Everyone can be dealing with anxiety at some point of the day or maybe the week. Some people can deal with this very easily but some people will stay with these thoughts the whole day in their head. Of course if there’s a way, there’s a will. There are different methods for calming yourself down and putting your mind at ease. I’ll also give some tips and tricks to clean your mind of any thoughts.
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is an emotion that is being characterized by feelings like tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure. Common symptoms can also include: restlessness, being tense, panicking, feeling nervous, heavy and fast breathing, thinking about anything other than the present worry.
When you feel anxious, your body goes into an high alert mode, readying itself for any possible danger and activating your fight or flight responses.
What anxieties are there and what can cause them?
Because there are different kind of anxieties, there can be different causes for a trigger.
Anxiety disorder due to a medical condition. This anxiety will trigger because of a physical health problem. It’s also a possibility the cause can be a fear for one of the physical health problem a person has.
Agoraphobia. It’s an anxiety that triggers in specific places or may trigger you to avoid certain places where you can feel trapped, scared or helpless.
Social anxiety disorder. It’s an anxiety that triggers when near any social situations that can be too much. Mostly these are situations where you can be judged, feel helpless or can be viewed negatively by others.
Panic disorder. Panic disorder is something you get when you are experiencing intense feelings in a short period of time and can lead to panic attacks. After an attack you may be more afraid of it happening again.
Specific phobias. This can be anything or anyone you have a feeling of wanting to avoid. This can be caused by previous events where you were embarrassed, being laughed at, viewed badly by people, etc.
Substance-induced anxiety disorder. These are symptoms, like intense anxiety or panic, that are caused by misusing drugs or being exposed to any other toxic substance.
Other specified anxiety disorder. These are terms where you get anxiety or have a phobia for something or someone that didn’t meet the criteria above but are stressing and disruptive enough.
How to get reduce your anxiety
Physical exercise. Any physical activity is not only proven to ease your anxiety but is also good for your physical and emotional health. A relief of your anxiety is something you can feel for hours after your workout.
Don’t drink alcohol or start smoking. You may have the anxiety gone for a short period of time but when you are sober again you will crave for that feeling again. This will only start an addiction of both of these 2.
Meditate. One goal of meditation is maintaining bad thoughts. Facing your fears and wanting your bad thoughts so you can learn on how to deal with these thoughts. Meditating will help you replace these bad thoughts with peaceful thoughts. Because you are taking your time to meditate you can focus on changing these thoughts and it will be easier to do this while going through your day.
Eat healthy. High sugar diets can impact the way you behave. While having anxiety your blood sugar levels can rise and if you already have a high sugar diet this can online
Sleep. It’s a logical solution that you would need some good night sleep. Everyone can become more easily irritated if they haven’t slept good or long. Not getting much sleep can be a factor of getting higher levels of stress or emotional disorders and these are only bad if you want to get rid of your anxiety.
Give yourself more time in your schedule. Making your schedule really strict and tight will sometimes give the situation where you have to hurry yourself and this will also create unnecessary stress.
Breathing exercises. While focusing on breathing exercises and calming yourself down, you will have it easier to face your fears and act on the conflict going on in your head.
Be aware. Knowing when you feel anxious and recognizing it for yourself is already a big step. When you know you are feeling anxious, you can act on it and try to calm it down. So by paying attention to when you feel anxious is important. You can also conclude around what kind of decisions or event you get anxious and start working on these.
Positive feelings. By surrounding yourself with activities that only include positive and happy feelings, things like that will come naturally. Things like showing gratitude or helping other people can work up the positive feelings and help you forget about the negative ones.
Accept it. Everyone has anxiety and everyone will have to deal with it at some point in their life. Accepting the fact that you bother yourself more with your anxiety will make it much easier to deal with it and to recognize it. Everything in life is temporary, those negative feelings and thoughts as well.
Everything, in general, that reduces stress can be seen as steps working towards reducing your own anxiety. This can either eb playing music or just talking with friends. No one ever can eliminate an anxiety fully
How anxiety can affect your life
Of course there are reasons why you should act on your anxiety and why you should try and keep it to a minimum. Anxiety can affect your life in very different aspects.
Mental health. Constant stress isn’t good for things like your immune system, your heart and your brain. This will make your immune system vulnerable. Through the high blood pressure you have more chance of a heart disease or a heart attack.
Physical condition. When feeling anxious your muscle like to contract or tighten very often. This will lead to cramps. Heavy breathing and feeling restless also are effects your anxiety can have your life.
Addictions. Craving for an easy way out of your anxiety can lead to you drinking, smoking or any other substance to ‘get out of this world’ for a moment. This will only lead to an addiction and will only solve the problem for a short period of time. It’s important to learn how to deal with things like this on a more natural ways.
Sleep. Getting troubled by your anxiety before you go to sleep is one of the things that anxiety can do to you. Because of this you can get even less sleep and anxiety will more easily and easily work on you.
Relationships. Worrying for possible outcomes, that are a slight chance of actually happening, may have some influence on your different relationships.
For example anxiety will take away the joy of a person. Meaning this you will not get that much joy from your partner or friends. Negative thoughts will also come in between all the activities between your relations. Through anxiety you might find yourself asking for reassurance constantly but this will also become an annoyance. It’s important to be looking for balance in a situation like this.
Your own emotions. Anxiety starts, most of the time, with things like stress and this stress will try and combine itself with other emotions. Anxiety will not go good together with other positive emotions and will almost completely block out other positive emotions as joy or happiness but will go in line with feelings like sadness or irritation.
How you look at yourself. Anxiety can affect your way of seeing yourself. You can start looking down on yourself and this can have even more bad effects on your life. Check it out here.
It’s important to try and talk to family or friends with any worries you have around this topic. This topic can start as something small and only be involving in small periods of time in your day but can eventually grow into something that is constantly buzzing you. If you can’t get any help from friends or family, try searching a doctor and explain the problem.
Even if you are having trouble with giving a name to what you are experiencing, you can also explain to a doctor what you are experiencing and either he will help you or send you to someone more professional in this topic.
