How to Calm Anxiety
There are several helpful strategies to calm anxiety you experience in your day-to-day life. It’s important to seek care from a licensed mental health professional if you find that your experience of anxiety is pervasive, distressing, and impairing your daily functioning.
For calming daily stress and anxiety, try some of these coping strategies:
Cognitive Reframing
Catch your anxious thoughts and explore more helpful alternative thoughts. Clues to look out for to catch your anxious thoughts include “what ifs” thoughts, thoughts that predict the future, thoughts that use extreme/definitive language like always/never/should, thoughts that attempt to read others’ minds, and thoughts that jump to conclusions.
Challenge the thought. Ask yourself the following questions when you catch an anxious thought:
Do I know for sure this is true?
Could there be any other explanation or potential outcome?
What would I say to a close friend in my exact situation right now?
Claim a more helpful, rational thought. After asking yourself the above questions, try to land on a thought that is more helpful, fair, and rational than your original anxious thought.
Mindfulness
Finding ways that work for you to connect your body and mind to the present moment can be a powerful coping mechanism for anxiety. Try some of these ideas to find what mindfulness practices may work for you:
Sensory Grounding: Look at your surroundings and name five things you see, four things you hear, three things you feel, two things you smell, and one thing you taste.
Counting Lyrics: Listen to a song of your choice. Pick a word/lyric that repeats several times throughout the song, maybe in the chorus. Listen to the song in its entirety and try to count how many times you hear that specific word/lyric. If you lose track of your count, gently nudge your attention back to the song and begin from 0 again.
Happy Place Imagery: Think of a happy or nostalgic place for you. Close your eyes and picture this place in as much detail as possible. Remember as much as you can about this place. Can you count something within this imagery? For example, if you’re picturing a beautiful beach, count the waves crashing, and imagine what the waves would sound like.
For more Mindfulness strategies, check out our Mindfulness course in Embrace Now’s online learning community here.
Self-Care
Practicing self-care can not only help calm our anxiety but also help reduce our vulnerability to feeling anxious.
Basic Self-Care: Make sure you are taking care of your basic self-care. This includes eating foods that fuel your body in a positive way, getting enough sleep/rest, resting when you are ill or injured, and moving your body on a regular basis. Think of basic self-care as playing “defense” against anxiety. You are more likely to feel anxious if you have not met your basic needs.
Pleasurable Activities: Make sure you are fitting pleasurable activities into your daily routine, making time for things you enjoy, hobbies, and passions. Not only can these activities provide an avenue for relaxation/retreat, but they can also cultivate positive emotions in addition to any anxiety or stress we are experiencing. We can feel anxious or stressed and still do something fun or joyous for ourselves. Pleasurable activities can help us experience the coexistence of opposite emotions (i.e., stress and joy).
Decreasing Avoidance
Working on decreasing anything we are avoiding due to anxiety/stress is arguably the most essential coping mechanism for anxiety. Avoidance increases anxiety, so the more we avoid, the more intense our anxiety likely will become. Try to evaluate what gradual, baby steps toward what you are anxious about might look like. To start, ask yourself the following questions:
What am I avoiding due to discomfort/fear/anxiety?
What feels manageable as far as movement towards what I’ve been avoiding?
Can I break the thing I’m stressed or anxious about into smaller, manageable steps?
What would the complete opposite of avoiding look like for me? Can I slowly inch towards this?
