How to Take Control of Anxiety
Anxiety manifests itself in your life through physical responses, emotions, and thoughts.
Avoid giving in to the physical response your anxiety is pushing you toward; anxiety will seek more reassurance and cannot be satisfied.
Emotions “compete” for space in your mind, so work on generating emotional states like calm and confidence that will compete with anxiety.
Grounding yourself in reality can help combat catastrophic thinking.
You don’t have to be haunted by anxiety.
But many people are—in fact, 40 million adults (18%) in the United States struggled with significant anxiety last year.
Although everyone has anxiety from time to time, it is usually short-lived and does not keep you from living a full life. Common, everyday anxiety doesn’t prevent you from doing the things you would like to do.
Run-of-the-mill anxiety doesn’t make a big impression on your life.
But serious forms of anxiety are a different story. They become a constant shadow that dogs your day and create a great deal of distress. These sorts of anxiety seriously degrade your quality of life.
If you have this sort of anxiety, now is the time to do something about it. Right now is the time to get your life back.
But how?
There are some very simple steps you can follow that work for most people.
That’s not to say it is easy.
Just like running a marathon is simple … keep putting one foot in front of the other. But performing that simple task for 26 miles is hard.
So here is the deal. If you really want to rid yourself of anxiety, to free yourself from this emotional ball and chain, you’ll find it is worth the effort to put in the hard work.
Know Your Enemy (3 Parts of Anxiety)
To better understand how to rid yourself of unrealistic fears it is helpful to know the three ways in which anxiety is experienced. That is, how anxiety manifests itself in one’s life. These are listed below with examples.
Physical Responses
Tension in the muscles of your shoulders, stomach, or chest
Heart palpitations
Racing heart
Shallow breathing
Upset stomach
Shaking
Physical sense of ‘fight or flight’
Dilated pupils
Lightheadedness
Emotions
Fear
Dread
Alarm
Apprehension
Panic
Unease
Agitation
Thoughts
That you will lose control
That you will be embarrassed
That you will be rejected
That you will fail
That others will be harmed/die
That you will be hurt
That you will be trapped in an unpleasant situation
You can remember these three symptoms clusters with the acronym PET (physical sensations, emotional experiences, and catastrophic thoughts).
Now let me point out a key aspect that should not be overlooked. These three components of anxiety interact with each other. They reinforce one another, and by doing so create a cycle that helps solidify a near-constant anxious state of mind.
Think about it this way: someone who is about to ask for a raise begins to imagine his or her boss responding by criticizing them, perhaps telling them, “Get out of my office before I fire you for being so stupid. I can’t believe you would bother me with such a request.”
Those thoughts are likely to create some anxious emotions, which in turn lead to physical symptoms (shallow breathing, tightened muscles in the shoulders or chest, etc.). The anxiety and physical symptoms mimic a fight or flight response, which in turn prompts thoughts about how to avoid this imagined humiliation.
Pretty soon the person decides not to ask for a raise at all. Ouch. That hurts. It reinforces a feeling of being meek, weak, and unworthy.
Anxiety has been reinforced. An opportunity to ask for a raise and, no matter what the response, to thereby grow stronger and more confident has been lost.
But here is the good news. If you break any link in the PET cycle, you greatly diminish the power of anxiety.
So the question becomes, “What hammer can you use to smash one or more of these components?”
Let’s look at each component to find the answer.
Physical Responses
The crucial thing here is that you don’t give in to whatever response your anxiety is pushing you toward.
For example, if you worry that the front door was not locked, even after having checked it, don’t go back and check the door again.
If you are concerned about an illness and find yourself Googling about this health concern, only to become more fearful every time you hop on the internet, stop Googling.
The key, again, is to resist the temptation to reduce your fear by doing the very thing that your anxiety is urging you to do. A couple of stories from people I’ve known will illustrate this point nicely.
A woman I knew was fearful of intruders. Upon returning home each evening, she would spend a half-hour searching through her small apartment. Every nook and cranny needed to be explored to see if someone was hiding in her home. Even the refrigerator was examined.
When telling me about her SWAT team-like approach to coming home every evening, she laughed, “I know it sounds crazy. I know it makes no sense. But it makes me feel so much better after I check everything out.”
That was an important insight. Her tedious evening home search relieved her anxiety. She knew it made no sense, but it served an important purpose—anxiety relief.
What she did not know is that every time she gave in to her fears and searched her apartment, it strengthened the hold that anxiety had on her. Easier to search the apartment and gain immediate (although temporary relief) than to resist and eventually break the fear that drove this behavior.
Thankfully, she eventually decided she was fed up with this nightly routine. She pushed back by refusing to search for intruders in her apartment.
Within a short time, the anxiety lifted. Not right away. It took a couple of weeks. But she stuck with it and became free of her fears.
Another person I knew was very anxious about having a heart attack. His doctor had checked him out thoroughly and reassured him that his heart was healthy. “But it keeps skipping a beat and at times my heart starts racing” he replied.
“Yes, I know,” his doctor said. “That’s not because you have a problem with your heart. That is happening because you get very anxious.”
My friend was momentarily reassured, but within a couple of days his fears were back strong as ever. He decided to take his blood pressure and pulse once a day. At first this worked to reduce his anxiety. Then he became anxious and started to check his blood pressure and pulse twice a day.
Again, this increased self-monitoring reduced his anxiety … but only for a short while. Within a couple of weeks, he was checking his blood pressure and pulse every hour.
You see how anxiety works? It always asks for more reassurance. But whatever you provide is never enough. Anxiety is rapacious, never satisfied. You might as well offer a shark one of your legs hoping it will not come back for the other.
