Listen To Soothing Music
Listening to music can have a very relaxing effect on the body.
Slow-paced instrumental music can induce the relaxation response by helping lower blood pressure and heart rate as well as stress hormones.
Some types of classical, Celtic, Native American and Indian music can be particularly soothing, but simply listening to the music you enjoy is effective too .
Nature sounds can also be very calming. This is why theyre often incorporated into relaxation and meditation music.
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Take Some Steps On Your Own
Get organized. Less clutter in your physical surroundings, email inbox, and to-do bucket will help your mind be more at ease, Braslow says. You donât have to tackle it all at once. Make a plan to work on one area at a time.
Make new goals. Is there something youâve always wanted to do, or a place you want to go? Create a step-by-step, realistic plan to make it happen.
Do something meaningful. Get involved in an activity that feels important to you. It may be athletic, political, spiritual, or a social cause where you can volunteer. Look for something that gives you a sense of purpose.
Be creative. Direct your focus into something constructive. Rediscover your strengths. If you have a long-lost talent or interest, dive back into it. Braslow suggests trying poetry, music, photography, or design.
Read a good book. Its a great way to relax. Thereâs even research that shows that reading books on spirituality or psychology may boost your mood.
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Stop Worrying By Keeping A Daily Emotions Journal
Chronic stress and anxiety happen when we dont notice the first signs of worry and let it grow over time. Want to learn how to stop worrying? Checking in with yourself regularly is an important way to maintain your mental health and manage your anxiety.
By the time were in a worry cycle, we often feel disconnected from our emotions. Keeping a daily journal can help you track patterns and actively manage stress before your feelings spiral out of control.
As you practice journaling your emotions and sharing your thoughts, it becomes easier to identify when youre starting to worry. Stopping worry early will ultimately help you feel better and stay focused on what matters most to you.
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Things To Remember When You Think Your Anxiety Is Never Going To Go Away
It might feel like it’ll last forever, but it won’t.
When anxiety strikes, it can be all too easy to imagine it will never go away. The physical symptoms – a beating or palpitating heart along with a constant sick feeling in your stomach – plus a mind working in overdrive become so consuming that you can’t remember a time when you just felt normal.
The problem is, that fear of anxiety never leaving you – of never being able to feel like you again – can ultimately cause your bout of anxiety to be prolonged.
If you’ve found yourself in a thinking pattern like that, one way to help yourself out of the cycle is to logically and rationally remind yourself that this intense feeling of anxiety won’t last forever. It physically can’t.
Here are four other things the experts at mental health self-help app My Possible Self suggest remembering when you feel like this phase will never end:
1. Anxiety can be managed
“Cheer up”, “calm down”, “stop overthinking” if you suffer from anxiety, you may be tired of being told to essentially ‘wish away’ your fears. If only it were that simple. Although it takes more than willpower to banish anxiety, there are things we can do to manage it. This means finding the right techniques or treatment for you. What works for one person doesnt necessarily work for another, so it may mean doing a little research, speaking to your doctor and getting support from your friends and family. And if results arent immediate, dont lose heart it can take time.
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Find What Relaxes You
There are already things in your life that relax you. You may find it beneficial to make a list of things you enjoy and that help you to relax so you can reference it when symptoms of anxiety arise. When you notice your anxiety rising turn to those activities to help stop symptoms before they escalate.
For example, if you find that a warm bath is relaxing, don’t wait, draw a bath, maybe light some candles or add a few nice scents and get in. Whether it’s a bath, a shower, skipping stones at a park, getting a massage – if it works, do it right away, rather than allowing yourself to become overwhelmed by your anxiety.
Tone Your Inner Power Daily
Think of your inner power as a muscle just like any other muscle. The more you use it, the more toned it becomes and the more you are able to accomplish. Every time you practice a healthy life strategy, you actually increase your ability to conquer your anxiety. What you couldnt do yesterday, you can do today. With practice, your new skills will become automatic. This is how you create lasting freedom from anxiety.
