7 July 2008 7 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Photo Courtesy of manop

Do you ever feel overwhelmed with anxiety? Feel constantly tense, have trouble concentrating, are persistently irritable or have a constant fear of something? Do you fear the worst outcome for everything in life? Have some serious self doubts and self confidence issues?

Anxiety can come up in varied forms and for varied reasons. And since it can come up for multiple reasons, we need multiple ways of dealing with it. Often we try one or two methods that we know of and then scratch our heads wondering - How do I deal with anxiety? How do I overcome anxiety?

I am putting together different ways in which we can overcome anxiety. This is Part I of the series : Break Free of Anxiety Habits - Creative Ways to Deal with Stress and Overcome Anxiety.

3 Simple Ways of Overcoming Anxiety

• Accept and Observe anxiety

Stop fighting anxiety. And be with it. In the beginning this might be very difficult to do. But do this anyways. Observe and observe. Do nothing beyond that. Notice how does it start. What are you thinking at that moment. How is your body posture. What are you feeling at that moment. What are you telling yourself. Get to know everything related to anxiety specific to you. How do you get anxious. And don’t fight it. Just be.

As you keep observing, you will slowly see yourself having a third party view of how anxiety operates within you. This observation is important. For it will show you what do you do to cause anxiety and how does axiety pave its way within you. This knowledge will come handy when you decide to beat anxiety out of your system. And become a kind of person who is always anxiety free. But for now, just observe.

You will notice, that sometimes, this act by itself is enough to reduce your feelings. When you simply observe - you don’t judge and you don’t fight, the power that negative thoughts, emotions has over you gradually decreases. It’s as if feeling stressed and anxious is just a phase and without any extra inputs from you, it passes away.

I agree this is tough. But do so anyways. This is your first step in gaining control back. And showing who is in charge. You might be anxious. But you can accept it and see it and allow it. And in process, gain tools for dealing with it and tackling your feelings of anxiety in the bud.

• Tap into your existing knowledge and abilities

Some specific things that you should observe and make note of are

1. How do you get anxious. If you have to teach someone how to get anxious like you, what would you tell them?. If someone has to enact you, thought by thought, emotion by emotion, body posture, facial expressions, activities … what would you tell them? Find your pattern.

2. How do you get out of anxiety. Feelings of anxiety come in phases. Observe what are you thinking, doing, feelling, acting at the end of the phase. What is making you feel better and helping you come out of this phase. What are you telling yourself? What are you doing with your hands, with your body? Which place makes you feel better?

Now that you have answers to two very powerful questions - how do you get anxious and how do you get out anxiety, use them constructively. Start changing things which trigger anxiety. And start doing things which relieve anxiety. The knowledge for both is within you. You know how to be anxious and how to deal with anxiety. All I am saying is use that knowledge to your benefit.
Avoid everything that makes you anxious and replace them with what works.

Experiment this as much as you can. The idea here is to eliminate everything that causes you anxiety and fasten the process of getting out of anxiety.

• Deal with anxiety reasons one by one.

Pick up one reason why you are anxious. Write down all your fears related to it. For instance, you have to make a speech and you are scared of making a fool of yourself, forgetting your speech, people boo-booing you etc. Don’t judge yourself while writing, don’t pause. Just write. Write all the worst case scenarios that you can think of. After you finish take a pause.

For each item, give a rating from 1-10. 1 means low probability of it ever happening and 10 means high probability of it happening. You will be surprised at how few items rank above 5. As you look at the list and the rating that you have given, your anxiety will automatically reduce. Since now you understand that whatever you fear has negligible chance of occurring. If something does rank higher than 5, develop a contingency plan for it. Having a action plan in hand for difficult scenarios helps to alleviate anxiety.

Tune in Next Monday for more ways to deal with anxiety.
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Update: Part II of Series : Mind Power to Overcome Anxiety and Be Stress Free