a little fruit between meals. Blueberries and peaches carry nutrients that have a calming effect. Chocolate can help too, since it lowers cortisol, the stress hormone. Pick up a plain unsweetened bar from the baking aisle, melt it on the stove, and stir in coconut milk or another alternative milk along with some honey. Once it cools, spoon it into a container, keep it in the fridge, and have a small amount each morning.
Wheat is another one to drop. Anxiety can show up as a symptom of celiac disease, and while nobody has the whole picture yet on how wheat acts on us, a number of studies hint at a connection between eating it and poorer mental health. Rice, gluten-free oats, and plant-based carbohydrates fill the gap without the downside.
Then there are the stimulants and the drink. Coffee and cigarettes rev the system and make anxiety sharper. Alcohol shifts serotonin and other neurotransmitters in ways that tend to leave anxiety worse off, not better. Trade them for movement. A walk first thing in the morning does real work against anxious symptoms, partly from the effort itself and partly from being outside in fresh air. Cycling, swimming, jogging, or dancing all do the same job if walking isn't your thing.
Much of anxiety traces back to how we imagine other people see us. The worry grows out of guesses about how they judge our looks, our abilities, our character. We end up watching ourselves from the outside, more concerned with how we land in someone else's eyes than with whatever we're actually living through. Breaking that pattern means becoming an active participant in your own surroundings. It means letting yourself experience the world from the inside, as a subject rather than an exhibit. Put your attention on what you can do, not on how you're being watched, and your thinking opens up for the kind of thought that actually moves your life forward.
How do you get there? One way is to convert your wishes into obligations. Nearly everyone wishes for a satisfying life, yet plenty of people never reach it, because anxiety plants itself between them and the dream and keeps them pinned. Reframe that wish as a flat duty, something you owe yourself, and you gain a way to pass straight through the fear and come out the far side. It sounds too easy to be real. But when you keep hardening a dream into a duty, pouring emotion into it and shaping your own character to meet its demands, it slowly grows heavier and more solid than the anxiety ever was.
The goals aren't only for your own private life. They matter just as much for how you treat the people around you. That was my worst stumbling block during my own years of anxiety. If a stranger spoke to me on the street I'd feel so mortified I was close to tears, and I'd just turn and walk off without a word. Then it hit me that my behavior might actually be wounding or insulting those people. I wanted to be the kind of person who was warm and left others feeling better about themselves, and I found it nearly impossible. So one day I made that wish my duty. From that point on, being friendly was simply required of me, even on the days I had no appetite for it.
There was a stretch when leaving the house was so hard that I spent half an hour each morning restating my purpose to myself. I told myself I deserved a full life, so living one was my duty. I told myself I deserved good relationships, so being kind and lifting people up was my duty. I knew I wanted to do some good in the world and I was terrified of it in equal measure. Only that steady repetition, reminding myself that these were things I truly wanted, got me through the door and kept me walking. Month by month the anxiety and the crushing shyness thinned out, until one day I realized it simply wasn't there. My relationships got better, and the full life I'd been reciting to myself had quietly arrived.
The spiritual piece surprised me most. Whether you hold to God, or some Universal Power, or nothing at all, speaking to something larger than yourself can carry you through trials you didn't think you had the strength for. Praying for peace and for relief does help. Thanking God, or the Universe, or even the bare idea of Peace itself for a calm you haven't been handed yet works better still. When I prayed, 'Please give me peace,' the results were hit and miss. When I prayed, 'Thank you for the peace I have been given,' calm came over me faster and more fully. If there was a single quiet moment in an otherwise frantic day, I'd fix on it and be grateful for it. Praying that way every morning, I watched the anxiety fade until whole days passed with none of it left.
Anxiety may be among the hardest things a person can carry. During my own worst stretch I cried myself to sleep most nights, worn down to nothing, the dread of walking outside with all those eyes on me swallowing my days. A physical, psychological, and spiritual approach together pulled it out of my life. The diet, the exercise, the reworked thinking, the prayer: all of it is still with me. Not because I'm bracing for the anxiety to come back, but because it turned out to make my life richer than I'd ever guessed it could be. - Iman Mohiki