Dealing With Anxiety (Sans Meds)
If you’re anything like me you deal with anxiety more times throughout the week than youd probably care to comment on. I wanted to talk about anxiety because its kind of like this thing that a lot of people pretend they dont have or sometimes people have anxiety and just dont event know, so today I’m sharing some ways that I de-stress, and calm anxious feelings, especially during times when I’m super busy and starting to feel overwhelmed.
Anxiety comes from thinking and living too much in the future. So when we think about ourselves in terms of our future, we usually thinking about short and long term goals, where we’d love to be in 1 year, 5 years, etc, sometimes we think about what we’re going to eat for lunch while we’re eating breakfast. A healthy dose of future thinking should generally leave you feeling excited, eager, hopeful for the possibilities of your future. Now on the flip side, when our thoughts about the future cause us to feel doubtful, or scared, or concerned or its just kind of followed up with just a feeling of feeling low or down, that lower vibration that you’re essentially thinking your way to is where anxiety lives. Anxiety is created from thoughts that lead to emotions and if you let it go on long enough it starts to physically manifest in your body, in the form of anxiety attacks, shaking, shortness of breath, and sometimes just random pain in different parts of your body.
When we are experience anxiety, we are entirely too far in the future and you need to bring it on back. Anxiety comes when you’re worrying about all of the worst case scenarios, it comes from a new awareness that oh hey this outcome I’ve been trying to control is actually not in my control, and now that out of control feeling you’ve been trying to avoid, sends you in a tailspin. A lot of people think that the best way to deal with anxiety is to go to the doctor and get a prescription for something that turns your brain off, but the only issue with that is, it turns your whole brain off, not just the parts causing anxiety. At the end of the day, if you just keep glossing over a negative feeling with the help of a medication rather than just mentally and physically deal with the root cause and work to remove it altogether, it’s always going to be there ready to attack at any moment. So let’s just cut it off at the head.
Practice Presence - Meditation, Journaling your feelings
Practicing be more present during your day is a great way to keep anxiety at bay before it starts. It’s like preventative maintenance. When you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is take time out to get your mental health in check, it makes a huge difference in how you move through the rest of the day. Taking time out to meditate, or sit in silence requires being present, and anxiety cant live in the present moment because anxiety is all about thoughts pertaining to things that aren’t actively happening right now. So the more you practice being present, the less anxiety you’ll experience. A lot of time we feel like we don t have time to practice being present, we have to constantly be thinking about the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing, but the more time you allow to think about what may or may not be coming next, the more opportunity you create to be anxious about it and when you’re anxious about the future, its that much harder to come back to present and focus on right now. So taking even a little time out of your day to practice being intentionally present is better than nothing.
Self-reflection through journaling is also a great way to practice being present. Just taking 5 or 10 minutes out of your morning, to set an intention for the day, or to just talk to yourself about where you are and how you’re really feeling is a great way to stay ahead of thoughts that generally lead to being anxious. Self reflection leads to aha moments which lead to better feeling thoughts which lead to positive self talk, which are all things that lead to a more peaceful mindset which of course is the opposite of anxiety.
Deep Breathing Exercises
Now, if for whatever reason you skipped over your preventative maintenance and find yourself back on your bullshit, no just kidding, feeling anxious, deep breathing is simple and majorly effective, the effects of deep breathing is backed by science. I learned what breathing really is from one of my favorite people Dr. Joe Dispenza, and when i learned what actually happens throughout our entire body when we take a breath, which is way more than just filling up your lungs, i took deep breathing a lot more seriously.
So if you’re still unsure of what actually triggers your anxiety, or you just haven’t practiced self-reflecting enough, it’s easier to miss signs that you are heading towards anxiety and for a lot of people anxiety is actually their base line, so they don’t even know that a more peaceful feeling exists. It takes mindful practice to really be aware of where you are in terms of what you are really feeling and the true emotions that you are experiencing at any given time, but if you ever feel yourself starting to go on a crazy rampage of negative thoughts and you’re not really able to pull yourself out of it, that is your number one indicator that you’re moving in the wrong direction and that little rampage thats happening in your head needs an immediate disruption.
A great way to keep a growing negative thunderstorm in your body from progressing to a full on hurricane is to take a moment, or 20, to stabilize your breathing. So you might not notice it at first but when you start to build up anxiety, your body starts doing little things like it might start to tremor ever so slightly, the actual breaths your taking start to ever so slightly get a little shorter, your body might start to tighten in certain places and to you you might just feel like “oh my back just started hurting out of nowhere” and really all of these things are just like your body preparing for war but there is none, its all in your head.
When you notice that you’ve been thinking really negatively about some situation for an extended period of time, taking a deep breathing time out will really allow you to slow down those thoughts, and bring everything back to a steady rhythm, which will also allow you to start thinking more clearly and bring your energy back to a place of peace where worrying about events out of your control cant live.
When Im feeling like “oh i cant seem to let this little situation go” or “i cant seem to move on from this thought pattern right now” I immediately drop what I’m doing, what I’m pretending to do, and i find a place to do some deep breathing. so if you’re at home you can always go to your room, if you live with people, the bathroom is a great place, if you’re at work or out and about, you can go to your car, just anywhere that you can be alone. I put on some meditation music, binaural beats is what its called if you want to search for it, headphones are key, because you really need to block everything out for a minute, even your own thoughts, and then i just close my eyes and start taking deep breaths, and of course if you’re already at a point where you’re feeling anxious the deep breaths are going to feel tight, so i typically continue to take deep breaths until it starts to feel normal. Now when I’m doing a deep breathing exercise I’m not trying to meditate, I’m not trying to clear my head at this point, I’m just trying to focus on breathing, so i may be saying “breathe in, breathe out” in my head and i don’t start focusing on better feeling thoughts until my breathing gets easier. Once my breathing starts to get easier, thats when i start firing off better feeling thoughts.
If you’ve been feeling like you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown, hopefully one of these tools will help you get through it.
Kelley Raye | Branding Photographer + Creative Business Coach | Atlanta - Los Angeles