Managing anxiety is about rewiring your brain and taking risks.
You’re always thinking ahead in any situation to possible what-ifs. Or your anxiety is less about thoughts and more about a tightening you get in your stomach or a shaky feeling. Or you have panic attacks that seem to come out of the blue. Maybe you self-medicate with alcohol or drugs to simply lower that idle speed and feel more relaxed.
Anxiety is about emotions and thoughts but also your brain: your amygdala, your emotional center, fires up, and your prefrontal lobes, your rational brain, go offline. Here’s a 3-step approach to managing your anxiety:
FIRST AID
Like anger, anxiety is one of those emotions that, if it gets too high, becomes too difficult to rein in. If your anxiety is rising, ask yourself these three questions:
1. IS THERE A REAL PROBLEM THAT I NEED TO FIX?
There is rational and irrational anxiety. Rational anxiety is about a real-world problem: You haven’t heard back from your boss about the work schedule or the doctor about medical test results; you don’t know if your friend is still angry with you after Saturday’s argument.
If there is a real problem, take real action: Check in with your boss, doctor, or friend. The key is to be decisive, not dither, and get the issue off your plate.
If there is no real problem you’re dealing with but instead you’re just feeling anxious, physically shaky, or irritable, it’s time to use tools to lower the anxiety itself: Take a hot bath, do some exercise, engage in mindful or distracting activities—your needlepoint hobby, a movie, or mindful cooking. The goal is to get out of your anxious mind and into your rational one.
2. AM I SAFE?
If you have a history of trauma, you can easily get triggered in the present without fully realizing it. Trauma creates a feeling of being unsafe, i.e., anxiety, and asking if you’re safe can pull you back from those triggered sensations of the past.
3. WHAT ELSE AM I FEELING?
Like those who struggle with anger, those struggling with anxiety often have a difficult time recognizing other emotions—hurt, sadness, anger, jealousy—that may lie underneath the anxiety. The aim is to become more emotionally diversified and use these emotions as information. That said, the first 100 times you ask the question, you may say I just feel anxious. But if you do notice anything—you’re annoyed by the comment your partner made when you were walking out the door in the morning—do something with it. Send a text to your partner saying how you felt. This is not about the morning or your partner but about rewiring your brain and increasing your emotional range.
MAINTENANCE
If you’re prone to anxiety, you want to have good habits and tools built into your everyday life that help keep your anxiety threshold down, so even if you’re having a bad day, you don’t spike up to a 7 on a 10-point scale but to a 3 or 4.
One effective tool is what I call check-ins, or asking yourself “How am I feeling?” You can step back and take your emotional pulse every hour or so. If you get to a 3 or 4, it’s time to move towards your first aid plan. This is about prevention—catching things early before they get too hard to rein in—but also training yourself to be more aware of and sensitive to your emotional state.
Lifestyle habits may include regular exercise, meditation, medication, or some mindful hobby—doing art, crafts, or playing music. All these help lower your threshold and keep you out of your anxiety brain.
PERSONALITY UPGRADE
First aid and maintenance help with the everyday. But to better manage anxiety, you want to address the underlying personality drivers. Those prone to anxiety tend to be people-pleasers, avoid confrontation, internalize emotions, or are self-critical. These are all outcomes of childhood ways of coping in your family environment. But like most childhood coping, what worked as a child doesn’t work as well as an adult. It’s time to upgrade your coping skills.
This is perhaps a longer-term project, but important nonetheless. The key here is learning to approach anxiety rather than avoid or squelch it through drugs or alcohol. Here, you take the risks of saying no, being assertive, and setting boundaries rather than being over-responsible or going along. Here you focus on what you want rather than what you “should” do and learn to tolerate conflict and others’ strong emotions. Here, you use emotions as information to tell you and others what you need rather than holding them in or blaming yourself.
You’re trying to upgrade your emotional software by doing now what you couldn’t as a child. By doing so, even with baby steps, you can become less triggered and feel less like a little kid and more like an adult.
The key to managing and decreasing anxiety is, paradoxically, running toward it—stepping outside your comfort zone, going against your grain, and challenging yourself to take risks no matter how small. Again, the situation isn’t important; you changing what you do is important. By approaching your anxiety, you build self-confidence and, more importantly, change your view of the world—that it’s not as dangerous as your anxious brain is telling you—and of yourself.
GET SUPPORT
The attitude you want to adopt is not that you need to go on a make-over campaign. Instead, take on an attitude of curiosity and experimentation. The goal is not about doing things “right” but doing things differently; and with anxiety, doing things differently and taking risks, no matter how small, are good places to start. If you need help developing skills, working on personality issues, or need support to move forward, get it.
This article was originally published on Psychology Today. Content may be edited for style and length.
