Five Ways to Calm Down When Anxiety Spikes
When you are feeling anxious, all you really want is to calm down, but the harder you try, the harder it is to relax. Relaxation is not something that you can achieve by trying harder.
Even when you are feeling calm – try thinking to yourself 'I MUST be calm' over and over. You'll probably notice yourself feeling less calm the longer you do it.
This feels like a paradox and never more so than when it feels like anxiety is taking over certain aspects of your life. All you want is for it to stop, but the harder you try to push it away the stronger it comes on.
In when people come to see me for anxiety therapy in Worthing, we will usually work on three things:
Identifying and changing the subconscious story their anxiety is based upon.
Reducing or resolving the unnecessary and excessive anxiety from their body and mind.
Helping them step out of their anxiety fear loop.
Building their concepts of more positive moods and emotions.
It's the third objective that I want to talk about in this article – helping step out of the anxiety fear loop.
Everyone experiences anxiety in some way or another, but this is the key difference between those who experience it and those who suffer from anxiety. Fear loops.
Your anxiety is an experience that is unique to you. You have learned it. It is your mind and body functioning just fine, but if it's a problem, then your relationship with it needs to change. Here are some insights into how to step out of the fear loop with your anxious experience:
Stop believing anxiety is a negative emotion.
Anxiety is widely explained as fight or flight response, which is a very useful response if danger is bearing down on you, but it is not useful if there is no threat present. Most of the things we are anxious about these days cannot be solved by fighting or running away, so if you experience your anxiety as fight or flight (no matter how biologically accurate that description is) then your mind is looking for fighting or running options that do not exist. What are you supposed to do? You will get stuck in fight or flight.
What if you can experience anxiety as a neutral warning system? If this happens I'm going to get hurt. If that happens I'm going to lose a lot of money. If this happens, my friend will never speak to me again. Sometimes you may need to do something about the warning and sometimes you may not. Sometimes the warning is simply wrong. Either way, you do not need to be overwhelmed by it.
When you are feeling anxious, look at the warning – is it right or wrong? Is the warning true useful or not useful? If it's true and useful then what do you need to do with it?
Understand that anxiety is not a feeling.
There is a lot of interesting research out there that emotions are universal experiences, but I do not believe that. I have seen around 1000 people for anxiety related issues many of whom have grown up and lived within a few miles of each other within West Sussex, and none of them doing it the same. One person describes their anxiety as tingles, and another as a shortness of breath, someone else describes a hot prickly feeling while someone else says they feel heavy and slow.
Anxiety is not a feeling, but you have certain physical sensations that you have come to recognise as anxiety, and so you will experience those feelings in situations in which you expect to feel anxious. That is a feedback loop. It is just how the mind works. It's the same for happiness – we all do that differently as well, and every other mood and emotion.
If anxiety is not a feeling, then is any feeling really anxiety?
The thing is, as soon as you experience that feeling as anxiety it feels more threatening, and if you learn to fear it then it gets worse.
When you start to 'feel anxious', look for the sensations in your body and ask yourself what does that sensation feel like without the label of anxiety.
Understand that thoughts are harmless.
It is possible to have an anxious experience while having a nice cup of tea as the sun comes up on a Tuesday morning while nothing is wrong. This is likely to be because you have had a thought of an uncomfortable situation in the future or a traumatic event in the past. Your body identifies with that thought as future or past, and begins a stress response.
Some of the traumatic stories I hear about the things my client's have survived are incredible – the terrible ways they were treated, or the pain they endured. I feel sympathy and respect for how they survived, but when working with trauma, it’s my job to help my clients realise that regardless how harmful an event was in the past, the thought of it is not harmful. Regardless of how harmful an event in the future might be, the thought of it is harmless.
You can imagine yourself lost at sea, but the thought of you lost at sea is not you lost at sea. It is just a piece of information that looks like you and looks like the sea. It is harmless, regardless how harmful the situation in real life would be.
We can suffer unnecessarily when we mistake our thoughts for reality.
The past and future are just thoughts that are happening now labelled past or labelled future. They are imagination.
So if you find yourself feeling anxiety when everything is fine because of a thought about something bad happening in the past or the future, ask yourself 'is it happening?' If it's not happening now, then it is just a thought, and thoughts are harmless.
Ask yourself 'where's the threat'?
So, anxiety responses occur when you mistake a thought for reality and you enter a fear loop with the thought, or a feeling.
If a thought is not reality, it is just a harmless piece of information. Is the thought therefore a threat?
If a feeling is just a sensation in your body experienced at the same time as an anxiety story. Is the feeling therefore a threat?
If you feel anxious and ask yourself where's the threat? And the answer is a thought or feeling, then is there really a threat? When you understand in body and mind that there is no threat present, there's no reason for the anxiety experience to be there.
Accept instead of resist.
The final piece in the fear loop puzzle is resistance. Carl Jung said: "What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size." The that trying to calm down and relax does not work well when anxious is because you are resisting it.
Trying to push anxiety away can give make it feel like a threat which just feeds back into the anxiety. So, how about the opposite?
We have ascertained that anxiety is not a negative emotion, that anxiety is not a feeling and a feeling is therefore not anxiety, that neither thoughts or sensations are a threat. If anxiety is not a threat, does it matter then if those thoughts and feelings are there?
When you experience anxiety, instead of distracting yourself, ignoring it, medicating yourself, arguing with it or trying to justify it, how about simply looking it in the eye? Let the thoughts be there, as they are not a threat, tell yourself 'I am okay for those thoughts to be there.' Let the sensation be there, as it is not a threat, tell yourself 'I am okay for the feeling to be there.' The anxiety experience will not be able to get worse, it may even subside.
FAQ
What causes anxiety?
Anxiety is often caused by mistaking thoughts of threat for reality, and becoming stuck in a fear loop with your own thoughts and feelings. A thought of a threat is not a threat. If you can learn to see through this illusion you will be more comfortable in your own mind.
Can anxiety go away completely?
Hypnosis can be a very effective way to resolve unnecessary and excessive anxiety, but it would not be healthy to get rid of anxiety completely. Anxiety is a natural process to keep us safe. If it is a problem you want to look to changing your relationship with the process, rather than trying to stop the process itself.
Do I need medication to treat anxiety?
Taking medication to treat anxiety enforces the idea that something is wrong which can feed back into the anxiety. A better treatment is to learn how to experience anxiety without fear so it does not get out of hand.
If you would like to delve deeper into these ideas and explore your own anxious experiences in a supportive and compassionate way, then I would be very happy to hear from you. Please click through to my contact page for the best way to contact me for you.