Table of Contents
1. Look After Your Wellbeing
One of the most important things you need to do to effectively deal with anxiety is to continually look after yourself. This means exercising regularly, getting quality sleep, eating healthy foods, and more. It also means not drinking alcohol, using drugs, and even avoiding excessive amounts of caffeine. You also want to continue to remain active socially as it can keep you in a good mental state. We as humans are social beings. You want to stay in touch with those you care about to keep yourself in a good state.
2. Try To Practice Breathing Exercises
While it may sound off, deep breathing and doing breathing exercises can be a great way to improve your anxiety levels. If you are constantly getting overly anxious, deep breathing can be very effective to combat your anxiety. Stress and anxiety are normal. It’s your “fight or flight” response to stressful situations that activate. You can calm yourself through deep breathing and other breathing exercises. This can help to curb the physical signs of being stressed and anxious. Try to breathe in deeply through your nose and out through your mouth. Do this for 3 seconds in and 6 seconds out. This can help you calm yourself and to put yourself in a much more relaxed physical state.
3. Challenge Any Anxiety Inducing Thoughts
One of the best belongings you can do to combat a lot of the feelings of anxiety that you are experiencing is to challenge the thoughts leading to them. For instance, if you are worried about your coworker being mad at you for something you said, you want to ask yourself whether or not it’s a valid concern. A lot of the things that creep into our minds that cause anxiety aren’t real. These things can add fire to your anxiety when they aren’t even valid concerns, to begin with. Clarity Clinic can help you to challenge your negative thoughts.
4. Test Things Out
A lot of times when you start to get anxious about something, it’s because you are predicting a negative outcome. For instance, you could be anxious about going to work because you are assuming you will fall flat on your presentation. However, when you test it out, you realize you gave a tremendous presentation at work. Test things out and prove yourself wrong. This will show you that next time you don’t need to get anxious because you were wrong from the start.
5. Don’t Avoid Things
A lot of people have the idea that avoiding things that make them anxious is the way to avoid anxiety. While anxiety can be uncomfortable, you don’t want to completely avoid things that make you anxious. When you are avoiding situations that cause you to be overly anxious, you aren’t facing your anxiety head-on. This can keep you from learning how to cope with your anxiety and lead you to get even more anxious in the future.
6. Count Backwards In Your Head
Whenever you are feeling anxious about something, try to count backward to take your mind off whatever is getting you overly anxious. This can be a good way to force your mind to think about something else. This could help you get your mind off things for long enough to reduce the physical signs of anxiety that can add fuel to the fire. If you are constantly thinking about the next number, your mind might not be able to continue to worry about things because it’s busy doing calculations.