No matter how much you try to cope with it, if you can’t get rid of it, anxiety sucks the life out of you. Yes, anxiety sucks because it keeps you in the dark, making you feel insecure, and takes away your joy. Often you face a situation when you want to move forward and take a step, but your anxiety issues keep you dragging back and leaves you unable to make any decision.
Reasons Why Anxiety Sucks
Anxiety sucks, because:
- You don’t know when it’ll go away
- It can strike at any time with almost no warning
- It affects your career
- It hurts your social life
- It is often not based on rational thoughts
- It makes you feel selfish
- People don’t always understand it
- It can push you away from those you love
- It’s exhausting
- It can create chaos in your life
- It stops you from living in the moment
- It creates a cycle of negativity
- Panic attacks are not fun
- It affects you physically
- It makes you feel really bad about yourself
- It’s hard to talk about
- It takes you by surprise
- It can turn a really great day or positive experience upside down rapidly
- You have to make changes
- It makes you overthink everything you do and say
- It’s hard to get the help you need
- It’s a daily struggle
- It tells you that you going to lose all your friends one day
- It comes in waves
- It affects the quality of your sleep and thus your overall health
- It affects your overall performance
- It can make you react irrationally
- It robs you from having fun and from enjoying life
- It makes some simple tasks appear to be impossible
- It makes you feel paralyzed, frozen, stuck
If you are tired of suffering from anxiety, here are some of the things you can do to deal with it.
Overcoming Yourself in Resisting Change and Advice
First get ready to accept advice and to explore doing something new even if some of it may feel uncomfortable at first. If you don’t change anything, nothing will change. In order to change we often have to do something we haven’t done before. This involves stepping out from comfort zones, because by remaining in a comfort zone there is no progress, no resolving of some core issues either. Accept to explore new short-term inconvenient emotional states in order to release the reasons which are feeding the long-term inconvenient emotional states. Give suggestions from this article a chance and you may find it much easier to step out from comfort zones. It’s not enough to read about them, but you have to make some effort and do something actively, and often it is not enough to do something once, but it has to be trained and entrained over a longer period of time. You can do it!
At the beginning, things are new and seem difficult, but over time, they get easier, because you become more familiar with them and more skillful. Remember, “Every master was once a disaster and every expert was once a beginner”.
Don’t be scared to fail (F.A.I.L. = First Attempt In Learning), because in one year from now, you probably don’t want to be at the exact same place where you are at right now. The path towards what you want often involves failing a few times, but that is natural and part of the process of growth, and it belongs to the process of learning. Trying new things enables you to change your current self and start moving into the direction, where there will be much more self-confidence and enjoyment of interacting with life.
Say: “I accept advice from experts. I am willing to change something and learn something in order to feel better. I will adopt new habits. There is a much higher chance of making much faster progress when making use of the help of specialists.”
Do: Take out a piece of paper and write at the top: “This is what I have been suggested to do in order to reach my personal goal of feeling better and enjoying life more.” Write down your personal notes from this article, and place the paper on your desk, so that you can read it and get reminded of certain to-dos.
Learning and Practicing Relaxation Techniques
As a new habit and part of your lifestyle introduce into your life something new, which you can learn to do also when you are alone at home. Learning different types of relaxation and stress release techniques and practicing them regularly will make you become much more resilient and balanced.
Here are just a few suggestions:
- Certain breathing techniques and yoga – practicing yoga and pranayama regularly changes your physiology and optimizes it. There are different types/styles of yoga – try out different ones for beginners until you find the style, teacher and environment, which is the best fit for you. You can learn a few basics, start with small goals such as only 2-3 exercises for beginners by finding and following some free video guided sessions with detailed explanations on YouTube. You can even search “yoga for anxiety” or “breathwork for anxiety“.
- Meditation – has to be practiced regularly, which is daily. It is often easier to start with guided meditations, where you listen to a recorded text. Note, that there are different types of meditations – sitting still is not the only type of meditation, for example, there is also so called “moving meditation” or meditation with open eyes such as candle gazing (trataka).
