Anxiety is the body’s physiological response to external stimuli. Everyone can feel anxious as a response to things, namely stress. How you handle stress, and prevent anxious feelings, depends on your strategies to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Anxiety, however, also extends into mental illness. Anxiety disorders vary from panic, to social anxiety disorders. Although the approach to deal with disorders should include your doctor, there are tips and tools everyone can apply to reduce anxiety.
One of the challenges to anxiety is dealing with a feeling that you have liuttle control over. Anxiety is unpredictable. Conversely, there are few guaranteed ways to make anxiety magically disappear at a moments notice.
Here are some keys that help reduce anxiety, and more importantly, help guard against the intense effects of anxiety in the future.
1. Healthy lifestyle. The simple things we all know but struggle to implement. Regular exercise, a healthy diet that’s low on sugars, sodiums, and junk foods, and good quality sleep, are all important factors to maintain health.
2. Discover Triggers. Once you are aware of what aspects in your life cause anxiety you can do more to avoid them. You can also work towards eliminating unnecessary or unhealthy stresses.
3. Good de-stressing. Anxiety is a response when your “cup is too full”. It takes work to reduce feeling overwhelmed, work that doesn’t yield dividends overnight. Take the necessary time out to recover from stressful days or weeks (or even years!). Look for professional help to seek our strategies to cope with loss and trauma.
4. Relationships. Healthy relationships will encourage you to work against the desire to withdraw and enter periods of depression. Find things to do to stay busy that you enjoy. Find a few friends along the way you trust to either share your feelings, or do fun and valuable things with.
5. Reduce the worry. When you’re stressed it’s often normal to heap more stress on yourself by feeling stressed about the stress! Coping with anxiety means understanding you have no control of your symptoms, especially when they occur. It doesn’t mean, however, you shouldn’t take necessary steps to reduce known triggers of anxiety.
6. Higher power and spirituality. For many it’s very useful to believe in a higher power. That you’re not in control of every aspect of your life that happens to you, but in the end you can rely or believe that things will turn out for better. This outlook will help reduce the burden you place on yourself to ‘be better’. Consider important excercises that will help reduce your stress level such as meditation. The process of prayer, right thinking, right breathing, can go a long way to “reset” the mind and body.