In the words of Aristotle: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
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Ways To Cure Your Anxiety Forever
Everyone knows the feeling of being rushed in and out of a doctorâs appointment, after which youâre handed prescriptions for medications that seem aimed at hiding symptoms rather than getting rid of whatever dysfunction is causing them. Itâs a disconcerting experience, because we trust our doctors yet weâre often not sure theyâve even had time to process our issues properly before making a diagnosis. Some, however, are trying to change their approach, prioritizing an in-depth relationship with patients and taking a more comprehensive route to curing what ails them. Robin Berzin, MD, founder and CEO of Parsley Health, is one such practitioner. Here, we get the skinny on how she quiets anxious minds holistically and affordably, and how you can accomplish just that.
Facing The Anxiety Triggers
Another important component of managing anxiety is to learn to face your anxiety triggers and not fear the anxiety itself. The mind is remarkably adaptive. Studies have shown that placing a person in direct contact with a fearful stimulus causes them to adapt and get used to that stimulus over time.
They used to do this with a psychological technique known as “flooding,” which has since fallen out of favor due to safety concerns but provides some useful insight into how the mind works. Flooding involves placing a person with a phobia in a room with the items they fear until they are no longer afraid. Someone with a deathly fear of spiders would be in a room filled with spiders. Someone with a fear of rats would be in a room filled with rats.
At first, people are so terrified they have horrific fear reactions, possibly even coming close to passing out. When they not allowed to leave the room, their minds adjust and the fear subsides. The mind doesn’t want to stay “afraid” of some type of fear stimulus for lengthy periods of time, especially when nothing happens to support the fear. By the time they leave the room, they likely will no longer be afraid of the stimulus.
These are examples of facing anxiety fears, and they can be very valuable ways to address and attack your anxiety. Alone they may not eliminate anxiety altogether, but combined with other useful tools they can be very powerful.
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Causes Of Panic Attacks And Panic Disorder
Although the exact causes of panic attacks and panic disorder are unclear, the tendency to have panic attacks runs in families. There also appears to be a connection with major life transitions such as graduating from college and entering the workplace, getting married, or having a baby. Severe stress, such as the death of a loved one, divorce, or job loss can also trigger panic attacks.
Panic attacks can also be caused by medical conditions and other physical causes. If youre suffering from symptoms of panic, its important to see a doctor to rule out the following possibilities:
What Is Generalized Anxiety Disorder
In generalized anxiety disorder, a person has frequent or nearly constant, nagging feelings of worry or anxiety. These feelings are either unusually intense or out of proportion to the real troubles and dangers of the person’s everyday life.
The disorder is defined as persistent worry for more days than not, for at least several months. In some cases, a person with generalized anxiety disorder feels he or she has always been a worrier, even since childhood or adolescence. In other cases, the anxiety may be triggered by a crisis or a period of stress, such as a job loss, a family illness or the death of a relative. The crisis or stress may have ended, but an unexplained feeling of anxiety may last months or years.
In addition to suffering from constant worries and anxieties, people with generalized anxiety disorder may have low self-esteem or feel insecure. They may see people’s intentions or events in negative terms, or they experience them as intimidating or critical. Physical symptoms may lead them to seek treatment from a primary care doctor, cardiologist, pulmonary specialist or gastroenterologist. Stress can intensify the anxiety.
Some people with this disorder have a genetic tendency to develop it. The disorder probably stems from how a variety of brain structures communicate with each other as the individual tries to manage the fear response. Life experience, significant relationships and environmental stresses also influence the development of this disorder.
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How To Stop Worrying Tip : Create A Daily Worry Period
Its tough to be productive in your daily activities when anxiety and worry are dominating your thoughts and distracting you from work, school, or your home life. This is where the strategy of postponing worrying can help. Rather than trying to stop or get rid of an anxious thought, give yourself permission to have it, but put off dwelling on it until later.
How Can I Help Myself
Face your fear if you can
If you always avoid situations that scare you, you might stop doing things you want or need to do. You wont be able to test out whether the situation is always as bad as you expect, so you miss the chance to work out how to manage your fears and reduce your anxiety. Anxiety problems tend to increase if you get into this pattern. Exposing yourself to your fears can be an effective way of overcoming this anxiety.
