If you have a couple of anxiety attacks a day, here are a couple of solid tips on how to calm them down. First, it’s important to realize that anxiety has a root cause and if you don’t deal with it, the anxiety will keep coming, but you don’t need to stay stuck in anxiety. These tips are to help you mitigate the anxiety; you will need to work for a therapist to deal with the root of it.
The first thing you want to do is what I like to call a sensation shocker. Anxiety is essentially your thoughts on a hamster wheel going down Mount Everest- so you need to get out of your thoughts without using your thoughts, how do you do that? By shocking a sensation. This distracts your thoughts to immediately deal with this new experience and can stop the hamster wheel or at least pause it.
Smell something like a candle or a flower, look at something with a lot of colors and describe them to yourself, listen to the noise outside and try and pinpoint every noise you hear, put ice on your face or go outside without a jacket, or stroke something like a soft blanket or smooth coffee mug. Just focus on the sensations that are coming and pay attention to the speed of your thoughts. Stay on the sensation until you notice a physical relaxation and a calmness to your thoughts.
Once your thoughts are calm enough to make sense again, this is the time to try and organize them. Write a concise list of what is making you anxious. I used the word concise because you don’t want to re-enter your thoughts too deeply, we’re just organizing. Each item shouldn’t be longer than 2 sentences.
Then go back to your body. Writing down these thoughts might have created a little more anxiety, so we want to check in if you’re able to deal with these thoughts yet. If you don’t have your immediate physical and safety needs met, this isn’t the time to listen to your thoughts. Anxiety gets worse with a lack of sleep, safety, water, and food. Check in with yourself, are there any physical sensations that you need to meet first? Are you in a place that feels relatively safe? Address those two needs before you go to the next steps.
Now that you’re fed, relatively well rested, calmer, we can deal with your anxiety better. Ask yourself two questions about each item, “Can I deal with this now and how?” and “What emotion is this bringing out?”
“Can I deal with this now and how?” and “What emotion is this bringing out?”
The first question will help reorganize that list into what you’re able to do to manage and if you can deal with it now. When feeling overwhelmed, it’s important to compartmentalize. It’s impossible to deal with 5 worries at once so pick the one that you can attend to and set a time to deal with the others. It’s also important to allow yourself the space to realize that you won’t be able to come up with an easy answer for each thing that brings you anxiety. Simply recognizing its existence and recognizing that it’ll take time is helpful.
The second question will help you navigate the root cause of your anxiety, and it will give you the answer of what you could do now. For example, if your anxiety was triggered by feeling overwhelmed about finishing the project, the emotions could be feeling incompetent, feeling like you’ll be rejected, or feeling like you are going to fail. Then it might be helpful to spend some time seeing where those emotions are coming from and validating them. Asking a friend to help you talk through them or giving yourself the affirmations, you need to quell the anxiety.
Anxiety is our response to being threatened- it’s a sudden pressure on us to get us out of the emotional or physical uncomfortably that we are in. If we can address the threat, we can get ahold of the anxiety.
