Four Tips For Dealing With Anxiety

A blog post drawing on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to explain a four-step approach to dealing with anxiety.

Recognition

Your heart’s beating especially fast. Maybe your muscles twitch. It’s hard to focus on anything. Maybe you can’t sleep, and you find yourself drenched in sweat. You’ve gotten lost in a spiral of negative thinking and you don’t even realize it. You feel like something terrible is about to happen. 

You imagine scenario after scenario with terrible outcomes. Your coworkers don’t like you and you’ll get fired. Your partner might get into an accident. An asteroid is about to hit planet Earth. Or the next pandemic will be even more lethal. Maybe this isn’t how you feel at all, it just feels like something is wrong and everything is about to end.

All this is racing through your mind, while you’re sitting down on a couch, and it’s a beautiful day. The fridge is filled with food. Everything is fine. Except for the feeling you have. 

This is called anxiety. Nervousness, self-doubt, catastrophizing—they all go hand in hand.

You can feel anxiety without even knowing that’s what you’re feeling. But names have power. Being able to identify something when it’s happening awards you a degree of agency. When we don’t know what is really ailing us, then finding solutions, if there even is one, becomes much harder. 

You can sit there and endlessly repeat all the things that you have to do, and all the ways in which you’ll fail. But you know it goes nowhere. Yet, you’re stuck. Now imagine, for a moment, that amidst all of that ruminating, you were to suddenly say: “This is anxiety.” 

It’s not the work presentation that’s causing your heart to beat faster. It’s not your relationship problems keeping you up, or the offensive comment a friend made—it’s your thoughts about them. It’s anxiety. And those worries are triggering your anxiety, making it worse.

Good. Now you’ve recognized it. You might find that by doing that, the weight of the feeling becomes lighter. You start to see the negative thoughts as symptoms of anxiety, not as truths. They’re just the clouds of a storm, which will eventually pass, but you’re safe. 

Acceptance 

The second step to dealing with your anxiety is by accepting its presence. 

You accept it like you would bad weather. It’s there, and it simply won’t go away just because you tell it to. In fact, wishing it would go away makes it worse. The denial makes the experience more painful.  

But it’s one thing to resist the feeling, it’s quite another to get swept away by or wallow in it. “Feel it, don’t feed it,” a meditation guru once told me. You become aware of the racing thoughts and uncomfortable feelings, but that doesn’t mean you contribute to them. 

This acceptance allows you to take a step back and witness what’s happening. You’re neither resisting nor reinforcing what you’re experiencing. You’re simply observing the storm taking place.  

It’s interesting because, as some neuroscientists say, you are the storm! You are that chaotic complexity of interconnected neurons. But you are also the observer, and the observer doesn’t get swept away by the storm. The observer sits within the stillness amidst the chaos.

There’s nothing worse than feeling bad about feeling bad. So, you accept the situation. “I feel bad. I’m worried. It’s anxiety. That’s ok.”

Why accept something that feels bad, you ask?

Because anxiety is a natural part of the human experience. We're wired for it. As foragers, we evolved to anticipate the possibility of a saber-toothed lion awaiting us on our way to get water, or of a rival tribe attempting to ambush us. There were many threats to worry about and be prepared for.

Think about it: we feared getting eaten. We feared hunger and disease, or a careless accident that could cost us our lives. We worried that we weren’t good enough. Not being fast or strong enough, not knowing how to cooperate with our tribe, could mean not surviving. Feeling that doubt and anxiety, in a way, kept us on our toes. It helped us stay alive and find ways to make life better. Not only did we survive, we thrived. But we felt anxiety as we did it.

For most of us, those times of do-or-die, sink or swim, are long gone. The problem is, the software is still running—on autopilot. It's how we’re programmed. Anxiety is a byproduct of evolution. That means it’s in our genes to feel as though nothing is ever good enough and to worry about things going wrong. And that’s ok.

That’s why acceptance is crucial. Make peace with yourself. Don’t be upset that you doubt yourself and feel worried. Recognize what you’re feeling. Recognize those thoughts. And accept them. Accept that even though the brooding may not go away forever, your identification with it can. It may seem counterintuitive, but acceptance is the starting point from which change follows. 

Gratitude 

How can you accept yourself, if you don't feel good enough, if you don't make more money, have a better body, etc.? 

As we saw in the previous tip, anxiety, self-doubt, and worrying, are inevitable conditions of being human—nothing is ever good enough, and things could always go wrong. 

But if there is a foundation of recognition and acceptance, you can catch yourself in those moments of anxiety and extreme self-doubt. 

You see how the spiral of negative thoughts and uncomfortable feelings are like a program; they don’t necessarily mean anything, they can just be background noise.

It’s here, in this place of observation that you can begin cultivating the art of choosing how to respond to your thoughts and feelings, as opposed to denying or obeying them. 