Know yourself
Try to learn more about your fear or anxiety. Keep an anxiety diary or thought record to note down when it happens and what happens. You can try setting yourself small, achievable goals for facing your fears. You could carry with you a list of things that help at times when you are likely to be become frightened or anxious. This can be an effective way of addressing the underlying beliefs that are behind your anxiety.
Try to learn more about your fear or anxiety. Keep a record of when it happens and what happens.
Exercise
Increase the amount of exercise you do. Exercise requires some concentration, and this can take your mind off your fear and anxiety.
Relax
Learning relaxation techniques can help you with the mental and physical feelings of fear. It can help just to drop your shoulders and breathe deeply. Or imagine yourself in a relaxing place. You could also try learning things like yoga, meditation, massage, or listen to the Mental Health Foundations wellbeing podcasts.
Healthy eating
Avoid alcohol, or drink in moderation
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People With Social Anxiety Don’t Want To Be Alone
8. Go to bed early.
This may sound impossible if you’re accustomed to staying up late to catch up on the to-do list. But this one’s a must.
Sleep deprivation is a huge anxiety culprit. Inadequate shuteye can amplify the brain’s anticipatory reactions, upping overall anxiety levels, according to research.
“We all have anticipatory anxiety,” explains researcher Fugen Neziroglu. “Having moderate levels of anxiety about doing well is important. But it can be destructive when it begins to interfere with your life.” It’s impossible to have healthy emotional functioning without adequate sleep.
Don’t burn the midnight oil in hopes of catching up on the weekends. Unused sleep minutes don’t roll over.
9. Wake up 15 minutes early.
Like most anxious people, you’re probably rushing around in the morning and yelling at everyone in your wake, “Hurry up! We’re going to be late!”
Go slowly, and set yourself up for a relaxed day ahead. If you start to worry about the to-do list, take a deep breath and think: There is enough time.
10. Get your lavender on!
Lavender oil has many healing properties and can be used as a natural remedy to reduce anxiety and other nervous conditions. There are many ways to incorporate lavender into your calm tool kit:
11. Reduce caffeine, sugar, and processed foods.
Sugar acts as an adrenal stimulant and can cause anxiety or even panic attacks. Other offensive foods include those containing refined flour products and even wheat, since this causes inflammation.
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Anxiety Is Not Always Bad
On that note, keep in mind that anxiety, as an emotion, is not inherently bad. Its only debilitating in the wrong amounts. Having the appropriate level of anxiety in our brain not too much, but just enough can actually motivate us. Like the example given above, anxiety is a contributing factor in motivating us to study for tests, determine how to act among others, maintain our physical health, achieve our aspirational goals, and so on. Its only when our levels of anxiety get out of balance that it becomes unhealthy and dysfunctional. Thats when we need to seek treatment.
How To Manage Anxiety
It starts with commitment. There is no magic pill or miracle cure that can stop your anxiety overnight. If you’re not committed to managing your anxiety than you’ll never be able to truly get experience relief from it because anxiety is something you need to work on managing continuously until it loses its strength.
The first step is to show a willingness to change things in your life that create anxiety. There are going to be some challenges and tough decisions – including reducing the time you spend with people that create anxiety and avoiding anxiety fueling activities – but those changes are going to have an effect in the long run.
Once you’ve shown a willingness to make life changes and are committed to following through, you can work towards successfully managing your anxiety with the tools and techniques below:
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What Makes Us Worry
One of the keys to learning how to stop worrying is discovering the root of your fears.
For better or for worse, worrying is part of how weve evolved as humans. Biologically, our central nervous system often responds to stress and fear by worrying. When this happens, the first step to stop worrying is to reflect on what exactly is causing your anxiety.
Some feelings of worry can be healthy, pushing us to find solutions to real and present problems. However, chronic worry, even about things out of our control, can severely impact our mental health. The good news? There is a multitude of strategies to help us learn how to stop worrying, manage stress, and start thriving.
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