Six Practical Tips to Manage and Move Through Anxiety

[00:00:00] Hi, Anxiety Masters. Welcome back to A Slice of Life. This is your companion podcast for confronting life's worries and fears, however they arise. I'm Dominic Decker, a British Registered Therapist, here to support your journey towards a calm, strong, and confident life. In today's episode, we'll delve into six essential tips for managing anxiety.

Before this, if you're new to the podcast, I want to say a few words about what Anxiety Master is. The project is founded on the belief that we all have the potential to direct our lives. From this respect, I can be my own master of worries, and you can be yours. All human problems health, work, family, relationships, etc.

tend to bring about uncertainty. Uncertainty can lead to stress, and chronic or excess stress, if it's left unaddressed, can manifest in anxiety. And problems will always arise. It's [00:01:00] inevitable. And some of these problems will be incredibly challenging and sometimes painful. And still, we can choose to direct how we respond.

So Anxiety Master is about breaking through our limitations, whether it be fear, confusion, destructive habits and beliefs, etc., to step into courage and strength for, ultimately, a life of no regrets. Now this podcast, A Slice of Life, is our conversation about all of these things. It's not sponsored and it relies upon your support, so if you find today helpful, please consider leaving a positive review so that others can find our community too.

So we'll get to the six tips for managing anxiety in a moment, and a quick preamble on this before we do. So I want to say that these tips aren't about getting rid of, avoiding, or minimizing or suppressing anxiety. Because a degree of anxiety is a good thing. And consider anxiety as nature's [00:02:00] alert system, whether it's signaling a need for more sleep, or less caffeine, or a moment to step outside and recalibrate our nervous systems.

Stress, and its gateway to anxiety, can also carry important messages that our lives might be telling us. For instance, perhaps we fear feeling trapped in confined spaces. An elevator or on public transport because we are, in fact, emotionally restricted in another part of life. Or we sense unease when we feel stuck.

Perhaps in a queue or a traffic jam because we're feeling stuck in a relationship or a job that we no longer want. So learning to interpret anxiety's language and its messages is a powerful skill that we can all develop. So today's ideas aren't about pushing anxiety away. Instead, it's more about becoming familiar and getting to know it from different perspectives.

And then, when it is intensely uncomfortable or just getting in the way, We want to have strategies to move [00:03:00] through it. So, six steps to regain control from anxiety. Uh, be sure to check the show notes for extra information. If you suffer episodes of intense anxiety, you'll know how distressing they can be.

Well, a bout of anxiety can come on suddenly. It can strike anywhere. And often, it happens at inappropriate and unhelpful times. If anxiety arises in private, there's a degree of comfort in knowing you can manage it discreetly. But when anxiety creeps up on you in a public space, Well this can be really startling.

Perhaps in a queue at the supermarket, or mid flow with your boss at work, or when expecting to talk in a group situation. If this happens, you're faced with managing two demands at once. There's the troubling peak of heightened worry, and this is your internal state, and then plus an expectation to hold it together and appear normal, or face potential embarrassment or humiliation, and this is the external situation.

And when confronted with these unnerving [00:04:00] scenarios, a desire to get away is easy to understand. An escape or avoidance seems the quickest route to relief. However, a swift exit is rarely the right approach for your longer term anxiety management, because, well, if you do run, your brain will tag any future similar situation as a potential threat.

And as a result, you'll be primed to experience even higher anxiety the next time you find yourself in the same circumstances. Instead, it's best to have one or two simple, trusty anxiety coping strategies to help you stay calm, put, and in the moment. Because the last thing you need in an anxiety inducing situation is to be half remembering and flapping your way through complex calming techniques.

And that's if you remember any at all, because this will only increase your sense of powerlessness. So to remedy this, the six steps that we're covering are, firstly, to give anxiety a form. Then, to go towards the anxiety. [00:05:00] The third step is to breathe through the anxiety. The fourth tip is to step aside from anxiety.

The fifth is to move with anxiety. And the sixth is to stay present and aware. So tip one, learning to characterize the anxiety. Anxiety attacks are not an innate part of who you are, and despite the experience, you're not your anxiety. Like everyone born, you were designed to be active and curious, not listless and fearful.

But at some point, anxiety turned up and started making unwelcome announcements. Many of which were probably inaccurate, or just plain wrong. Research demonstrates that putting feelings into words reduces the symptoms of anxiety. As human beings, we need to air and express our emotions, to shoot them out there, rather than burying them in here.

So putting experience into words can dilute the experience of anxious thoughts. And this is because we have to use the left prefrontal lobe of the brain to transfer feelings [00:06:00] into words. Because anxiety is an emotion expressed through the brain's right hemisphere, this activation of the left hemisphere can reduce the experience of anxiety.

