Anxiety can take over suddenly and seemingly, without warning. I am here to share with you 5 tips for overcoming anxiety so that you can get back on track and enjoy your day.
- Learn Your Triggers: Triggers can be thoughts, behaviors, feelings, situations or even people. Its important to know what causes your anxiety to spike so that you can create a plan to effectively manage it when it happens or even prevent it from happening. Keep a journal every day writing down what your anxiety feels like, what your thoughts are, how intense it is on a scale from 1-10 and what is happening around you when it occurs. Try this Free Anxiety Trigger Tracker Worksheet I created to help you with this.
- Accept What You Cannot Control: Fear of losing control or being in a situation you can’t control can trigger anxiety especially when you have a chronic illness that can cause loss of control of whats happening in your body. This is a process – learn to let go of any expectation of outcome and don’t let fear take over. Everything will be ok and if we avoided everything we didn’t have control over, we would never experience anything!
- Maintain a Positive Attitude: This comes with practice. Negative thoughts and beliefs tend to be easier to believe and act upon than positive. Practice positive self talk through saying positive affirmations specific to your fear or worry. ‘I can control my thoughts and beliefs and feelings. I can accept that there are things I cannot control and I am able to let those things go.’
- Talk to Someone: Anxiety, worry and fear lives in our mind – when we can share these with a licensed professional or someone we trust, we can start to find and identify thought traps or faulty thinking patterns.
- Take a Time Out: When we were children, we often took time outs to sit and think about what we were saying, thinking or doing. As adults, we assume we no longer need these moments of self reflection – but we do! Take at least 3 ten minute breaks a day to reflect and reset. Take a walk outdoors, do a 10 minute exercise or draw in order to help ground yourself in order to fight or prevent negative thinking and build up of anxiety or stress.
Amanda Pratt, LCSW
727-939-5037
Want to learn more? Sign up for our email list below to get premium access to online courses, new blog posts and educational content! Once you sign up, you will get our FREE GIFT: The Stress Reduction Activities Worksheet!
Comments are closed.