How To Calm My Anxious Mind
So many of us have been there. One minute, we’re going about our day and running through mental lists, getting things done. Then the next, we’re overcome with anxiety and worry, seemingly about anything. We try to focus our thoughts, but it’s hard and before we know it, we’ve given up on the task we’re trying to complete because we feel entirely too distracted. Anxiety can affect things other than work and daily tasks, including sleep, appetite, and downtime. But, just because anxiety can be powerful doesn’t mean we have to give in to it (unless we want to “ride the wave” of anxiety, which is something I’ll save for a later blog…).
While anxiety can be big, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things that we can do to help better manage it. This can run the gamut from practicing certain techniques and exercises to changing up certain aspects of our lifestyle. Here, I’ll cover some of my favorites.
o Grounding exercises
Grounding exercises are a set of different tasks that we can practice to help shift our focus on to something else in our environment. There’s a variety of different ones to choose from, though most of them have the same goal – to bring yourself back into the present and create some space between you and your feelings of anxiety. This can be accomplished by using your senses to shift the focus of your mind. My personal favorite, and the one I often recommend to my clients, is the 54321 exercise. This asks you to look for 5 things you can see; 4 things you can hear; 3 things you can touch; 2 things you can smell; and 1 thing you can taste. Taste in particular is a very powerful sense. Eating a piece of chocolate or eating a very strong mint and focusing solely on the taste and experience can certainly help distract you for a bit!
o Mindfulness
I talked briefly about mindfulness meditation in my last blog, which focused on helpful sleep tips (Sleep... where are you?). Overall, mindfulness is the practice of remaining in the present moment. Have you ever had the experience of being in a car headed someplace and before you know it, you’re there, but you can’t even remember the drive? This tends to happen because we’re not present or focused on what’s going on around us, which isn’t all that surprising given all the tasks and responsibilities we have every day. Aside from the practice of remaining “in the moment,” mindfulness can also be practiced via mindfulness meditation. There are many wonderful, guided mindfulness exercises on YouTube that can help to give you some respite.
o Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Ah, another favorite. Progressive muscle relaxation, or PMR, is an exercise wherein a person tenses and relaxes different muscle groups at a time, all the way from their head to their feet. This exercise can help us to see just how much tension we actually carry since most of us don’t actually realize it! There have been many times where I’m sitting watching television, reading, or working and suddenly notice that my jaw is clenched. Maybe if I had done a little more PMR, I could’ve more easily recognized that, eh?
o Belly breathing
One of the most interesting phenomenon I’ve read about is how as children, we automatically take long, deep belly breaths (next time you’re around a kiddo, you might notice). Yet as we get older and have mounting stress and responsibilities, it’s almost as though we forget to do this. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, actually wrote about this in one of his books, noting that it was a good thing breathing was an automatic bodily function or else we might just forget to do it! He’s not wrong. Belly breathing essentially takes us back to that breathing style we used to have as kids. You can shut your eyes if you’re comfortable and take a big, deep breath counting to 5, hold it for 4 counts, and exhale completely for another 5 counts. Even 60 seconds of this can work wonders.
o Know your triggers
While our anxiety sometimes seemingly comes out of nowhere (it doesn’t really, there’s typically something underneath the surface), other people have very specific things that tend to trigger their anxiety. For some, things like enclosed spaces, public speaking, interacting with new people, or even driving can cause significant feelings of anxiety. Taking some time to figure out what makes us feel anxious can often help us to better prepare for the experience (and subsequent anxiety) and it can also help us to work through those triggers, with the help of a trained therapist, of course.
While all of these things can be helpful in managing our anxiety, there is often so much more to uncover and many other techniques within each of these that can also be helpful. If you’re experiencing feelings of anxiety and are finding it hard to function and focus, it’s important that you reach out to a licensed mental health professional with experience in this area. If you’d like some additional help with calming your anxious mind and working through some of those feelings of anxiety, feel free to get in touch by visiting the Contact page for my contact info.
And as always, be kind to yourself.
Sincerely,