How to Deal with Anxiety: An In-Depth Guide from a Madison, WI Anxiety Therapist
If you’re like most people, the thought of tackling your anxiety feels overwhelming. All you want is to feel better, and hoping your anxiety will go away has been a pretty good strategy so far! How would you even go about addressing it, even if you wanted to?
Each person is unique, and so is their anxiety. There is no exact formula for dealing with anxiety. But there are guidelines and steps that you can take that will likely benefit you.
The main thing to keep in mind is that your anxiety is telling you something.
Don’t expect your anxiety to disappear in a week. In fact, the goal is not to make anxiety disappear. Everyone experiences anxiety! Anxiety is a normal part of the human experience. The goal is to change your relationship with anxiety. Over time you can understand and process your anxiety better. This can allow you to use more effective coping skills and strategies for anxiety. All of these skills and practices can, over time, lessen the overall amount of anxiety you experience.
In this guide, I will break down the steps to dealing with anxiety into four categories:
How to deal with anxiety Step #1:
Notice what anxiety feels like for you
Sometimes anxiety is obvious, like if you feel nervous before a presentation. (And, feeling anxious before a presentation will likely make sense to you.) What may not be as obvious are things like muscle tension, overplanning, or feeling distracted. What anxiety feels like can range from a sense of dread, to irritation, to feeling nauseous or having difficulty breathing.
The more you know about what anxiety feels like, the better you will be able to recognize it. Anxiety feels different for each person, and shows up as either a physical symptom or an emotion (and most often both). Physical symptoms include things like heart pounding, feeling like you’re short of breath, getting nauseous. You might notice yourself sweating or feeling hot. If you are experiencing these kinds of symptoms, make sure you talk with your doctor about what you are experiencing in order to rule out other contributing medical conditions. Fidgeting and biting your nails can also mean you’re anxious. More ongoing physical signs of anxiety can be headaches and muscle tension.
You’ve likely heard people say, “I carry my stress in my shoulders.”
The ways that anxiety manifests emotionally are feelings like worry, feeling unsettled, overthinking. You might second guess yourself, overanalyze decisions, or overplan. Irritation might show up more than usual, or for no apparent reason.
In all of these signs, be aware that people are complex beings. Just because anxiety includes feeling nauseous or fidgeting doesn’t mean that every time you are nauseous or fidgeting you are anxious. It’s one of the things to consider when you observe yourself. It’s important to pay attention to physical symptoms, especially when they are severe. Again, it’s important to examine all of your experiences with a doctor.
Noticing what anxiety feels like is an ongoing exploration. Counseling for anxiety can make it easier. Read more about what anxiety feels like here.
How to deal with anxiety Step #2:
Learn coping skills for acute anxiety
When anxiety hits hard, you might feel frozen or unable to focus on anything except the anxiety. Often the physical signs of anxiety are the hardest to deal with, but things like intense dread can sometimes feel overpowering too. In these moments, using a coping skill for anxiety can help move you through the intense anxiety so that you can continue functioning.
When you experience intense anxiety, you might feel like everything is shutting down around you. You might not hear anything except your heart pounding. You might have moments that feel like you blacked out. You could feel like you can’t move, that the fear is paralyzing you. Or that you are so distracted by the anxiety that you can’t focus on anything else.
Using Grounding as a coping skill for anxiety
There are many coping skills to help you out here. You may have already learned some from an anxiety therapist or an anxiety app or workbook. One coping skill is grounding. Using grounding takes you out of the anxiety and back into the present moment. There are many kinds of grounding. Lisa Najavits, in her book Seeking Safety, breaks grounding down into three categories: physical, mental, and soothing.
Physical grounding uses any or all of your five senses to get you back into the present.
You can use your senses by pressing your feet into the floor or smelling a favorite lotion.
Using sight and sound, you could find three things that are red that you can see or describe what you can hear. Feeling the smooth sides of your cold water bottle would be a way you could use your sense of hearing to ground yourself.
Mental grounding looks like counting back from 100 by 7’s, naming cities that start with “A,” or describing your surroundings in great detail to yourself. Soothing grounding uses kindness to move you through the anxiety. You could say things like, “You are getting through this.” Reminding yourself of something you love can help distract and soothe you from the anxiety. You could think of someone you care about, a favorite poem, or what you are looking forward to eating for dinner.
Interested in more coping skills for anxiety? Here’s another blog about grounding and breathing techniques as coping skills for anxiety.
How to deal with anxiety Step #3:
Get to the root of anxiety
The number of times when you experience acute anxiety may keep increasing, even after you have learned good coping skills for anxiety. And you want to feel less anxiety, not more. One of the ways to help decrease the amount of anxiety you feel over the long term is getting to the root of anxiety. One of the ways that can help decrease anxiety is to explore the root cause of your anxiety.
Noticing what anxiety feels like for you and using coping skills to get you through moments of intense anxiety are key pieces of dealing with anxiety. They prepare you for the exploration of where the anxiety might be coming from. This process involves noticing what is going on when you experience anxiety. Your coping skills for anxiety will prove very useful here! When intense anxiety shows up, you’re not able to observe what’s going on.
Once you have moved through the intense anxiety using your coping skills for anxiety, you will be better equipped to pay attention to any surrounding events. Over time you might start to notice patterns, and more emotions. All of this is useful information, but not the end task. In order to move through the emotions, you’ll need to feel them. Feeling emotions can seem scary!
Here’s a tip: emotions are not as scary when you’re not alone.
Think about who could be a person to share your emotions with. It could be a friend, or an anxiety therapist. Getting to the root of anxiety can feel complicated and daunting. I’ve written more about the process of getting to the root cause of anxiety here.
How to deal with anxiety Step #4:
Build a long term coping strategy for anxiety
Getting to the root of anxiety takes curiosity, patience, and courage. While you are observing yourself and using coping skills for anxiety in situations of acute anxiety, you can build a practice of some kind of long term coping strategy. These long term coping strategies for anxiety, if done regularly, can gradually decrease the overall amount of anxiety that you experience. There are plenty to choose from. Progressive muscle relaxation and yoga are just some.
Progressive muscle relaxation is getting much more attention in the past few years, and you can find plenty of guided examples on YouTube. It’s a process of tensing and relaxing all (or many) of the muscles in your body on purpose, for a short period of time, and then letting that tension go. This practice of feeling tension and relaxation in your body regularly helps you to notice when tension shows up throughout the day. According to research by Johns Hopkins University, doing progressive muscle relaxation several times a week can decrease stress and anxiety and improve sleep.
Yoga is another long term coping strategy for anxiety for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that practicing yoga helps distract you from anxiety and focus on your body. Over time, this helps you feel more connected with your body.
Emotions are stored in your body, so feeling connected with your body and being able to calm your body down are really important when you’re trying to reduce anxiety.
Learn more about long term coping strategies for anxiety here.
How to deal with anxiety: it’s a process
As you can see, although there are guidelines, there is no formula to deal with your anxiety. As you learn more about yourself and the process, pay attention to what works for you and what doesn’t. If all of this feel overwhelming, start with a quick daily mental health break! The better you understand yourself, the more you will understand your anxiety (and vice versa). Your anxiety won’t go away entirely. To be human is to experience some anxiety! But the more you understand and process your anxiety, the more likely it is that your overall level of anxiety will decrease.
About the Author
Owner of Bronwyn Shiffer Psychotherapy based in Madison, WI, I love supporting women who want to experience less anxiety.
I provide counseling for anxiety, therapy for depression, therapy for HSPs, telehealth therapy for women in Massachusetts and online therapy in Wisconsin. Would you like therapy for anxiety to support you in dealing with anxiety?