Anxiety – how to deal on a day to day
I’ve gone through periods in my life where I’ve had intense periodic bouts of anxiety, and also chronic low-grade anxious feelings. I want to open up about this because I want us to start talking about, and stopped being scared or ashamed of it, and start working with it. I know how hard it can be to go through it alone, but you don’t need to.
I share with you 3 beautiful, easy and effective tools that you can use on the fly every day to interrupt the cycle when anxiety arrives. This is what I have found to work for me, it might not work for you, but I highly encourage you to try these tools out in addition to your self-care practice and see.
If you don’t already have an established self-care practice in place I highly recommend you attend to this in parallel. You can download the 10 self-care practices I apply every day here.
Essential oils:
I love how pure essential oils can immediately take me out of my head and into the present. Choose a scent that resonates with you. Personally, I switch between lavender, geranium, bergamot, sandalwood, chamomile and rose oil. I use these before bed, when I have a tension headache, or when I’m feeling irritable. Sometimes just a whiff, sometimes rubbed onto my temples and wrists, a few drops in the bath, or over my bedsheets.
Everyone is different when it comes to scents. I invite you to experiment with these and other essential oils such as ylang-ylang, mandarin, lemon balm, clary sage, vetiver and frankincense which are known to have a calming effect and see what works for you.
2. Breathwork:
Specifically, the Wim Hof method
Breathing without a doubt is the easiest, most transformative self-healing and cathartic practice that helps you get into your body, into your heart and out of your mind for free. We take it for granted and underestimate it’s power.
When we feel anxious our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is overstimulated and we tend to take quicker, shorter breaths. Keeping our breath in their upper lungs only serves to prolong feelings of anxiety. To interrupt the anxiety response take longer deeper diaphragmatic breaths to help the stuck emotional energy move through your body.
I think the Wim Hof method is amazing. It’s a scientifically researched and validated technique . having you over-oxygenate your body through conscious, deep inhales, and part exhales over several rounds. It serves to calm the mind and brings you into an altered state of consciousness, allowing blocked emotional energies to release. I find it a rapid hack to transcendental meditation. It’s easy to learn and easy to practice at home. Take 15 minutes and give it a go.
3. Emotional Freedom Technique:
Meridian Points for EFT
Otherwise known as tapping.
Similar to acupuncture but without the needles (!). EFT stimulates the body’s meridians and creates a balance in your energy system.
The basic technique involves only 5 steps, and does not require you to have it perfected in order for it to work.
1. Identify the issue: Settle into your body with a few deep breaths. Focus on the negative emotion or concern at hand.
2. Rate: How intense is the feeling? Rate it on a scale of 0-10.
3. Set-up: Choose a statement or affirmation that acknowledges the problem at hand, and also has you accept yourself in spite of it. Using the following as a guide,
“Even though I’m anxious about [insert a fear or anxiety, a bad memory, an unresolved problem, or anything that’s bothering you], I deeply and completely accept myself.”
4. The sequence: You then use your index and middle fingertips to tap about 7 times on the meridian points pictured below, starting at your crown, moving down to your third-eye side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin point, collarbone, under the arm. You can use both hands, or just use one hand. The exact number of taps doesn’t matter.
5. Re-rate: Rate the intensity of the issue or feeling on a scale of 0-10. If you rate higher than 2, repeat.
But don’t forget about your daily self-care practice!
I use these anxiety busting techniques on top of an established self-care practice - you can grab my personal practice here!
Daily self-care is paramount to managing your anxiety, and I would argue that this must include a mindfulness practice. Not only for your well-being now, but also to aid in growing your level of self-awareness and start to address the root cause of your anxiety.
Mindfulness? Why?
By paying attention to your physical and mental state in the present moment you calm your mind. With practice you will increasingly incorporate mindfulness and presence into your every day life. This presence is an absolute gift, you will start to find the joy in the small things. You will find you become more adaptive to situations rather than reactive, and you will learn to meet the emotions that you feel with awareness, acceptance and compassion rather than judgement. Practice this on a daily basis and you are likely to find your anxiety will start to ease.
Could you consider your anxiety a blessing, not a curse?
With the growing self-awareness that will come from an embedded mindfulness practice you can begin reflect on your anxious feelings and see where it has come from and begin to address the root cause. Your expanding perspective may also open you up to begin to see how anxiety is serving you. No doubt you are highly attuned to other people, you can read body language and subtle cues well. You are most likely an empath. You are great at things you set your mind to because you strive for excellence. You may be an overachiever. You may really, really CARE.
If you live with anxiety I encourage you to start sharing your story and to let us join together to breakdown the stigma that still exists around mental health, and let the sharing of your story be something that can help others be release from their burdens.