When we experience Anxiety unless you have a go-to method of challenging the feelings and emotions, it can easily overwhelm you. Whether it be Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety or just an anxious period in your life having some method and proven tactics to relieve it naturally is really important.
These methods help me on a daily basis and they can be adjusted to suit your own needs. Our Anxiety presents itself in many different ways so there is no "one size fits all". I try to keep a list of things that worked in a particular situation as well as a list of things that didn't work.
So here are 5 ways to relieve Anxiety when it starts to get on top of you;
1. Grounding myself - This is basically forcing my brain to come back to the present and in the moment. So I will describe in great detail what I can see, smell, touch and hear. And when I say in great detail I really mean it, the more I push myself to focus on what I am doing, the distress level automatically goes down because I am directing attention away from it.
2. Acknowledge that this will pass - Sometimes my mood can shift in a minute, and it's important to not let that shift scare me into any self-harming behaviours. I try as hard as I can to tell myself that this anxiety is just an emotion and like all emotions, they will come and they will eventually leave.
3. I put it in a box - If I am strong enough at the time, I will tell myself that this is going in a box and getting locked, not forever, just for now until I am in a better place to address it or deal with it depending on what the trigger was.
4. I take a break - I allow myself to switch off if I can. So I take a nap because there is every chance I could wake up feeling calmer. I don't criticise myself for being "lazy", I give myself permission to take a break and I do it without judgement. I try to read at least a couple of pages of my book to steady my thoughts and then try to clear my mind as much as possible.
5. Mindfulness - This is something that I struggled with at first to learn, but I think that is quite normal. We don't live mindfully anymore, we are so consumed with the material world around us, that we don't stop to just be in the moment. I use my Calm App on my phone to do even 5 minutes of deep breathing exercises and like the grounding technique, the brain automatically sends messages to the nervous system to calm down.