Real anxiety hacks that worked for me!

I have spent most of my adult life battling a really debilitating anxiety disorder - but the good news is I've learned how to handle it and prevail, so today I'm going to share some of my secret top tips on handling anxiety along with some hacks I've learned that literally changed my life! 

1. Accept it and stop pushing it away!

How often do you tell yourself that you are going to "overcome"anxiety and become "anxiety free."

The truth is that I've found that those kind of statements are part of the problem. I spent years of my life trying to rid myself of anxiety and I ended up feeling even worse every single time I failed. Until I realised.....You cannot actually be completely anxiety free! 

Everybody has anxiety, it's a form of fear which is an emotional state, so to think we can somehow completely rid ourselves of it is silly. It's setting ourselves up to fail! That doesn't mean we are stuck feeling crippling anxiety forever either though.... we just have to change our approach!

Imagine trying to rid yourself of all love. Can you decide to just stop feeling love towards everyone in your life? Your partner, kids, parents, pets, nieces and nephews, cousins, grand parents, friends and siblings? No? So, it stands to reason that it is also pretty much impossible to decide to stop feeling fear either given that both love and fear are the strongest human emotions!

The good thing is that we actually don't need to!

Anxiety is actually very necessary and serves to keep us safe; for example, your anxious thoughts when your alarm sounds in a morning make you get up and hurry to get to work on time so you don't get fired, or they keep you from stepping too close to a cliff edge when out hiking up a mountain! They serve you and are imperative to your survival.

Anxiety becomes a problem when we have recurring unhelpful thoughts that don't serve us.

We can't simply get rid of all anxiety just to remove all the unhelpful thoughts though, instead we need deal with them a little differently, trying to shut them out is not the answer and actually worsens the problem.

I learned that to shut out an anxious thought just makes it shout louder and recur more often. It's like the alarm clock on your iphone, if you ignore it, it just gets louder and louder until you hit snooze. With thoughts, the more we try to push them away the more they come because in  order to try and not think about something.... We have to actively think about it....

Telling ourselves not to think an anxious thought is akin to telling ourselves not to imagine a pink elephant.... you just pictured one in your mind didn't you?

Accepting the thoughts and letting them in is necessary, but that doesn't mean we have to respond to them or allow them to rule us.

Let's go back to the alarm clock analogy. It's 7.30am and it's sounding. You know you don't actually need to get up until 8am and you'd set it early as a contingency. It's done it's job and alerted you to the fact it's morning and you should get up, but you know it's a false alarm and you have half an hour to spare so you hit snooze and choose to over rule it. You know better so you acknowledge it's alert and hit snooze to stop it sounding but you don't respond by getting out of bed. 

Think of your anxious thoughts in the same way, they will always alert you to a possible problem because that's their purpose, but you have a choice of whether you respond to them or not.... the thoughts don't always know best. Often we just need to acknowledge them and let them go because they are nothing but a false alarm.

2. Prove that anxiety is a liar!

So, once I had accepted that we'll always have some anxious thoughts and that to some extent they're needed, I had to learn to weed out the necessary helpful anxious thoughts from the unhelpful problematic ones.

For me, the easiest way to identify a problematic anxious thought is when it is one of those nagging "What if" thoughts that just goes round and round in my head getting ever more catastrophic as it goes!

You know the ones, like when your other half is late home from work and you convince yourself that they've been in a car accident and then before you know it your mind has completely spiraled and convinced you they're dead.... Your hand shakes as you call them and you can't breathe when it rings out and they don't answer, now you're convinced it must be true. Full blown panic attack ensues.... You're imagining an unbearable life as a widow and the coffin at funeral.... then they call you back 5 minutes later to say they were just stuck in traffic, but you've already had a full blown meltdown by then.

There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest anything bad had happened, just a few "what if" thoughts and I assumed the most extreme catastrophic outcome was true!

As anxiety sufferers we seem to just be in the habit of automatically believing and responding to everything we think and the key to getting anxiety under control is to stop doing that and start questioning these thoughts before we respond with automatic panic!

I learned a really good technique that helped me to stop this automatic catastrophic thinking.

I got a notebook and a pen. For a month I wrote down down every single time my anxiety lied. No matter how big or small. Every time I had an anxious thought that turned out not to be true it went in the book. This got me used to identifying these thoughts and helped me to compile a stack of evidence that just because you think something, it doesn't automatically make it true!

Eg;

What if I haven't turned the oven off and the house burns down while I'm at work. (Didn't happen!)

My husband is late, what if he's been in an accident? (Didn't happen!)

I kept the book close and every time an unhelpful or catastrophic thought got me to the verge of panic, I'd open it and look at all of those other thoughts that I'd had which simply were not true.... It got me into the habit simply disregarding these "what if" thoughts as nonsense and into the understanding that just because I thought something didn't mean it was true.

Look at it this way, do you believe it every time you have a daft fantasy thought about winning the lottery or marrying that hot celebrity? No? So why believe all the daft bad thoughts then? They all come from the same unfounded place don't they? I always remind myself if this when my thoughts start to spiral and it really helps me to regain perspective. Would I believe a thought about winning the lottery? No? Well then I probably shouldn't pay too much attention to this catastrophic thought either.

3. You can't panic in the present!

Another amazing technique I learned for handling anxious thoughts was that you "Can't panic in the present."

This is so simple to implement and eases anxiety almost instantly. You may not have realised it but all anxious thoughts are future focused. By learning to stay in the present you can stop panic in it's tracks. I learned to simply stop and ask myself:

Is this thing I'm worrying about happening right now? 

It never is and so instead of focusing on what could / might happen in the future (be that in four minutes, four days, four months or four years) we need to live in the here and now. 

You cannot panic if you stay in the present so if I ever start to panic now I think about where my thoughts are and pull simply them back to this very moment.

4. Change your state.

When we feel anxious it often feels like the feeling will never go away. I like to remind myself that it will and this is so much easier easy to do than anyone realises! I like to put a hilarious youtube video on (I love to watch funny fail compilations) and before I know it I'm laughing until my sides ache and I've shown myself that I won't feel bad forever and that this anxious state is changeable not perminent.

5. Distraction.

This was my "go to" coping mechanism for years! When my thoughts were spiraling and I could feel a panic attack brewing I'd use distraction techniques....Reading, writing, picking the phone up and gossiping to someone, watching a movie, doing puzzles, taking a shower, cleaning the house, going for a walk, doing a workout....Anything at all to shift my focus and get myself out of my own thoughts and head for a while to allow time for the thoughts to disperse. This isn't easy and the thoughts do keep creeping in for the first ten minutes or so but I leaned that if I persevered, eventually my attention would be fully submerged in the new task and the anxiety would level off.

I hope you find this insight helpful.

Please always remember that dark times don't last forever and that you will come out of this , but if you feel like you aren't coping don't be afraid to seek professional help. It is OK not to be OK, and no matter how hopeless it might feel I promise you there is always someone out there who can help you, please reach out to your GP or an advice line and ask for support.