If you’ve been dealing with anxiety lately, especially around this COVID period, I want to give you the tools that you can use to ease it your anxiety symptoms fast!
Anxiety is not depression. There is a huge difference and it’s important to know because you may be misdiagnosing yourself.
Depression is considered a chemical imbalance inside of your brain.
Anxiety comes from your thoughts and most of the time its thoughts about the future. Whether that’s worrying about something that’s going to happen, might happen or not being in control of the current circumstances that are happening in the world, it all comes from your thoughts.
If you’re aware that you’re suffering through anxiety right now, here are 5 strategies that will help you overcome it.
H.A.L.T
The acronym H.A.L.T stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired.
It’s really important to ask yourself the following questions because it can change the way that you think, and when you change the way you think, you change the way you feel.
Am I hungry?
I don’t feel anxious a whole lot, but sometimes when I do, it’s because I’ve forgotten to eat. I’ve been busy the whole day and 3 pm hits and I begin to wonder why I’m feeling so crappy. It’s because I haven’t given my body the nutrients that it needs.
Am I angry?
Did something happen to make you feel angry? No matter how small, it has the same effect on the body.
These thoughts are going to send signals from the brain to the body. That body is then going to create cortisol which creates adrenaline and that’s going to get your heart rate to spike.
That alone can make you start to feel anxious.
Am I lonely?
One of the things that people look past, besides improving themselves is improving all of the relationships. We are beings that love to be around other beings. If you haven’t seen anybody in a few days, maybe haven’t left your house, haven’t gotten sun on your skin, whatever it is, that loneliness can start to make you feel anxious because subconsciously you’re wondering whether it’ll be like this forever.
Am I tired?
You don’t need me to tell you why sleep is so important. If you’re not getting enough sleep, or you’re having interrupted sleep, your body will be running on its reserve tank.
These are things that we often look past but have a massive impact on our stress level.
Breathing
When we start to change our state, whether that’s from happy, angry, or anxious, the first thing to change is our breathing.
If you’re feeling anxious, check in on your breath and your posture.
A lot of times when we’re anxious, we keel over a little bit and we have real short breaths.
Become aware and change your breathing, the amount of oxygen, and carbon dioxide in your body will change your state and change the way that you feel.
One technique that helps is, breathing in for four seconds, holding for seven seconds, breathing out for eight seconds, and repeating six times.
Your state will change completely, almost every single time unless something is hitting the fan in your life. Breathing will change your anxiety and change your state faster than almost anything else.
Anxiety and excitement are the same in the human body
The only thing that changes them is your thoughts around them. So what I mean by that is when you’re anxious, what happens?
Your heart starts to beat faster, your body starts to create cortisol, your brainwaves start to change.
It’s the exact same thing that happens when you’re excited.
This might seem crazy but it’s been studied by psychologists and scientists and I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve received from people telling me that this works.
Next time you feel anxious, tell yourself this, “I’m excited, I’m excited, I’m excited, I’m excited.” You’re tricking your brain, based on the voice and you will feel better about your situation because you’ve repurposed the feeling inside of your body based on changing your thoughts.
Focus on what you can control
You’re not anxious about what you can control, you’re anxious about what you can’t control.
So what’s happening is you’re having a control issue.
You’re having an anxious breakdown from things out of your control, which I get as I’ve had it before too, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
So what should you do?
You should start focusing on what you can control.
Focus on your breathing, your body, going for a run, what you eat, how you spend your day, these are all things you can control.
Ask yourself if you’re okay
Not just, “Am I okay”, but, “Am I okay, right now, at this moment?”.
99% of the time anxiety comes from things that might happen in the future.
You’ve got what you need in this world right now and you’re going to be okay at this very moment.
If you come from a place of calm, cool and collected, you’re usually going to find the answers to the problems that need to be solved, but if you’re coming from a place of stress and anxiety, it’s going to be a lot harder to figure out what you need to do.
“When emotion is high, logic is low.“
The average person has about 60,000 thoughts per day. Out of those thousands of thoughts, about 80% of them are negative and 95% were exactly the same repetitive thoughts from the day before.
Another study found that 85% of what people worry about never even happens.
Secondly, 79% of the people said that 15% of the things that did happen were easier to handle than they thought it would be.
So in conclusion, 97% of the crap that you’re worrying about means nothing.
Write these strategies down somewhere that you can get to easily when you feel the anxiety creeping up.
