6 Daily Strategies to Decrease Your Anxiety!

6 Daily Strategies to Decrease Your Anxiety;

We all deal with varying degrees of anxiety in our hectic, demanding lives; this video will give you six concrete things you can do every day to get a handle on yours.

First of all I’m going to ask you to increase your internal awareness throughout the day; Think of your anxiety on a 1-10 scale with 1 being low and 10 being full-blown anxiety attack; Strategy #1 Is to note your number now, and note continuously throughout your day; you can keep a journal, keep a listing on your phone notes, or just keep it in mind throughout the day. your goal is to always stay between 1-5. If you’re getting to 5 or higher, stop what you’re doing and take care of yourself. What does that mean; I’ll explain in the following strategies;

#2. Give yourself the gift of breathing; truly, this is science, not mumbo jumbo; in our culture we tend to breathe quickly and shallowly and this deprives our brains of oxygen and escalates any anxiety as it starts. So think of an amusement ride spinning faster and faster; deep, diaphragmatic breathing slows it down like you’re pulling the power plug out of the ride, and it’s going to eventually come to a stop. Throughout your day, note your breath and practice deepening and slowing your breath. While doing this, note your number and how you can lower your number at will. If you’re having trouble slowing things down, get up and stretch, walk if you can, even to the water cooler and fill your bottle, go to the break room or even to the bathroom; if you have to sit still for your job, then breathe in place and take an imagination break; imagine you’re at the beach for a moment and just breathe.

#3 Another daily strategy is to start the day with a planning time; and even take a few minutes in the middle of the day to assess or remake a plan; anxiety is often a real reaction to feeling overwhelmed and knowing we can’t possible do what is being asked of us. I hear this from high school, and university students as well as professionals, and we can all use more mindfulness in how we plan out and take care of our day. When we don’t plan, and are overwhelmed, this often causes us to escalate into feeling like we can’t measure up and we’re not capable; when you write out the things that are urgent for that day and the things that are ok to leave until later; you set priorities; and when we prioritize, we feel less overwhelmed, and more competent, and capable.

#4; is to continuously watch the thought-patterns that tend to escalate your anxiety; if you can zero in on the overriding messages that explode in your head when you’re anxious, you can combat this much more effectively; is most of what is dogging you social anxiety, with messages about your belonging or being cared about? Or is it professional with messages about your worth, value, or competence? Or is it overall overwhelm with everything in life with a lot of catastrophic thoughts, all or nothing thinking and things like that? When we know our escalating thoughts, we can create healthier thoughts; I had a therapist once forbid people in a group from using the word “overwhelmed”. He would correct them and say, you’re whelmed; which isn’t a word but what happened is that we all realized that when we say to ourselves we’re overwhelmed, we’re saying we can’t cope and we’re hopeless and helpless and if you say anything to yourself over and over, it’s becomes more and more true in your mind. So telling yourself you’re whelmed means you’ve got a lot on your plate, AND you can handle it, it’s ok, you can also remind yourself throughout a day, this isn’t personal, it’s not about me, one thing at a time, one moment at a time, I can do this one thing now and then the next thing. I’m ok, just breathe.”

#5; take action; do the next right thing and only that ONE thing; people are always trying to do many things at once and often end up spinning their wheels, getting stuck, shutting down, wandering off in their minds and really getting nothing done; then beating themselves up about getting nothing done, saying they’re overwhelmed, lather, rinse, repeat; research is showing that we’re not really multi-tasking when we think we are; we are really just doing several things distractedly and not doing any of them with all of our focus; focus on one thing, do that thing, then do the next thing.

#6 Give yourself 30 sec celebrations. Every time you can bring yourself from a 6 down to a 4, even momentarily, that’s a celebration-worthy event! Give yourself a big internal high-five! Every time you accomplish even a slight decrease in your number with your own internal talk, breathing, changes of thoughts or actions, make sure you acknowledge it; the more you do this, the better you’ll get at it and you’ll grow some really strong relaxation muscles over time.

So to recap; an idea is to write these down and put them on your fridge or mirror or somewhere you can remind yourself throughout your day

1) note your anxiety number throughout the day; staying at or below 5.

2) Breathe throughout your day; noting your number and how it changes as you breathe

3) Create Planning time

4) Watch your escalating thoughts

5)Take action one thing at a time

6) 30 sec celebrations;

Relaxation muscles are really resiliency in action and resilience is the most important measurement of good mental health.

When we look at how to cope, manage and really thrive in this fast-paced, demanding and hectic world, this mindful approach is what will get you through.

Take good care of yourselves and create an amazing day!