Live less anxious

Anxiety in some shape or form is completely normal. It happens unconsciously and often is the result of stress. Like it or not stress is important for us to function and can help us to achieve important milestones or keep ourselves out of trouble in dire times.

Anxiety as a result of stress does become a problem though, when you are feeling deflated. When it starts to hinder your day-to-day tasks and when you feel you can no longer live life the way you want to. Luckily anxiety is not a lifelong phenomenon and its effects can be reduced to the bare minimum. Again remember that some stress is required for us to perform “normally”, and thus some of it should not limit our happiness in any way.

The origin of your anxiety

When you are struggling with anxiety for some time you may find yourself trying to rationalize with it. You may say: well I failed my thesis so it makes sense I am feeling anxious about my graduation. Or you may say, well, I was raised in a bad neighborhood so naturally I feel less safe.

While these reasons could be valid you should know that you probably don’t know what is actually causing your anxiety, or at least not all of it. Because of this, reasoning probably won’t actually fix the anxiety, no matter how hard you try.

Often our anxiety is very deeply rooted. Though not all are created equally. In psychology various types of anxiety are recognised and can be treated differently. Do you recognise your own feelings in one of these?

Generalised anxiety A persistent feeling of worry resulting in tension, stress, sleep problems and generally feeling on the edge.

Phobia Sudden anxiety for something you are scared about such as spiders, snakes or even seemingly random things that should not bear any reason for anxiety, such as popsicle sticks.

Social phobia Anxiety in public settings, social events and so on.

Posttraumatic stress (PTSD)
Feelings of stress related to a serious event. Often results in nightmares, frightening thoughts and flashbacks of the trauma.

Knowing what is causing your anxiety is the first step to fixing it. We may need to dig deep, and it’s recommended to seek out a therapist to help you further. But this article is called live less anxious, so we do have a few tips to help control your situation for the time being.

1. Get out of your head

Our first and most important advice is to get out of your head. Anxiety and stress starts in our heads and without fault will find its way into all the outskirts of our body. Remember stress is actually measurable and definitely does not stay in the mind.. but it does start there. So go out and exercise, go for walks, do long meditation sessions, find the sun, the beach or study a tree. Find out what works for you.

You can use Luci to register your activities and daily mood. Doing more things that makes us happy is a sure thing to please the mind. And don’t be too critical if it doesn’t work out right away, because that would be circular and worrying about a new habit is not really going to help.

2. Find triggers

As we have discussed above we probably do not know the reason behind our anxiety, but we can figure out the trigger. Whenever/wherever you feel a panic attack or strong feeling of anxiety, do write down what you are doing and where you are. Write it down, and then forget about it.

Potentially you will experience this multiple times over a period of time. After a month or so check back and see if any of these triggers are frequent. Now when possible, try to avoid these triggers. Of course escaping anxiety is not the answer, but we need to reduce the feeling in order to function “normally” and find the long-term cure.

3. Socialize

Next find people you can socialize with. People you trust. Friends, family or even strangers that are in similar positions as you. We are social creatures and the act of spending time together can help us to get out of our head, and potentially even fix the anxiety all together.

Concluding

In short, we have learned about the various types of anxiety today and how it influences us. We also learned that we probably don’t know the root cause what is causing us to feel this way. Our long-term solution is therefore probably to seek a psychologist, but we can potentially fix the problem on our own by getting out of our head, finding triggers and socialising with others.

We also learned that stress and anxiety are normal, and we need the bare minimum of it to perform healthy and in a sustained way.

We hope you found this article helpful and can find a solution to your feelings of anxiety. With Luci (free app) we hope to help you reduce stress. We have a self-reflection topic where you can answer carefully curated questions designed to discover triggers and the root cause behind your stress. We also offer a mood tracker to help identify ways to get you out of your head and into the real world.

Without further ado, go out there and find happiness. You got this!