Use This One Life Hack When You Are Feeling Anxious
Anxiety Life Hack from a Licensed Therapist
We all experience anxiety at some time or another. So, how should we be dealing with our moments of anxiety?
Here we go!
Use This One Life Hack When You Are Feeling Anxious
Anxiety touches us all in some way or another. For some it’s relatively minor, and for others it is paralyzing. How can you help yourself in moments of anxiety? To answer this question we can turn to some core practices that clients learn here at POD HEALTH.
Mindfulness (aka Present Moment Awareness)
Anxiety Rating Scale
Acceptance and Defusion
Paced Breathing
Anxiety Tracking
These 5 practices stacked together give us our hack!
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is where we begin. Mindfulness helps us better recognize what is happening in our body when we are feeling anxious. It helps be more in touch with the body. And, when you become more skilled at present moment awareness (PMA), you are able to notice when your anxiety is increasing faster. That will lead to less times when your anxiety gets really high. Catching it quicker will help you intervene sooner.
There is somewhat of a misconception about mindfulness. Some think that mindfulness is about “thinking about nothing” or about making you feel better. Unfortunately, those beliefs are not really accurate. Mindfulness or PMA helps you get better at feeling. That does not always mean you will be calm and blissful during mindfulness practice. Sometimes you will be asked to be more mindful of the difficult feelings you are experiencing, like anxiety.
Anxiety Rating Scale
Our next, and very important, step is understanding the anxiety rating scale. This scale will help you determine how to respond when feeling anxiety.
Here at POD HEALTH we use a 0-7 rating scale for anxiety.
0- no anxiety, completely calm. Fully functioning on daily tasks
1-3- low level anxiety- able to manage pretty well and can function pretty well
4-5- medium level anxiety- getting difficult to handle, but still able to function
6-7- High level anxiety- too difficult to handle at the moment
Take some time to get familiar with the scale and try to remember times when you have felt each of these different levels of anxiety.
Now, like I said before, we use this scale to help us navigate times when we are feeling anxious. If you are at a 0-5 rating, you should sit with your anxiety as best as you can. 6-7? Then you can use a coping skill to get you down to a 5 at which time you begin sitting with the anxiety.
Acceptance and Defusion
Step back, allow the anxiety to be there, and watch it.
When you are at a 0-5 level anxiety we are trying to practice mindful acceptance of anxiety and its sensations. YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO ANYTHING TO HELP YOUR ANXIETY! You will not make things any better, and will probably make things worse in the long term, if you step in to try to ease your anxiety. Your body knows how to recover from anxiety on its own. Our job is to step back (defuse) from the situation, accept that anxiety is here, and observe as it peaks and then resolves itself.
If you can do this repeatedly, then your body will get better and better each time at going through this habituation process. That’s the hard part. Sitting with anxiety does not feel great at all. It may be hard to accept the anxiety letting it just be there. But, that is the absolute best way to deal with anxiety long term. Avoidance of anxiety is what leads to bigger and bigger problems with it.
Paced Breathing
While you are sitting with your anxiety your focus will be only on your body and your breathing. You can use some paced breathing like 4 second inhale, pause, slow exhale. There are many types of paced breathing. 4, pause, slow exhale, is typically the one I like to start with when I am meeting with clients in session. But, feel free to find a different one that works for you.
The breathing is your anchor while you sit and feel your anxiety. Catch your mind wandering or thinking and bring your attention back to your breath and body. The mind loves to wander and think! So when it does that, gently escort your attention back to the breath and body.
That’s all you need to do. Breathe and Feel the sensations of anxiety.
Anxiety Tracking
It is best to then collect some data on yourself. Keeping track of this process will help you move through this process more quickly. It has been said that up to 40% of the improvement in anxiety comes from tracking the process and collecting data on yourself.
I find the best way to do this is to get either a small notebook or a note taking app on your phone. Create a small chart that will track these three things:
Date this is experience happening
Peak Anxiety Rating during the experience (0-7)
Time it takes for anxiety to decrease by half all on its own.
Over time you will find that it doesn’t take you as long to recover from anxiety, and that your anxiety does not spike as high so often. We are training our body to handle anxiety on its own without us getting in the way or making things worse.
Allowing yourself to feel anxiety fully is the first step in the process. Over time, with this training, your anxiety will be less problematic in your life. We are not trying to get rid of anxiety here. That would be unhelpful because we need some anxiety in our life. Rather, we are trying to teach the body to handle anxiety so that it does not interfere with our lives and values.
Until next time,
Drew
