Coping with Anxiety

Anxiety, unfortunately, is a normal reality in everyone's life that may peak during certain situations for most. Some typical settings for anxiety include new situations, testing/assessments, performance/evaluation, competition, and even asking something of another can provoke anxiety.  Most of the time, anxiety decreases once the nerve-wrecking activity has started or even ended, yet some people may continue to feel anxious.  Anxiety can be a "gut feeling" or can showcase physical symptoms, such as sweating and fast heart beat.  

Since anxiety is something that everyone has to deal with, it is important to have techniques available which will allow a person to cope with their anxiety.  Coping techniques can help sooth anxiety mentally and physically by training your mind and relaxing your body.  A few techniques one may want to try in order to cope with anxiety include:

1. Deep Breathing:  When feeling anxious, sit up straight for a few minutes (if possible) and close your eyes.  This will help you center yourself and by sitting tall you can feel your breath working through your upper body. Take deep, long breathes in through your nose, hold the breath for a moment, and then slowly exhale through your nose.  You may even want to count as you breath in to 4 and out. Repeat several times to reduce your anxiety.
   
2. Relaxation Techniques:  Various techniques are available for mind and muscle relaxation, check out a previous post where I discussed guided meditation.  The basics for any mind relaxation technique is to sit or lay quietly in a comfortable position and to close your eyes.  For muscle relaxation, you may want to release tension from your body by focusing on individual areas of your body and creating tension in those areas and then releasing it after a few seconds (toes, feet, calves, thighs, legs, gluts, stomach, hands, arms, upper body, mouth, eyes, head).  Once your muscles are relaxed, you may want to continue into a guided imagery where you can imagine yourself in a peaceful place.
   
3. Practice Positive Thinking:  When ever you catch yourself full of worry or having ruminating thoughts, you need to stop yourself by telling yourself "Stop!"  You then need to find ways to re-frame your thoughts into positive or less negative thoughts.  For example, Negative Thought: "I hate meeting new people, I can't believe I have to go to this stupid work event..." can be re-framed to "Meeting new people is difficult but the event is only an hour long, I know I'll make it through."
   
4. Counting / Adding:  Similar to practicing positive thinking,  counting can be a useful activity to combat anxious thoughts because it changes your mind set in the moment.  When you feel overwhelmed in your thoughts, try to count backwards from 1000 or start at 1 and add 7 to each new number.  Counting and adding pulls our mind out of an emotional state and into a logical state where we are solving for a problem and must focus on the logistics.

These techniques can work individually, but they can also work together to create better outcomes.  These activities should be practiced so that anxious individuals are comfortable with these techniques and can use them at any time when anxiety is present.  If you feel that you are still combating anxiety, don't just suffer on your own, seek out  first your physician to rule out any physical complications, and then seek out individual counseling or a counseling support group for anxiety so that you can gain support, learn more coping techniques, and work on the underlying causes of your anxiety.  

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