Anxiety is one of the biggest disablers in our life as it may cause you to stutter at times, spill coffee over your lap in an important meeting, fail to read other people’s body language etc.
For these reasons and more, you should try to recognize the early signs of anxiety and stop it from taking over. Here are some techniques to try that proved useful to other professionals:
1. Acknowledge your feelings:
Fear and anxiety are primal emotions that all human beings feel, but try to remember that the part of your brain that’s responsible for generating and processing your fear and other primal emotions is primitive, it’s the part of your brain that hasn’t evolved. There’s another part that is brand new, educated and is capable of applying logic to messages of raw fear that your primitive part send.
#dontjudge #depression #anxiety #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealth #bekindtoyourself #health #positivequotes #positivequoteseveryday pic.twitter.com/lauHTXKBeN
— The hidden enemy (@thehiddenenemy_) February 25, 2017
If you remember this every time you feel your anxiety creeping with its ugly head, telling you that everyone in that room hate you; you will be better equipped to brush it off as an overly dramatic feeling that has no logic behind it.
2. Take your mind off of it:
It might seem like a contradicting tip but I promise it’s not. Most of the time we nurture our anxiety by over-thinking and analyzing. You may think you’re helping yourself by thinking logically about your fear but if you over-do it, it becomes worse. When you reach a point for your anxiety is disabling, simply acknowledge what you afraid of then distract yourself to stop thinking about it. Stay away from the self-help books and work on a word puzzle or watch a movie instead.
#ANXIETYTIPS: When panicking, ask a friend to ask you random questions. Bringing yourself into the present will help you calm down
— Jenny Harvey (@jennykharvey) February 22, 2017
3. Exercise:
There’s only one full-proof immediate solution to anxiety. And that is exercise.
Bike, walk, swim, run or dance. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as your body moving. You don’t have to be training extremely hard to feel the antidepressant effect of exercise. Aerobic exercise can be as effective at relieving mild and moderate depression as some prescribed medicine.
4. Feed your anxiety:
Anxiety should be your first clue to take care of your diet. Make sure you are not drinking too much caffeine, not ingesting too much processed flour, and not bingeing on sweets.
Eat power food that helps improve your mood and stabilize your emotions such as nuts, soy, milk and yogurt, dark green leaves, dark orange vegetables, broth soups, legumes, citrus, wheat germ, tart cherries, and berries.
5. Do some yoga:
Practicing yoga can be very rewarding, especially to people who work in a highly stressful environment or lead a stressful life in general. Breathing exercises whether it’s part of a yoga regimen or not will help you calm down a bit.
There are plenty of videos on Youtube that you can watch to learn more about meditation and proper breathing techniques that can save you the embarrassment of crying in public and bring down your anxiety level to a minimum, which I’m sure you would like to avoid.
6. Laugh:
Laughing does much more than relieving any crushing anxiety. It lowers your immune system, diminishes both physical and psychological pain and fights viruses and foreign cells. You have no doubt experienced a moment when you were crippled by anxiety until someone made you laugh out loud, and in doing so anxiety lost its hold over you. Why not laugh all the time, then?
