9 Ways to Cope with Anxiety

 In Blog Posts

Here are 9 ways to cope with anxiety, for those moments when your mind won’t let you sleep.

Coping with anxiety in the moment

1. Mindfulness is probably the better known. Mindfulness is a pause, or time out, during which you simply observe your experience in some way. The easiest way to start is by focusing on your breath. Often, doing this will calm the nervous system down from an activated emotional state. The brain waves change here. The more you practice this, the less reactive you will be in everyday life. The good news is that you can access tons of meditations on all different subjects, from 1 minute to very long, for free online.

2. Just as a baby would try to keep itself awake, try keeping your eyes open, and then letting them close. First, let your eyes close, just a little. Then, open your eyes fully. Then, close your eyes a quarter way. After this, open your eyes. Repeat, gradually increasing the amount you close your eyes, until your eyes close fully, before opening your eyes again. This way of behaving like a baby may fool your brain into tiredness.

3. Imagine you are receiving a safe full-body massage. Start at your toes and imagine every little detail, and how it would relax you.

4. Breathing. The breath is remarkable. It affects every single system in our bodies, from the physical to the emotional. Most of us are shallow breathing in our upper chests. We’re not supposed to be doing that; that is supposed to be reserved for fight or flight. But we’re often stuck there. Being able to breathe into the rest of your torso is where the relaxation and satisfaction is. You can try humming through your out-breath or speaking more slowly, extending the time it takes to say words. This can be very calming.

5. You can also refocus and evoke a state of mind from a place, person or thing that makes you feel good or safe. Take time to remember the details, especially how it makes you feel.

6. Creative expression, doing things with your hands, physical movement, listening to music, reading or learning poetry, or being in nature, are all other ways to self-regulate.

 

Coping with anxiety in the bigger picture

7. Attending to a healthy lifestyle is another way to regulate yourself. I’m not just talking about exercise and food. Making sure you have pleasures in your life, that you attend to your relationships and social life, and that you do things to feed your soul or higher self, are also self-regulatory. What you do in the day and how you process your life has a huge effect on sleep.

8. Have something or someone else to care for, esp if your kids have left home, or you live alone. This can be anything from another person to a plant. It might sound odd, but I took great pleasure in growing kefir in the first days of social isolation. Not having kids myself, I got a great deal of satisfaction from nurturing any form of life.

 

 

9. Coping with anxiety on a deeper level

The last of the 9 ways to cope with anxiety is a little deeper. This is more about addressing the root of the tension.

Eminent author and trauma expert, Bessel van der Kolk said,

You can fully be in charge of your life, only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions”

Getting in touch with our instincts, drives and needs leads us to treat ourselves with more care, and to experience more satisfaction. It’s the source of inner resources and strength.

Rather than trying to ignore the stress or discomfort you’re feeling, acknowledge it in your body. Be interested in where it actually is and what it feels like physiologically. Sometimes just staying with a feeling or naming it calms the nervous system and helps it to shift.

It is often the fear of the feeling, rather than the feeling itself, that is the difficulty.

  •  Understanding and bringing compassion to what a feeling wants and meeting that is next. Your feelings always have a message. Uncomfortable feelings like frustration, irritation, upset, hurt, worry and shame are always pointing to what we care about in life. But also to what needs compassion, and possibly deep healing.
  •  It sounds counterintuitive, but try to ‘support your defence’. So, if you feel resistant to something (for example, if you want to avoid practising mindfulness) you might need to honour, give full permission to, and understand your block before you can remove it.
  •  Often this will be enough to relieve tension. But there are other things you can try if the tension persists. Exaggeration is one thing you can do to help you shift perspective. Try exaggerating a feeling or state that causes you discomfort. Often this can lead to smiles and laughter. Another thing you can try is redirecting the energy into something meaningful to whichever of the techniques you try, feeling better is all about self-acceptance. You will come up with your coping strategies the more you allow your compassion for who you are, how you feel and what you need. The idea here is that you explore, rather than fix. Because there is nothing wrong with you.

Here I’ve given you 9 ways to cope with anxiety. If you need some help exploring these, book your introductory session here.