How to manage anxiety on yourself?
While all psychological and mental disorders are best dealt with by qualified doctors, there are methods that can be used at home. If you feel an anxiety attack coming on, try the following:
- Try to relax and feel your body. List the signs of your anxiety, do not run away from this feeling, but accept it.
- Do some breathing exercises - they will help you calm down quickly. Take a few deep breaths, the exhalations should be as relaxed as possible. Breathing is better with holding your breath in a row. Several cycles of such exercises normalize the condition.
- Learn to enter into a resourceful state. By this term, experts mean a sense of one's own strength. You should feel that you have enough internal resources to solve the problems that confront you at the moment. Try to remember the last time you experienced this feeling. Go back to that moment mentally or reproduce the situation in life. Each person has their own source of strength and joy. It can be meetings with loved ones, doing what you love or doing sports, talking with animals, walking in the woods, visiting a bathhouse and much more. Be sure to make time for activities that give you pleasure. This will reduce the feeling of anxiety.
- Try to visualize your body and identify where the anxiety is. Take a pencil in your hand, and then mentally draw a line from your anxiety to it. Then draw your feeling. No need to control or analyze what is happening, just let the hand move on its own. The drawing must be torn or burned. This exercise allows you to relieve tension at a particular moment.
- Be sure to review your work schedule. It is necessary to allocate time for proper rest and sleep. Particular attention should be paid to the diet.
- Try to protect yourself from negative information. Avoid watching TV shows and movies with dark negative overtones.
- It is necessary to realize and accept the fact that a person cannot fully control everything that happens around. You need to learn to trust the people around you. If anxiety is caused by situations that you cannot influence, then you need to change your attitude towards it.
- Break the habit of always expecting the worst. As soon as negative thoughts start to appear in your head, you need to tell yourself: “Stop!”. But you do not need to protect yourself from these thoughts, but you need to rethink them. It is necessary to separate reality and frightening fantasies.
By following these tips you can deal with anxiety on your own. But this requires sufficient willpower and a desire to change your life for the better. Getting rid of serious forms of anxiety disorders without visiting a specialist is quite difficult. Therefore, you should not postpone a visit to a psychotherapist if you notice signs of this or another psychological disorder.