So to put this technique into practice, you might carry a notebook with you. And when anxious feelings arise, use the notebook to detail how you feel. Now curiously, and this is an experiment I've carried out with many of my clients as well, The more extreme the words are that people use to describe their experience, the more this dilutes the anxiety experience.

The second tip is to give anxiety a form. So some people also find it helpful to give their anxiety a form, a name, or maybe both. For instance, the pressure might take the form of a pesky insect levelling for a swat, or an annoying jack in the box waiting for you to apply a firm lid. Now, some people settle for a black cloud that needs blowing away, or a bad smell that needs overpowering with a good one.

Whatever you [00:07:00] choose, make it something easy to visualize, and come up with an image or sensation that you can turn off, replace, disable, or stop in its tracks, and practice using this replacement when the anxious feelings emerge. A man I met, he named his anxiety Shaky Pete and describing him, the anxiety, as an uninvited guest, propping up next to him at the bar, he'd say, Oh, here comes Shaky Pete again, wobbling his way in without an invite.

And he would then visualize giving Pete a sharp elbow off his stool. It wasn't very subtle, but it actually really worked well for him. Yet, to show ourselves that there's nothing to fear, we need to move to this next step, which is to go towards the anxiety. Now imagine you're waiting at a bus stop. You feel somewhat anxious, but it's more of a nuisance than actively distressing.

The bus pulls in, and you step on. And the first thing you notice is how crowded it is. You take an inside seat, and someone [00:08:00] quickly sits next to you. And you start to feel trapped in a closed and busy space. And gradually, and then suddenly, the anxiety shifts gear, and you start feeling panicky. And without a second thought, you stand up and quickly leave at the next stop.

Now, stepping off at the bus and into the air, you feel slightly disorientated, yet also experience a sharp sense of relief to have recovered from the situation. But the question is this, how will you feel about getting on that next bus? Because here arises a potential problem. You see, nature has primed us to avoid danger.

If anxious, our first response is to seek out safety. But in our modern world, What we avoid will start to feel threatening, even if it's not. So in our crowded bus example, escaping the scene does two things. First, it tags the bus as a threat to be avoided. And second, it reinforces escape as an appropriate response.

So while a swift departure from the bus may lower [00:09:00] the immediate anxiety arousal, your future anxiety will likely climb higher, even at the thought of catching the next number 73. Had you stayed on the bus and managed to bring yourself back down, you would have realised that nothing would happen apart from the mental discomfort.

And once you had regained your composure, the fear instinct would have had no cause to tag the bus as a potential threat. So if you stay in a situation rather than running away, the fear response will eventually turn off. Because here you train your instincts in part by how you behave. So run away and the fear dials up, but stay and the fear will eventually dial down.

And if you do start panicking you can reach for this next step, to breathe through the anxiety. So hyperventilating can produce symptoms of panic. So breathing is one of the first responses you can focus on and learn to control. So when you inhale, you take in oxygen to your lungs, and the blood's [00:10:00] haemoglobin carries oxygen to the tissues throughout your body.

Oxygen is a very sticky molecule, and without the aid of a gas called carbon dioxide, it can't be detached from the red blood cells and transferred to the tissues. Suppose you breathe in excess oxygen through shallow breathing. In that case, the excess is quickly exhaled along with any available carbon dioxide.

But before the carbon dioxide has had the chance to do its job of helping make oxygen available to the tissues. Now this produces that startling sensation of being oxygen starved and leads to a person to gulp in even more air. Whereas the urgent need is not to breathe in more, but to restore balanced carbon dioxide levels.

So about 30 percent of people who panic chronically hyperventilate. This is taking 18 or more breaths per minute. And when we breathe in, we activate the sympathetic nervous system. And that's the part that involves the fight or flight, stimulated by heavy [00:11:00] exercise and emotional or sexual arousal. And when we breathe out, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which relaxes and calms us.

So you might not know these physiological details, but you can properly understand their importance if you learn to employ a 3 5 breathing technique in anxious situations. And this is a breathing exercise in which you can breathe in for a count of three seconds and then out for a count of five seconds.

I've created a specific resource to help you manage moments of high anxiety, specifically using this 3 5 breathing technique, and I'll put a link in there to the show notes. So as a method to help you gain or regain composure, bringing attention to your breath acts as both a distraction and a helpful reminder that you aren't in any real danger, because well, who counts their breath in real life danger situations?

And practicing this breathing will help you calm down and make the next tip, which is stepping aside from anxiety, easier to practice. [00:12:00] So stepping aside from anxiety. Well, high anxiety can feel all consuming, it's as if we are the anxiety. In essence, this is because fear is a state of high emotion, it's all enveloping.

