Anxiety can not only ruin days or hours but weeks and months for some people. Personally, when my anxiety acts up, I find myself in a funk for the whole day. I found that following these habits listed below completely changed how I felt and how my thoughts showed themselves to me. I hope this can help you too!
As cliche as it sounds, the main tip anyone will give you about dealing with your anxiety is to breathe. Anxiety can make it so hard to feel like you’re doing simple tasks like breathing. Focusing on your breath not only reminds you that you are in fact, breathing but you are also taking your mind off your anxiety and focusing on your breath. If you search a guided breathing video on youtube, you’ll have someone counting your breaths perfectly so you can calm down and slow your heart rate.
Something that used to really help me was following anxiety Instagram accounts and saving posts under an anxiety folder. That way, when I was feeling anxious, I could go look at all these posts that I had saved that were created to help calm your anxiety. Some of them offer breathing techniques, others are simply a reminder that anxiety cannot kill you and you will be okay.
CBD oils can be super helpful if you don’t want medication to help your anxiety but need something to help calm you down. It gives you a great calming feeling and helps you think through your anxious thoughts more clearly. You can drop oils into your coffee or right under your tongue. A few drops should leave you feeling great for the rest of the day.
If your anxiety makes your heart race which in turn makes you panic more, I’ve been there. The best thing I’ve found to help that is having something to track my heart rate so that when I panic, I can look and see for real that my heart is beating totally fine. Personally, I use my apple watch to track my heart rate but you can use any device that works for you. If you don’t want to spend money on a device to track your heart rate, learning how to properly check your pulse can really help to give you reassurance, too.
Weighted blankets are a gift from the angels, I’m convinced. I find them personally too heavy for me to sleep under all the time, (Mainly because I like to starfish in my sleep and they make it harder to move around.) but, they do help in moments of extreme anxiety. If you lay down and listen to music or just try to nap with the extra weight on top of you, your body will naturally begin to calm down.
I am a firm believer that sleep is the cure to almost everything. Whenever I’m anxious and nothing else seems to help, I go and take a nap. Sometimes my anxiety makes it extra hard to fall asleep but once I do, I always wake up feeling much better. I usually tell myself, if I still feel this way when I wake up, then It’s worth worrying about but if I feel fine when I wake up, it’s just anxiety. A good nap should be the perfect reset for your mind so that your anxious feelings go away.
Processed with VSCO with jm1 preset99% of my anxiety attacks have been reduced by me “talking myself off a cliff”. When I feel my thoughts getting out of control, I sit and talk out loud to myself. Sometime’s thinking things in your head isn’t powerful enough to help the scary thoughts go away. When you speak out loud you get to hear yourself speaking and reminding yourself you are and will be okay. Plus, sometimes talking to yourself will distract you from focusing on the anxiety at all.
There is research to prove that spending time with your pets can reduce anxiety. For me, I find it comforting that one of my dogs has bad anxiety the same way I do. When I get wound up, I’ll go sit with him and remind myself we both feel equally as scared of this big world sometimes. Laying with him makes me calm down and the act of petting him usually takes my mind off my anxious thoughts all together.
Meditation can be so hard but is the most rewarding practice. When you suffer with bad anxiety, your mind runs on overtime all the time. When my anxiety was at it’s peak, I used to meditate for the only relief I could find. When I would meditate, I would be given an escape from my own mind. It would relieve these bad headaches I was getting and would make me feel significantly less exhausted than I felt all the time when I wasn’t meditating. If you can find ten to fifteen minutes a day to meditate and give your mind a break to shutdown, I promise your anxiety will simmer down, if even just for the moment.
Excersie is so important if you are an anxious person. Not only does it boost endorphins which make people happy, it also opens up your body for more air and blood flow. This will make you feel happier and healthier. When I began watching what I was putting in my body and working out, I was a million times less anxious. I didn’t choose to do it so I would lose weight, it was a lifestyle change I made because I noticed an immediate difference in how I felt.
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