How to gain control over your anxiety: 7 useful tips

Many people suffer from Anxiety at some point in life. The most common fears are: getting an illness, loosing your job, hurting or losing the people around you, underperforming at important events or not being liked by the people around us. Luckily, anxiety does not need to control us. In this post you will find 7 useful tips about how to fight anxiety:

1. Know your anxiety. Knowing what makes us anxious is the first step in reducing our fear. Try to keep a notebook of situations in which you felt nervous or anxious. Write down what happened, when it happened and what you thought. This will help you to find patterns in your anxiety.
2. Remember that anxiety won’t last forever. Anxiety is the reaction of our body to a situation we perceive as frightening. It prepares us to fight or flight from a dangerous situation. Many people think that if they don’t do anything to stop anxiety, it will go on forever. Fortunately however, our body cannot stay in the “fight-or-flight” mode for a long time. If we stay in the situation long enough our anxiety level will always go down!
   

   The red line shows how most people think Anxiety works. The blue line shows that our Anxiety always goes down if we stay in the situation long enough.

3. Expose yourself to your fears. Usually when we´re afraid, we start avoiding the situations we fear. For example someone who’s afraid of getting an illness might avoid sick people,or going to the doctor. When we avoid we tell our brain that something dangerous is really about to happen, and we can never discover if the opposite is true. By exposing ourselves to our fear and staying in the situation long enough, our anxiety will go down.
4. Schedule worry time. Sometimes it can be difficult to stop worrying. The best thing you can do is to schedule 1 hour during the day in which you have to worry. During the rest of the day write down your worries in a booklet and save them for your worry time. It might sound strange to force yourself to worry but it´s the best way to gain control over our worries.
5. Tire yourself. Our body can only be anxious when we have the energy for it. One of the best ways to fight anxiety is to engage in exercise. Take the bicycle, go for a run or go skating. The more tired you are, the less anxious you´ll be.
6. Breathe properly.The way we breathe can greatly affect how we feel. When you feel anxious try to take deep and slow breaths. Try to raise your abdomen with every breath instead of your chest. This will increase the oxygen level in your body and make you feel more relaxed.
7. Change your diet. Reduce the amount of coffee, tea, energy drinks and cola you consume. They´ll make you more anxious, which is just what we want to prevent.

As you can see there are many things we can do to gain control over our anxiety. For more useful tips check out the tips from the Anxiety and Depression Association. Also, if you have any questions feel free to comment. I’ll answer them gladly :).

I’m curious about your experiences. What do you do when you feel nervous or anxious? Did the tips help you?