- Humming melodies of good-mood songs and dancing to it. It relaxes you, and betters your mood. Humming also helps to activate the vagus nerve, which is also highly beneficial. You might have never heard about it, but there are books only on the topic “Vagus nerve“.
On a side note: spiritual seekers, those interested in the ultimate goal of yoga, are on a path towards achieving a state of true lasting inner peace – being content under all life circumstances.
Visualizing Yourself as the New You
Become clear about how the new positive improved version of you looks like, which you wish to become. Most importantly: How does it feel? What do you do, how do you react? Repeat it several times in your mind. You will be training your subconscious mind, which is highly powerful.
Here is an empowering fact: The subconscious mind cannot differentiate between real and imagined. According to the following study: Your brain on imagination: It’s a lot like reality, study shows.
New brain imaging research shows that imagining a threat lights up similar regions as experiencing it does. It suggests imagination can be a powerful tool in overcoming phobias or post traumatic stress.
If you can anchor in your vision with your imagination using strong positive emotions in present tense, you are building a new self, by instructing and teaching your subconscious mind what you are like now. Repeating this new vision of yourself consistently for a minimum of 21 days, but ideally until you feel you still need it, can start to make you believe that you have those personality traits that you are envisioning (vividly & emotionally).
You will know it worked, when next time the same situation occurs this time you will react differently. With new beliefs, you approach life differently. If you want to change your life, one powerful way is through changing your beliefs first. To learn more about it you can read books about the subconscious mind and get yourself familiar with the works of Dr. Joe Dispenza.
Practicing Positive Self-Talk
Don’t let your mind become and be your own enemy, start mastering the mind to be your biggest friend and biggest supporter, who tells you only the most supporting and loving sentences. Send the negative mind on a lifelong vacation and see how it is to stay in the company of good, supportive, loving thoughts. Imagine that your negative mind malfunctioned and all that remained is the positive side of looking at everything. Goal: live the rest of your life with a positive, supportive mind. How? Give yourself compliments throughout the day (today and every day is positivity day) – be your own lover regarding this – love yourself through loving words. Everyone is worthy to be loved, to receive love – start with self-love. Become good at giving compliments.
Taking a Breath
If you are suffering already, you know how you get panic attacks when you have anxiety. You don’t know how to respond in a certain situation and how to handle things. Next time and whenever you have such a situation, stop for a second and take a few deep breaths. If you don’t stop and ponder, you might react in the wrong way and regret your reaction later. The best thing to do is to think first, before you fall into the trap of these anxiety attacks, as it will be your first step towards handling it.
Talking About It
You might be suffering alone in this hardship, and it can make things harder. It will be very hard but you ought to talk about it (what you struggle with) to someone. You can talk to your friends, family member, or a professional therapist. Seek help whenever you can and you will feel the change instantly. Nowadays it is easy and fast to find a therapist online. We live in a busy world, if you are home alone, but want to talk to somebody and wish to find someone to talk to – you can find people to talk to online.
Maintaining Contacts With Friends
Anxiety sucks because it takes away your social life. You cannot make friends, socialize and connect with people. Often you are too much scared to connect with people due to anxiety issues. Often times many people report positive changes from listening to anti-anxiety self-hypnosis audios, which are sending messages to the powerful subconscious mind. It can help you to be more confident and comfortable in social situations, approaching and talking to people.
Identifying Root Causes of Low Self-Esteem
Often feeling not confident, feeling insecure about yourself, how best to react, what to say, what others think, overthinking and self-judgment on autopilot is a source of anxiety. Identify what exactly makes you feel not confident and insecure.
Ask yourself:
- Why do I feel insecure?
- What am I afraid of could happen?
- When would I feel confident about my skills, this situation or myself?