The story has a happy ending. My friend eventually decided to altogether stop taking his blood pressure and checking his pulse. Within a week or two, the anxiety about his heart was insignificant. What’s more, he felt free and happy.
Emotions
You need to generate an emotional state that will compete with anxiety.
What does this mean?
Emotions exist on a continuum. Think of joy and anger. Each one of these feelings anchors an extreme end on a continuum of emotion.
If you take out a pen, or pencil, and place it on Joy it will not be on Anger. Yes, I know, obvious. This is similar to how your mind works.
It is nearly impossible to feel extremely angry and joyful at the same time.
These emotions compete for ‘emotional space’ inside your mind.
The same holds true for anxiety. Its opposite is calm confidence.
This is why many therapists who work with anxious clients spend a lot of time teaching them how to calm their emotions. You cannot be both calm and anxious at the same time, so learning how to calm yourself can be very effective.
Other emotional states can also work as antidotes to anxiety. Laughter and humor can be very powerful ways to push back against fear.
I’ve also seen clients who are able to use anger as a competing emotion. One man I know became furious at how his fear of driving kept him ‘a prisoner’ in his own home, and made him feel weak.
One day, as he sat at home waiting for groceries to be delivered (the driver was running late), his anger grew. “It felt like I was some small child sitting there waiting for my mother to come and feed me.”
His anger motivated him to grab the car keys and drive to the store. Pushing the cart through the isles he decided to buy himself a nice steak, then dropped by the pastry section and bought a dozen donuts. After that, he just kept shopping … with a vengeance. Eventually, he checked out and loaded the groceries into his car.
On the drive home he felt so liberated he decided to stop by the park and enjoy a box of Cheetos while sitting on a bench. Even fed the squirrels (OK, Cheetos and squirrels are not a good mix but he was feeling expansive).
By the time he returned home, he had a new perspective on going outside. Did it still make him anxious? Sure, but not nearly as much as it had before. It was a good start to getting his life back.
Thoughts
Changing your thinking can be helpful, although it is not as powerful as changing behavior, or generating a competing emotion. Surprising, yes?
The reason for this is that many times a person will already know that there is nothing to worry about and yet remain fearful.
You see, the person already has the ‘head knowledge.’ What they need is to find a way to get this understanding also rooted in their gut (or heart … pick whatever organ system you prefer).
Here is an example. Another friend of mine is afraid of flying. I can tell her about the safety record of airlines, discuss the numerous mechanical checks done on each commercial airliner every day, etc. She will nod, tell me that’s impressive, and still grow anxious at the thought of flying.
I’ve not touched the anxiety by reciting facts with which she is already familiar (which begs the question of why I would do this, but that’s a question for another day).
What is true of my friend and her fear of flying applies to many people. Their anxiety is not grounded in reality.
Think about the fear of public speaking as another common example. Can it turn out badly? As someone who has done their fair share of public speaking, I can say with great authority that it’s possible to ‘crash and burn.’
But is it the end of the world? Would a bad public speech be the end of your career, your reputation, or a black mark that defines your life? Of course not.
So the fear is not grounded in reality.
With all of this in mind, you may be wondering then what the point is of trying to change your anxious thoughts?
The greatest benefit is that it helps to slow down the rate at which anxiety accelerates.
It acts as a brake. Most often it does not get rid of the anxiety. But it can slow down the momentum of fear. Reminding yourself of the reality of a situation is a way to ground yourself. By doing so, you often slow down the rate at which your emotional and physical symptoms are growing.
That’s a pretty great thing because it buys you time to think more clearly about how to use other skills to fight back in the moment.
Practice Is Essential
So the key to getting rid of anxiety is to attack it by not giving in to the fear (don’t perform your normal behavioral response).
This is much easier to do if you have a way to reduce the intensity of the fear (calming techniques, humor, anger).
Lastly, reminding yourself of the reality of a situation (e.g., could an intruder really be hiding in my fridge?) can slow the momentum with which anxiety grows.
After doing these steps you need to repeat them … multiple times over the course of a month or two.
Why do you need to keep repeating these exercises?
Because you are literally rewiring your brain. Hebb’s Law states that “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
When you push back against anxiety, you begin to break apart the normal brain circuitry that keeps you anxious. What’s more, by behaving in the opposite way that the anxiety is pushing you to act, you begin to rewire your brain in healthy ways. Cells (neurons) are recruited to fire together in healthy ways that do not stimulate the fear centers in your brain.
Your actions literally begin the process of creating new circuitry that makes it easier to keep anxiety in check.
This is similar to learning a new skill. For example, if you were interested in becoming a skilled guitar player you would devote yourself to daily practice. What was difficult in the first month would be second nature by the sixth month.
That is because new brain circuits had been developed. With enough practice, they would be firing on automatic. The effort necessary in the first month would no longer be needed.
The same is true for rewiring your brain to become less anxious.
Conclusion
There you have it. Break free of anxiety by doing the following:
Behave the way you wish to feel (behavior leads, feelings follow).
Tap into healthier emotional responses that compete with anxiety.
Ground yourself in reality, fight against catastrophic thinking.
When you start out doing these things it will feel awkward. It might even feel horrible. Pay no attention.
This is normal. You know it is. Remember when you first decided to get in shape and began to work out? It felt awkward and difficult. Afterward, your muscles ached. You might have even felt weaker rather than stronger.
But if you kept going, if you persevered, then before long you were making progress in the gym. Your stamina and strength grew. Then one day, you looked in the mirror and realized that you have morphed into ‘Master of the Universe.’
The same thing is true when you begin to push back against your fears.
My challenge for you is to spend the next month waking up determined to challenge yourself and do hard things. Face your anxiety.
Don’t settle for having fear as a constant companion. Break free and live your life more fully.