Anxiety is a problem many people struggle with in today’s world. Everyday pressures, trauma, mental health issues, substance abuse and so on, coupled with personal imperfections, often tend to leave adverse physiological and psychological effects on many individuals.
The Anxiety and Depression Association of America ranks anxiety disorders as the most widespread mental illness in the US, affecting around 40 million adults. To avoid being a part of this statistic or simply to manage your own anxiety, it helps to learn about ways to manage anxiety.
So, if you’re looking for helpful tips to keep anxiety in check, take a look at these tips below.
5 Helpful Ways to Overcome Your Anxiety
- Know your triggers and manage them
People become anxious for a wide range of reasons that differ from person to person. As such, several psychologists agree that a crucial step to battling your anxiety is defining what your triggers are either personally or with your therapist. Doing that makes it easier for you to pull yourself out of crippling anxiety.
Are you stressed after drinking alcohol or taking caffeine? Or perhaps you are worried about your finances and other work-related issues? Successfully linking your anxiety to its root cause will help you isolate the problem and address it effectively.
If your anxiety comes from body image issues, you can try a proactive approach to isolating and addressing the problem to make you less worried. For example, if you have severe dental issues that give you significant social anxiety, you can do some research into how much veneers cost and consider investing in them. This step will provide you with the perfect confidence booster that will eliminate your anxiety’s source.
- A healthy diet and regular exercise
There is sufficient evidence to prove that both diet and exercise profoundly affect mental and physical well-being. This makes them essential areas to pay attention to when addressing your anxiety issues. Exercise releases beneficial anti-anxiety neurochemicals like serotonin, provides a distraction from the problems you are worried about, and decreases muscle tension.
Exercise also activates the part of your brain that controls your reaction to real or imagined threats for survival, building up resilience to challenging situations over time. Good nutrition cannot cure anxiety but may help relieve symptoms that you experience regularly. Many health experts advise against too much caffeine and alcohol while focusing on eating a healthy, balanced diet, so prioritize this for the best results over time.
- Practice mindfulness meditation
Dr. Elizabeth Hoge, a Harvard Medical School assistant psychiatry professor, opines that mindfulness meditation is perfect for treating anxiety. She explains that people with anxiety struggle with subduing strong, distracting thoughts, leaving them unable to distinguish between a problem-solving idea and one that has no benefit.
Mindfulness intervenes in this cycle by helping you slow down your negative, racing thoughts. This increased awareness, caused by focusing on simple issues like your breathing rate while observing your thoughts and emotions from a detached viewpoint, gives you a sense of calm.
Mindfulness meditation is also inexpensive, easy to practise, and requires little time and effort. Therefore, engage in mindfulness meditation as an effective antidote to combat your anxiety.
- Try cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most widely used therapy for treating anxiety disorders. Many health experts agree that it is also the best anxiety disorder treatment available to you. CBT comprises two primary therapies; cognitive therapy, which examines how harmful thoughts fuel anxiety, and behavior therapy, exploring how you react to anxiety-triggering situations.
Therefore, CBT can help you identify and understand the root cause of your worries and fears, assess conditions in less intimidating ways, and develop better coping skills. This is what makes CBT such an effective treatment option; it gives you practical tools to overcome your anxiety’s underlying causes instead of merely addressing the symptoms (like medication does.) As such, consider booking a therapist for CBT as an effective way to help overcome your anxiety.
- Get better sleep
Two significant types of rest occur while you sleep: non-rapid and rapid eye movement rest. These two rest types are vital to your immune function, learning, memory, and emotional health. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that considerable research establishes a significant mutual relationship between anxiety disorders and sleep-related issues. Scientists even say that sleep deprivation can cause or worsen anxiety and depression symptoms.
Being anxious and depressed also makes it difficult for you to sleep well, trapping you in a cycle of sleep deprivation and anxiety. Therefore, it would be best to develop a healthy sleep pattern to mitigate the adverse effects of sleep-related anxiety issues.
The National Sleep Foundation thinks 7-9 hours of sleep is perfect for your body to rest well and function at optimum levels. As such, prioritize these hours of quality sleep to escape sleep-related anxiety issues while also avoiding many physical health problems.
It’s possible to build a solid list of tools to draw from when you feel your anxiety building, hopefully these tips are a good start for you to Overcome Your Anxiety!
Leave a Reply