Managing Your Anxiety – By Shahela Sheikh

How To Cope & Manage Your Anxiety – Written By Shahela Sheikh

How can you manage your anxiety?
Over the new decade, anxiety has become an increasing apprehension within our society. Your anxiety can be very detrimental to your livelihood. Mental health discussions and forums explore various ways that are scientifically proven to help manage the anxiety, that psychologists use in their practice.

Anxiety can happen at any-time given at any triggering situation. What are these triggers? You must know your triggers in order to manage your anxiety. Some of the common triggers are:

• A stressful job or work environment
• Genetics- anxiety sometimes could run in the family. This has been shown in research, where many psychologists have found that anxiety is sometimes genetic
• Trauma – past traumatic experiences could trigger anxiety
• Side effects of certain medicines
• Driving or travelling
• Chronic pain
• Caffeine
• Having another mental illness such as depression
• Phobias
• Certain situations or contexts, for some it may be public speaking or closed spaces
• Withdrawal symptoms from certain drugs

These are some of the common triggers, however, each individual is unique and some may have more than one trigger.

Managing your noxious anxiety

Anxiety can be very unpleasant, managing it can take away the discomfort and make it easier for you. Here are some of the ways you can manage it:

1. Challenging your thoughts: Challenging your negative thoughts about a possible situation can be helpful to get rid of those anxiety-causing thoughts. How you think is how you feel. It’s about self-talk. Think about different interpretations about the situation & it will become clearer how many positive approaches you may have to the
situation.
2. Slow breathing and progressive relation exercises: Diaphragm breathing improves your mood and relaxes you. Take slow but deep breathes by inflating your abdomen muscles when breathing in and deflating your abdomen muscles while breathing out, use this breathing exercise to relax your muscle tension as you do it repeatedly.
3. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle and exercising: Keep active by doing some physical activity. This elevates your mood. If you feel too anxious you could sweat it out by doing some exercises. Eating well, keeping social, spending some time with friends and family could actually help the anxiety to be more manageable. Yoga can also be very relaxing.
4. Write down your thoughts: If your anxiety overwhelms you keeping a ‘mood diary’ or a ‘worry diary’ could actually help you navigate through your mood. Writing down takes away scatterbrained thoughts, making it easier to identify thoughts that provide problem-focused solutions.
5. Adopt a therapy: Therapy could help you manage your anxiety. As a cognitive-behavioural therapist and psychologist, CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) is one of the most effective ways to manage your anxiety, as it can help you identify anxiety-causing situations and manage behaviours before they spiral.
6. Stay in the present moment: Most worries are from a cause of hypothetical situations; they are ‘perceived threats’ that cause worry and are not real-worry situations sometimes. Therefore, living within the present moment could help eliminate your worries. Planning for your future in the present moment, with the help of a professional consultant to advise you, could help you reduce anxiety.
7. Be brave: Last but not least, the mind can be our strength & could help you encounter your anxiety with firmness, by having a planned daily routine to exhibit your strength against harmful thoughts. Act of ‘avoiding’ can provide a short term relief, but can make you more anxious in the long term, therefore taking some little brave steps to deal with your anxiety-causing situation could become a healthy coping mechanism.

 

Shahela Sheikh – Psychologist

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