Reduce Anxiety and Stress with Mindfulness:
Anxiety is a vicious cycle that is difficult to get out of. We are facing a psychological disorder that is a true pandemic in today’s society. Fighting stress and anxiety and reducing it is indeed a challenge for today’s generation. However, it can be fixed with mindfulness, meditation, and more important willpower.
But what exactly anxiety is, what symptoms does it present and how can we get out of this anxious state?
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a mental state of anticipation, in which we experience nervousness and restlessness. It is an unpleasant sensation that puts us in stress and tension. Anxiety is a normal response of our body, which interprets that we must be alert to an event close to time. However, some people are kidnapped by anxiety and report a series of inconvenient symptoms and signs including somatic and psychological.
The feeling of anxiety is particularly difficult to describe, it cannot always be related to a specific origin (medical results, an exam, financial distress, etc.) and it feeds on its own significance (such as postponement of pending tasks). Moreover, it is also related to the person’s response to difficult situations and mental power.
Fighting Anxiety and its Causes:
As mentioned above, it is difficult to face stress and anxiety, though not impossible.
In today’s article, we are going to explore five tips to combat tension and relax your mind. These five guidelines to reduce anxiety can help you mitigate its adverse effects and better understand its nature.
1. Learn to be your own Boss:
Anxiety is an unpleasant feeling that everyone wants to avoid. The problem is compounded when we decide to compensate for the state of anxiety by resorting to stereotyped and repetitive forms of behavior. These are behaviors that usually start unconsciously, are partly automatic, and can be more or less simple (stretching or pulling one’s hair, tapping one leg, etc.) or something more complex (taking trips to the fridge and eating something).
In addition to the adverse effect that these behaviors can have on our body, such as obesity or hair loss, letting ourselves be carried away by them has the disadvantage that it makes us enter a vicious circle: as they are so associated with periods of stress, they act as a reminder that the feeling you want to avoid is there. Therefore, to overcome anxiety it is convenient to recognize these stereotypical patterns of behavior and stop them.
2. Fighting Anxiety is fighting the “I’ll do it tomorrow”:
The anxiety periods may have been triggered by day-to-day elements that are related to work, obligations, and decision-making. For this reason, fighting anxiety also means recognizing the situations in which this feeling can lead to a self-fulfilling prediction in which the negative mood itself invites you to throw in the towel ahead of time.
Anxiety is one of the forms that fear can take off starting to do something that may go wrong and that, as a consequence, is put off time after time in a process called deferment. Inconsistently, these delays are what make anxiety a reason for being since thanks to them the obligation that generates stress is still there.
3. Divide your day-to-day into small pieces:
Surely you have realized that, when you start a task that you are lazy to do, it becomes more and more enjoyable and manageable. Something similar happens with anxiety: to keep your attention away from what causes tension, starting an activity is much more effective than thinking about starting that same activity.
However, being aware of the fact that anxiety acts as a burden when doing things we want to do is in itself an anxious source. If you want to make sure that what needs to be done is done without anxiety acting as a brake, there is nothing like breaking more complex tasks into short sequences. If you have to write a blog post, for example, the first task can be as simple as turning on the computer and opening a Word document. The following sequence should start from there and also be very short (write the article heading or write the first paragraph, etc.).
4. Take your Time:
The flip side of combating delay is making sure that we make good use of the time we spend resting since spending all day doing things to try to distract our attention can be exhausting. If we do not know the source of the anxiety, this coming and going of distracting activities can act as a reminder that we are anxious, and if the source of the anxiety is in the pending responsibilities, it can generate a feeling of distress and guilt. That is why it pays to be systematic with rest periods and make them allow a better alignment towards the objectives.
In addition, the breath control exercises that are included in activities such as meditation, Mindfulness, or tai chi exercises (an internal Chinese martial art practiced for defense training, health benefits, and meditation) are very useful to reduce the levels of stress that start all the anxiety machinery. Taking time to relax even if the body asks otherwise and making these moments do not last longer than necessary to adjust the hormonal levels well are two basic steps to reduce stress and anxiety.
5. Don’t try to make the anxiety go away:
It should be clear that you can only overcome and reduce stress and anxiety indirectly. As much as we try to ignore feelings of tension and fear, they will not go away just because our conscious mind asks it nicely.
In fact, trying to mentally suppress these biological processes is nothing more than a way of recognizing that this problem is there. To stop thinking of anxiety as a problem, you have to fight its symptoms by creating new patterns of behavior. The solution to fight stress and anxiety is not in the privacy of the mind itself but in the relationships between the body and the environment.
This article (How to Reduce Anxiety) is based on personal experience, a Study of the psychological state of people going through anxiety, and data collected from people working on stress and anxiety. So, we hope, it will be beneficial for you if you are going through any stage of anxiety.
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