In some cases, feeling anxious can be helpful. It makes you compose yourself, pushes you to make decisions. However, strong or prolonged anxiety always acts negatively: it deprives you of strength, spoils your mood, worsens your well-being. How can you help yourself when anxiety is too much?
The first thing to do when trying to cope with anxiety is to stop denying that feeling. Of course, by stubbornly suppressing and denying the anxiety state, you can drive out fears, experiences and anxiety from consciousness. However, these feelings will remain locked inside, concentrate in the subconscious and continue to carry out their negative impact.
"Suppressed" anxiety runs the risk of spilling out through nightmares or insomnia, through psychosomatics, exacerbation of chronic diseases, through mood swings and severe irritability. Therefore, trying to lower the degree of anxiety, you need to consciously accept this feeling, as if to come to terms with its existence, and not try to escape, deceiving yourself.
One of the most effective psychological methods of dealing with fear and anxiety is to deliberately maximize negative feelings. This method acts as if by contradiction. Very often, when a person who is in an anxious state, they try to calm down, convince that everything is in order or everything will work out, this only leads to the fact that the anxiety intensifies, the fear becomes completely uncontrollable. Approximately the same result can be achieved by trying to calm yourself down on your own. Self-belief and positive attitudes work, but not when the creature is clouded by fearful thoughts and images. Therefore, many psychologists advise to literally bring anxiety and fear to the point of absurdity, so that these feelings at a certain moment simply lose their strength.
Australian scientists from the University of Tasmania argue that even minimal, but regular physical activity can reduce anxiety and get rid of obsessive fears. Every 2-3 hours you need to get up and do at least a light warm-up, switch between passive existence and active actions. This will “unload” the brain, allow internal tension to be released, reduce the amount of cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline in the blood, and improve well-being.
Smells and music are affordable and effective remedies when you need to calm down quickly.
Among the aromas, it is recommended to give preference either to your favorite scents, or to those options that act in a relaxing way on the nervous system. These include mint, lavender, coniferous aromas. To lift your mood, you should turn to the smells of chocolate, coffee or citrus fruits.
Music, just like smells, you need to choose something pleasant and beloved. It is not necessary to give preference only to relaxation compositions or classics. However, it is better to refrain from dramatic, disturbing or too aggressive music.
Any meditation techniques and classes perfectly fight against feelings of anxiety, with nervous anxiety. You can sit in the lotus position or lie relaxed with your eyes closed for 10-15 minutes, concentrating on your own breathing and the feeling of calmness that gradually arises inside. You can do drawing, embroidery, sculpting, or origami. Psychologists have proven that when a person does something with his hands, the level of anxiety decreases markedly. The main thing is that the chosen activity is to your liking and helps to distract yourself.
