Understand your anxiety and deal with it.

In this article, I’ll briefly explain what anxiety is and how we can learn to deal with it. This is a huge topic and the current pice of writing is just an introduction to it. This article will attempt to provide a quick overview of this complex emotion and ways to deal with it.

What is anxiety:

Anxiety is a universal experience which often pulls us away from success and happiness. It's an unpleasant and disturbing feeling which we don't want to feel. But all of us have felt it and hated it. Who can forget the heart palpitations, the increase in breathing, the sweating of palms, the flushing of face and trembling body movements? Be it an upcoming exam, viva, project deadline, an interview, a presentation or a performance opportunity, anxiety creeps in and attacks our body and mind. Just remember a recent situation when you ended up avoiding a task in order to escape from the anxiety it brings. Were you successful in warding off this unwanted guest completely or did you end up being more disturbed and upset in the long run? 

Do you think it may have led to missed opportunities and deteriorated performance even when you could have done better. Well, there are slim chances that your answer is in your favour in the long term. So, what can be done to get the best out of the potential situations in life which offer a breeding ground for this foe? 

Let us first understand this deep rooted emotion. A person feels anxiety when they perceive a threat to their wellbeing This happens at both neurological and cognitive level. At the neurological level, the autonomic system reacts and all bodily symptoms are felt. And at the cognitive level, the person’s mind generates automatic negative thoughts which predict failure and impending catastrophe. Both work in combination with each other and make us feel miserable. When the event is over, the physical symptoms gradually go away but reappear as soon as a similar situation arises or when the automatic thoughts get activated due to perceived threat. Although the scope of understanding and managing this complex emotion is vast and requires more profound knowledge and deep work, the present article aims to give some quick tips to practice whenever one perceives that anxiety is hampering their goals.

Tips and techniques to try:

1. Practice mindfulness:  Become more aware of your body sensations, thoughts, feelings and external environment triggers. For this, you can set some time aside and start observing and noting them down on your laptop or phone or diary. As you become more aware and start noticing even slight discomfort, you become more capable of intervening in the complex process which leads to a cascade of unpleasant consequences.

2. Deep breathing exercises: Tons of breathing exercises are available online for you to check out and try in order to calm your body and mind immediately so that taking charge of your emotions by intentionally thinking in an adaptive way becomes relatively easier. One such popular and effective technique is called “box breathing” or “square breathing” in which you sit in a comfortable position and repeat a process of inhaling, holding, exhaling and holding your breath for around 4 seconds. 

3. Identifying automatic negative thoughts: Psychologists use various techniques of cognitive restructuring and the first step for many of them is to identify one’s negative thoughts and acknowledge their role in generating unpleasant emotions like anxiety. Remember you may have seen a friend/classmate who unlike you never got too anxious when exams commenced. Acknowledge that the reason behind this striking difference is mainly due to different thinking patterns.

4. Debating with your automatic negative thoughts: Almost all of the time, these automatic thoughts are not objective in nature. So, you can learn to question their validity by checking for scientific evidence or data. Most important of all, you can question yourself whether holding on to this thought or belief would do any good to you in the long run. 

5. Coming up with an alternative adaptive thought: If you have successfully been able to debate your irrational thoughts causing unnecessary anxiety, the next task for you is to come up with a more realistic and helpful thought whenever you face a difficult situation.For eg, instead of having a thought like- “I am going to fail in this exam”, it’s better to intentionally think something like “I really want to pass this exam (and I’ll use all available resources and time wisely) but if still I fail, that’s not the end of this world and next time I shall try harder.” You can try repeatedly telling both thoughts to yourself aloud and see if there is any difference in the intensity of the anxiety you feel about your exams. 

6. Practicing the new thought and attitude: If you believe that this new realistic thought or attitude may be helpful to you in reducing the intensity and ill effect of anxiety, you can then keep on practicing it in all similar situations in order to become less affected by anxiety.

If you are able to practice these techniques or similar ones over and over, it’s very much likely that you will see significant change in your anxiety levels and the way you think. However, you may be thinking that all these “tips” are easier to write down in an article but difficult to bring to actual practice. And you are correct in your assumption because it is difficult but definitely possible. And yet if you find it too difficult to do it yourself, professional help is always available and you can talk to trained psychologists like me. All the best in your self-improvement journey!