Six Tips for Managing Your Anxiety
/You know the feeling well - an email lands in your inbox, and your heart rate quickens. You enter into a new environment, and you can feel charged energy begin to move through your body. Your mind starts to race, and it becomes more difficult to perceive whether your friend’s comment was harmless or tinged with a hint of judgment.
Whether experiencing difficulties slowing down or living with a constant feeling of being on edge, anxiety can show up in many forms and the impacts can be devastating.
Finding practical tools to help manage life as you begin therapy and move toward stabilization can be instrumental in your journey toward growth.
As you read through and learn about these tools, it’s important to remember how the state of our autonomic nervous system impacts feelings of anxiousness and thoughts of being overwhelmed. Our nervous systems operate in two different states - parasympathetic and sympathetic.
How our nervous system impacts our anxiety
Our sympathetic nervous system activates when we detect a sense of danger, putting our body into fight or flight and creating a sense of hypervigilance, agitation, and panic. When living in our sympathetic nervous system, cortisol floods our body, and our hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis comes online, disrupting our thought life and our connection to self, others, spirit, and the world around us. Our heart rate quickens, our breath becomes more shallow, and our digestion begins to get disrupted.
On the other hand, our parasympathetic nervous system is the counterpart to our sympathetic nervous system and brings a sense of safety and calm. It keeps the energy in our body regulated and our prefrontal cortex online, allowing us to have choices and possibilities in how we respond. Our bodies can relax, and our digestive system works properly.
Try to get curious about the difference between what it looks like for you to be in sympathetic or parasympathetic and how each of the exercises below shifts your autonomic nervous system state.
Here are six evidence-based tools for helping to reduce the impact of anxiety:
54321
A grounding exercise that helps shift your thoughts to the present moment, 54321 relies on the five senses to help bring you back into your body. To practice this exercise, engage in the following steps:
Name five things you can see - the more detailed, the better. This can be anything in your immediate surroundings, such as a mark on the wall, a colorful mouse pad, or your phone case. Pay attention to each item’s size, shape, and color.
Name four things you can feel, incorporating details as much as possible. You can use different clothing textures, the ground or seat beneath you, or your hair. Get specific about texture and weight here.
Name three things you can hear, focusing on sounds outside your body. This can be things like soft music playing in the background, cars driving outside, or drifting voices from another room.
Name two things you can smell - maybe you have a diffuser with your favorite essential oil, or you can smell the perfume or cologne you sprayed in the morning.
Name one thing you can taste; this could be from your last meal, a sip of your drink, or a mint you carry with you.
You can utilize 54321 as often as you would like and quickly go through these steps in the presence of a crowd or while alone. Focusing on the here and now interrupts the fight-or-flight response, which helps bring your prefrontal cortex back online and moves you back into an autonomic state of connectedness.
478 Breathing
You’ve likely heard that breathwork calms your nervous system, but it’s important to note that not all breathwork fits with each person. This article will discuss three different breathwork methods and why they work. Try out each one and see which brings the most settledness to you in activated state.
478 breathing is a form of pranayama yoga that helps with breath regulation. It activates the diaphragm, sending neurobiological signals of safety to your brain and deactivating the fight or flight response. This is most helpful when feeling hypervigilant or when worries pop up before bedtime.
To practice, inhale for four counts, hold your breath for seven, and exhale slowly for eight counts. Breathwork is most effective when you activate the diaphragm and parasympathetic nervous system, so breathe out forcefully, making a “whoosh” sound as you exhale.
If inhaling for four counts feels too long for your lung capacity, cut the numbers in half - breathing in for two, holding your breath for 3.5 seconds, and exhaling for four.
This kind of breathwork can lead to lightheadedness, so it’s best to practice this while sitting or lying down.
Physiological Sigh
The physiological sigh is one of the simplest and most natural forms of breathwork. Proven to be one of the most effective relaxation methods, this exercise flushes your body of carbon dioxide and fills your lungs with oxygen.
When we’re anxious, our breath tends to become more shallow, reducing our oxygen intake and causing an uptick in carbon dioxide, which can contribute to agitation.
All of us, including animals, naturally engage in physiological sighs throughout sleep when too much carbon dioxide builds up. Take a few moments to pay attention to your furry friend next time they nap, and you may be able to see it in action.
To practice:
Take two deep inhales through the nose On the first inhale, focus on filling your lungs almost to total capacity, then follow immediately with another quick inhale.
Conclude with a long, slow exhale.
Box Breathing
The final form of breathwork we will discuss today, this exercise also helps send messages of safety to the body by activating the diaphragm, moving the body out of fight or flight. Box breathing gets its name from the visualization of a box as you move through the breathwork pattern. Like the other breathwork exercises, it helps you get back into your body and focus on the present moment.
To engage in this exercise:
Breathe in for four counts
Hold this breath for four counts
Exhale for four counts
Hold this exhale for four counts
You can repeat this cycle as many times as you like or until you start to feel a sense of calm.
Vergence
This grounding practice utilizes neurobiological pathways to send messages of safety to the body by activating the vagus nerve, helping you move out of sympathetic and into a regulated, connected ventral state.
To engage in this practice:
Hold a pen or your pointer finger about six inches in front of you.
Focus on the object or pointer for two to five seconds, then focus on what’s directly behind it for two to five seconds, switching your focus between your finger or objectand what is immediately behind it.
Continue this pattern for a few minutes or until you notice your body relax and calm down.
Containment Exercises
When emotions or thoughts disrupt your ability to perform daily activities, containment exercises can help you learn how to keep them stored safely until you can truly feel and process them. Centered around creating an imaginary container - a safe place that can fit the weight, size, and depth of the emotions or thoughts that consume you - this practice is best done with a counselor using guided imagery.
With the help of a counselor, you will get curious about this container - noting its size, the material it’s made out of, how many locks it has, who keeps the key, where it is stored, and more. Similar to 54321, the more details here, the better. In the session, you will learn how to connect with the overwhelming thoughts and feelings and place what you can into a safe container for processing later.
This exercise is frequently used with military special forces to prepare to endure strenuous physical situations, and the benefits also translate to psychological distress.
Stay Curious
As you try out each of these tips, remember that everybody is different, and what works for some may not work well for you. Getting curious about what helps reduce physiological distress and what sends messages of safety to your nervous system will ultimately help you to do the deeper work of exploring the root of your anxiety and healing past wounds.
Possibility sits in settledness; when we are settled, we have a greater capacity to move through our emotions and toward healing. May you offer kindness to yourself by taking a few minutes to create settledness in your day today and each day moving forward.