Start by training yourself to focus on what’s good in your life. Choosing gratitude in a moment of anxiety is not as simple as making a selection on a multiple-choice test. It takes practice. You’ve been in the habit of resisting or identifying with and believing everything you think and feel.

Now that you can recognize and accept what’s happening, you can begin rewriting the program. In the face of what’s largely involuntary thinking, you practice intentional, voluntary thinking. You practice finding gratitude. 

As one part of your brain mindlessly ruminates on what you lack, another part of your brain learns to mindfully focus on what you have.

You ask, how can I be grateful for what I have when I don’t have what I want?

I’ll tell you a little secret: even if you got what you wanted, you’d find yourself worrying about losing it and thinking about what you still don’t have.

Wanting never ends. Neither does worrying. Again, we’re wired that way.

Examples abound of celebrities who seem to have everything anyone could ever want, and yet they end up end up with chronic substance abuse problems or taking their own lives.

Why? What are they missing? What’s lacking in the life of someone who apparently has it all?

Inside of every one of us, a void palpitates. It seethes with an emptiness longing for fulfillment. It's an existential void that’s part of being alive. All the drugs, sex, fame, fortune, and money will never quench its thirst or satiate its hunger. 

Not even raising a family, a successful career, and marriage can quell this everlasting anxiety that comes from worrying about losing what we have and yearning for what we don’t. 

The only thing that can ease this existential angst embedded within who we are, is our ability to sit with that discomfort, accept what we feel, accept ourselves, and find gratitude for the moment, for being alive.

Focusing on your breathing

A simple Google search will bring up reputable scientific studies proving the mental and physical benefits of mindfulness. The beauty of this is that you can actually engage in mindfulness at any time of the day, and you don’t have to repeat mantras or practice special types of breathing—all of which are great—but not crucial. 

Catching yourself in a spiral of negative thinking is the first step of starting what we know as mindfulness, which is a meditative technique. The thoughts continue, but now you’re observing them, not fusing with them. You feel nervous, but you’re allowing that feeling to flow instead of running from or getting swept away by it. 

And while you feel your fast heartbeat and the heaviness in your chest, while your mind races from one concern to the next, you’re centered, accepting what’s happening. Then you think up things to feel grateful for: a roof over your head, food in the fridge, your good health, family, friends, the ability to breathe—anything you know that is good in your life.

Now your focus has begun. This is your center, your anchor within the storm. You’re breathing. You’re focusing on how your chest and belly rise and fall with each inhalation and exhalation. Through your nose, you can breathe in for 5 seconds, hold your breath for two, then exhale for as long as you can, hold for two. Repeat. 

There are many possibilities. But you can also just breathe normally and be aware of your chest and stomach rising and falling. The negative thoughts, the nervousness, will begin to recede, and you can watch them from a safe distance. 

Every time you find yourself caught up in the storm, you return to the center. The place where you observe, find gratitude and focus on your breathing.

It doesn’t matter if this feels ridiculous. You’re proving to yourself that you’re not a slave to the autopilot mode of your mind, that there’s a part of you that can step back from the stream of anxiety, which runs all by itself. You’re exhibiting agency by voluntarily taking action in the face of what is an involuntary feeling or thought.

Conclusion

Of course, putting these tips into practice isn’t easy. Like getting fit or becoming good at an instrument, it takes conscious effort and persistence.

The goal is to turn these exercises into a new habit, one you maintain effortlessly, like brushing your teeth. That takes time and self-compassion. Sometimes, you may falter, which means you forgive yourself and keep trying. Whatever little you can do routinely, is better than nothing, and better than doing too much, but then stopping altogether. 

It's the small, repeatable actions that end up building structure, that end up paving the way towards improvement.  

All of this is not to say that by learning to deal with your anxiety, suddenly all of your problems are solved. Life is hard and filled with legitimate concerns. The last thing we need is to layer on top of these concerns with unnecessary preoccupations and ruminations that don’t do anything to help us. They’re just extra weight. 

The tips described here are designed to empower you to confront hardships and adversity from a place of calm, with a clear head, rather than from a place of anxiety and with a cluttered mind.

As you get better at recognizing anxiety when it arises, accepting it for what it is, finding gratitude, and focusing on your breath, you may find that all your other concerns don’t feel as burdensome. You realize that as long as you have your basics—food, health, shelter, clothing, friends, and family— everything else becomes more manageable. 

Rejection and failure become the stepping stones on your journey, and the journey is what you embrace. The end result, once obtained, won't fill the void, that endless longing for more. But you’ll have discovered a newfound ability to sit calmly with that void, instead of running from it or being run by it. 

Remember the simple formula for dealing with anxiety. It’s available to you at all times of the day: recognition, acceptance, gratitude, and focused breathing. Practice this, and you will see wonderful results.