How To Cope With Anxiety
If you feel as though anxiety and panic keep undermining your physical and emotional stability, it’s time to take action. And taking action doesn’t imply seeing a therapist, although if you can afford it, that is highly recommendable. You will benefit greatly from having the support of a professional.
However, if for some reason you’re not yet quite ready to see a mental health professional, there are various coping techniques that you should become familiar and experiment with. The effectiveness of each technique will vary according to the individual, and that’s why you should try different things until you realize what works best for you.
Things you should avoid doing to keep your anxiety from growing
Caffeine: coffee is one of the greatest anxiety inducing drugs available, so people with anxiety disorder should avoid drinking too much of it. Ideally, you should not drink coffee at all, and substitute it with relaxation beverages such as herbal teas (see below).
Refined sugars: not only is sugar bad for your physical health, it’s also known to interfere with anxiety in a number of ways and induce mood swings. Sometimes you may feel as though it helps you relax, but within a matter of minutes or hours it will cause the opposite effect. If you’re struggling to find your inner balance, sugar will not help the least bit – so you should avoid it.
Worrying: it may seem like something you simply cannot avoid doing, and to a certain extension, it is. But if you don’t believe you can possibly reduce your compulsion to worry, that will pose a serious obstacle to your recovery. Worrying about something you can influence is planning; worrying about something you cannot influence is wasting energy.
Things you should try doing to reduce your anxiety levels.
Increased physical activity: the overwhelming majority of patients suffering from anxiety disorder do not engage much physical activity, if any. Regular physical exercise may be the last thing you want to do when feeling anxious, but it will help distract your mind, stimulate your immune system, and help level the neurotransmitters whose imbalance is known to cause anxiety and depression.
Herbal relaxation: herbal teas such as chamomile, Kava Kava and st. John’s Wort produce a mild sedation without causing adverse side effects. If you don’t usually drink such beverages, you are missing out on inexpensive and effective natural anxiety relief.
Meditation: time and time again, mindfulness meditation has proven effective in reducing anxiety levels and helping solidify progress in terms of anxiety management. Meditation is effortless and free. You can do it anywhere, and it might provide several benefits such as being aware of your automatic thoughts.
Yoga: this oriental discipline provides a middle ground between doing meditation and physical exercise. Not all people are too fond of its extreme postures and unique philosophy, but many people who try quickly become adepts, and claim it was instrumental to change their life around. As such, we believe that everyone should experiment with yoga as a way to find relief from anxiety.
Think positively: Sometimes it feels as though there’s a one-way street between your thoughts and emotions, right? So when you’re feeling anxious, thinking positively seems impossible. Well, truth of the matter is that your negative thoughts also influence your emotions. Believing in your ability to get better will indeed make the process a bit smoother. It’s by no means a requirement, but it will certainly help!
How to stop panic on its tracks by doing nothing
It might begin with excessive sweating with no reason, then you notice your heart is pounding really fast, you may get some chest pains, and soon enough… you’re in a state of absolute terror, thinking you will drop dead at any moment. Well, you won’t. Do you know how many people have died in the course of a panic attack? Not even one.
Zero people have died from having panic attacks. You just can’t die of fear because fear makes your body release adrenalin. And adrenalin forces your heart to keep pumping.
A panic attack is essentially a chain reaction. While having one of these attacks, your fears amplify themselves until they’re out of control, until you are out of control and feeling overwhelmed with terror. Once this cycle takes hold, that’s when you start to experience those scary physical symptoms. From there, it progresses until one of two things happen:
- Your mind breaks the cycle through distraction.
- Your body breaks the cycle through fainting.
Doesn’t sound too comforting, does it? Truth be told, the commonest fears that accompany panic attacks include fear of dying, fear of going crazy and fear of fainting. So there’s a chance you may perceive the possibility of fainting as something extremely scary. Well, do you know what the chance is of that actually happening? It’s not zero, but very close.
It’s extremely rare for anyone to actually faint during a panic attack. When you’re having a panic attack, your blood pressure climbs steadily; but in order for fainting to occur, it takes a sudden drop in blood pressure. As such, both phenomena are actually not compatible.
What usually happens at the heights of a panic attack is that the mind just breaks the fear cycle through distraction, consciously or otherwise. And that’s when the attack will start to subside. How long does that take? It depends.
If you’re caught up in the fear cycle, it’s you who is actually feeding it. When you start pacing around the room uncontrollably, fearing you can faint or go crazy, then you are sourcing the panic. When you do this, you can prolong a panic attack for as long as 30 minutes of living hell. And if you’ve had various panic attacks, you probably did that each and every time, which is only natural. You were feeling scared and confused, not knowing what was happening. There’s no need to chastise yourself over it. Instead, consider doing the opposite.
Next time you feel as though you’re about to have a panic attack, don’t struggle.
Don’t fret. Do not feed the panic. Just sit down, focus on your breathing and brace yourself. Let the panic arise and just watch. If you can just act as an observer to this panic, do you know what will happen? That disturbing feeling of sheer panic will probably not come, and if they do, they will subside very quickly, probably in less than 5 minutes.
As a matter of fact, that’s also the reason why you can’t induce a panic attack, as much as you try. It’s just not possible, and any psychotherapist will confirm that if you ask. Because unless the fear cycle has already been triggered, there will be nothing for the panic to feed on. So try as you might, you will find it simply impossible to provoke a panic attack of your own volition.