Friends and experts can help you with this. Then you need to devise a plan with actionable doable steps broken down into small logical steps, which if done, bring about positive changes, results and success moments. If you struggle with implementing steps and staying consistent, you can also ask for help with this aspect of making it happen, so that you can start seeing positive changes in your life. Finding a partner or friend to do things together provides extra motivation.
Doing What You Love More Often
Adjust, flip it around when you are giving too much attention and time to what makes you feel bad and very little attention and time to what makes you feel good. Find ways and new opportunities to do what you love much more often in your life. Doing what you love in an environment that feels comfortable. Identify activities that you feel good about, identify places where you feel good, identify people with whom you like to spend time with. Make it part of your life more – do it more often.
At the end of your life you will not be wishing: I wish I would have spent even more time and focus on what was dragging me down, NO! You would be happy to say: I am happy that I did my best to do the things I love much more often, more often than the things I didn’t like. In the grand scheme of one short life, there is only a small portion of things we can do from all the many things that are available – choose what you truly prefer and give it more chance to be what your life is about – doing what you love as often as possible. You still have the chance to spend the rest of your life doing more of it, more of what you love, like, enjoy. Your life is what you do daily.
Identifying Your Life Goals
You can make a decision: do you want to spend more time struggling in life without going in a particular direction, or do you want to have clear goals, which are a driving force and point of focus, knowing your exact direction in life? At the end of your life, when you look back, what would you like to be able to say in order to feel satisfied with the way you lived and what you achieved and/or experienced? Become clear about his. Every time you wake up, you can remind yourself of this. You can read about what’s the point of living and about the higher purpose of living. It can help you a lot to gain much more clarity about the meaning of life and what life path you would like to choose to explore and focus on.
Exercise and Anxiety
Exercise is highly beneficial also for coping with anxiety. To read about its many benefits, please visit exercise and anxiety.
Therapies for Anxiety
There are many different types of therapies, which can help reduce anxiety. One of them is AAT – Animal Assisted Therapy.
EMDR Therapy also works for anxiety and panic attacks.
Anxiety and Depression have certain similarities and some approaches and therapies for overcoming depression, dealing with depression, coping with depression are applicable and being used for coping with anxiety too.
Audiobooks for Anxiety
A popular audiobook is: Anxiety Sucks! A Teen Survival Guide.
DNA-Based Recommendations to Treat and Cope With Anxiety
You can find out which genes are contributing to your low serotonin levels, and then you can implement targeted recommendations, like taking specific supplements or starting new habits, that actually change how your genes are functioning.
You might be stuck with the genes you have, but you aren’t stuck with the way they are working. You can actually overcome the negative effects with specific changes.
You can get access to your Anxiety, Mood and Pain DNA Reports and see the results for ALL of your genes related to these issues. Find out more about DNA-based health analysis and recommendations.
Other Recommendations to Cope With Anxiety
Some further recommendations that often help reducing and coping with anxiety:
- Using an anxiety bracelet (chakra stones, lava stone, essential oils, magnetic)
- Listening to some free energetic morphic field programmed audio to cope with anxiety
Final Words
Anxiety sucks because it hurts almost all aspects of your life. You feel alone and depressed most of the time. But, if you take a stand for yourself and start taking small steps, you can take hold of your life and get in control of your anxiety. Don’t try to figure it out all at once with a huge plan – start small, start with what is most easily available.
Having any type of mental health difficulty, whether it’s depression, anxiety or something else, we can’t look at it as only the problem of the mind. We are body-mind-spirit and they are interconnected. What we eat and drink affects also our mental state and mental health. Many therapies exist, not all of them are easily available. Start and continue with what appears to be the best available next step.
You could strive for focusing on releasing limiting beliefs and adopting new useful habits.
To overcome fears, insecurities, and learn new coping mechanisms, it is best to do it with the help of a professional who specializes on helping with all of these. Health comes first and mental health is an important part of your health. The best investment is investing in your well-being (strong and healthy body-mind-spirit).
ANXIETY SUCKS NO MORE!