Here, opening up some space and separating yourself from the immediate experience can be really helpful. So to step aside from anxiety, you can grade it on a scale from 0 to 10. 0 being no anxiety at all, which is rare for most of us, and 10 being all out, bowel loosening terror. Reframing the experience from a feeling to a number is also helpful because using a number quantifies and imposes limits on anxiety.

This also forces us to use the cognitive rather than emotional part of the brain. So you might say something like, this is a 4 at the moment. It's a 4 because, well, I had a dry mouth when it was a 6 last time. And it's not so bad right [00:13:00] now. As you continue to grade, simply watch the anxiety as if from a distance.

Have in mind a number you'd be happy to reach, and then using the previous tip, the 3 5 breathing, focus on breathing your way down to that number. So now that we've named, faced, and put a limit on our anxiety, let's take a look at moving with it. So moving with the anxiety, or high levels of physical activity tend to lower anxiety generally.

I once met a young woman who panicked about going on the underground. And for our meeting, I proposed a different approach. So knowing that an underground station was not too far away, I suggested we go for a run. It wasn't the typical counselling session, I know. Anyway, we had our running shoes on, and we set off at quite a pace, for us.

And little did she know, we were heading for the underground station. As we approached, I ran down the stairs, and thankfully, she followed behind. And as luck would have it, a train was just about to [00:14:00] depart, and I said, come on, should we try this? And without a moment to catch a breath for further discussion, we jumped on, and the train started moving away.

And we caught our breath between stations before jumping off at the next platform. I asked her how it had been, and to her surprise, she explained that she'd been so tired out she hadn't had the energy to waste on panic. And this was her first ride on the underground in nearly three years. So why did this work?

Because when highly anxious, the body's fight or flight response, this is the choice available to us in the face of threat, is activated. And this system is triggered by the release of hormones that prepare your body to either stand your ground and deal with the threat, or to run away to safety. And if we engage in vigorous exercise, as far as our instincts know, we have gone into the fight or flight response.

And because we're alive at the end of it, we've survived the danger. So in other words, pre empting any perceived danger makes it much harder for panic to arise. So now we [00:15:00] can train ourselves to become more aware by combining some of the earlier ideas. And this is the last step, staying aware of anxiety.

So this last step is beneficial when you want to remain in a situation. For instance, social gatherings or a queue at the supermarket or other situations when frankly, it would be a bit of a pain to leave. So you can use the AWARE method to stay present, keep your head, and manage the ride. And when you do this, you'll have much to be proud of.

And this method involves reconditioning your fear response. The five steps to AWARE are acknowledge and accept, wait and watch, act normally, repeat the steps. And expect the best. Step one, acknowledge and accept. So this first step is to recognize the anxiety and accept that it's there. And as you feel the anxiety creep in, don't fight it.

Instead, decide to be with it. You [00:16:00] scan your body and see how you feel, and then tell yourself about it just as it is. You don't need to ignore or run away from it. Then step two, to wait and watch. So continue by focusing on your breath, just as we covered earlier. And instead of running away to find temporary relief, let the relief come to you.

Observe the anxiety without judging it to be good or bad. You can be detached from it, if only a little bit. And move into your observing self and study it. Rate the pressure from 1 to 10, noticing when it goes up and comes back down. And remember that you're not the anxiety. You can be in the anxiety state, but you don't belong to it.

Then we want to act normally. This is step three. So instead, carry on behaving normally and do what you intended to do. Now breathe calmly and stay in the situation if at all possible. Because if you run from the situation, your [00:17:00] anxiety will decrease, but your future anxiety will likely increase. So by remaining present, you show your fear instinct that it doesn't need to tag the situation as threatening.

Then step four is just to repeat. So just repeat the first three steps again. Accepting. Watching and acting normally, all the while focusing upon your 3 5 breathing. And the final step is to expect the best. So taking the prior steps means taming and controlling your fear instinct. And with practice, this method can help you to calm down quickly and discreetly.

So most likely you've achieved things in life of which you are proud. Now imagine a successful outcome from trying to master anxiety attacks and take pride in what you're on the verge of achieving. So visualise the best possible outcome if you stay present and perform to the best of your ability, free of any limitations imposed by a bout of [00:18:00] anxiety that you can learn to control and banish.

Now a final thought on this, I'd recommend having a practice with these tips when you feel calm, and these tools will be reassuring as they become familiar and easy to implement. And perhaps you'll find one technique more helpful than the others. Yet all of these methods involve getting to know anxiety from different perspectives, so it helps to be at least aware of each.

And once you know what works for you, it's essential to persist with these techniques rather than becoming quickly discouraged, if you can only succeed some of the time. Okay, I really hope there's something helpful in there for you. That brings us to the end of today's episode. I've put a link to my anxiety toolkit that contains three separate resources.

All come with audio support for quick and simple access. So take a look in the show notes and go and download a copy today. I've written it for you. All right, take care and I'll see you again soon.[00:19:00]