Feeling as anxious as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs?

If you are sensing an uptick in your anxiety or stress levels, you are 100% not alone. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible not to have an uptick in stress and anxiety these days. Social distancing, worrying for ourselves and others, work-related anxiety and Covid/quarantine issues.

I talked to a close friend on Saturday, and she suggested I write a post about anxiety. So here it is. A list of things you can do to lessen your anxiety.

I’m just going to assume that you have some anxiety, and that it’s coming to the foreground these days, at least now and then, because this coronavirus pandemic is no joke.

Whether you are at home (alone or with family), or still having to go to work as an essential worker, odds are good that there are plenty of triggers in your life.

I can’t tell you how to stop the triggers from happening, but I can give you some tips to help reduce or relieve your anxiety.

If you feel your anxiety levels suddenly spiking, and heading toward a panic attack, here are a few things to do to try to stop or diminish it:

1. Breathing. Specifically, try something known as “box breathing”, which helps to calm your autonomic nervous system. The Navy SEALS use it, and you can swing over to this site and breathe along with the video dot to literally follow along, but it’s inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds. Four equal sides to your breath, like a box.

2. If your panic attack is the result of overwhelm, close your eyes if you can (to minimize visual stimuli—obviously, don’t do this while driving or operating equipment) or choose a focal object. If you have a focal object, start making every observation about that thing that you can: what does it look like, how does it act (or not), what color is it, does it move (and how does it move if so), etc. Giving your brain a focused task can distract it from spiraling.

3. Similar to a focal object, do a grounding exercise. This exercise is often known as 5-4-3-2-1, because you look around for 5 things you can see, identify 4 things you can feel, listen for three things you can hear, identify 2 things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Say each of the 15 things out loud as you go through the exercise.

4. Count to 10. Literally. Out loud, and deliberately, count from one to ten. Just focusing on this other task might help to stop your anxiety from becoming too acute.

5. Seek medical attention if needed. If you believe you might be having a heart attack, then better safe than sorry. If it turns out to be “just” anxiety, ask to speak to a mental health worker if they have one on staff, ask for a referral or list of agencies to call in event of a crisis, and/or follow up with your primary care physician to seek medication or an appropriate referral.

For more generalized anxiety, which nearly ALL of us have just now:

1. Grab a pen and some paper, and write it out. All of it. If doing that is enough to make you feel better, you can then throw it out, shred it, or even burn it. If you identify stuff that you need to talk over with another person or a health care provider, consider keeping the list.

2. Get outside. Being in nature is excellent for clearing your mind a bit, especially if you focus on what you are seeing outside, and not on your phone or other tech. Bird-watching, watching other animal (maybe deer if you live in the country, or squirrels almost anywhere), and even spending time with a tree are great for lowering your stress levels.

3. Eat well. I don’t mean you have to eat large portions, or fine cuisine. Just try to get a healthy balance of the stuff that is good for you. And try not to skip meals (unless it’s on purpose). I have at least two cousins who have been “forgetting” to eat due to stress, and that’s no bueno.

4. Meditate, or try mindfulness. I’ll go into the technical difference between the two in a separate post next week, but if you are paying attention to the here and now, that’s mindfulness, whereas meditation can include visualization, focus on the breath, and other things.

5. Limit alcohol and caffeine intake. Caffeine is known to make folks jittery, since it’s a stimulant, so probably this makes immediate sense. With alcohol, which is a depressant, it can at first numb your anxiety, but alcohol (like anxiety itself) is an asshole, and will eventually stop “working”; it will instead make your anxiety worse.

6. Exercise. Seriously, anything you want to do here will help you. Could be walking (may I suggest you try it outside?), running (ugh), yoga, weight lifting, tennis, cycling, swimming . . . ANY exercise will help due to burning off excess nervous energy and releasing positive endorphins.

7. Get enough sleep. By all means, see the post I wrote with 11 tips to help you get a better night’s sleep, and the next 9 posts after it, for ways to go about this.

8. Find something to laugh about. Make yourself a “playlist” of videos that make you laugh, whether it’s babies laughing, goats fainting, people falling over, standup routines . . . create your own YouTube playlist and watch it when you need it. Because it is pretty much impossible to be anxious while laughing your ass off.

9. Talk to someone about your feelings. I don’t mean “explain your particular anxieties and get them to join you” so much as telling someone if you are feeling overwhelmed or incapacitated by anxiety or stress. Tell your partner if you have one, or a friend, or a doctor. If that person suggests that you might benefit from professional help, do yourself a favor and consider it. Because trained counselors can give you coping tools that might work for you, from biofeedback to relaxation exercises to medications.

10. Use music to help calm yourself. This could mean putting on upbeat/cheerful music to alter your mood (or to dance around to), but I personally recommend using Baroque music in order to calm down or reduce anxiety. Why go for Baroque? (I know, I slay me.) Because all the tempos were based on natural body rhythms (heart beat, walking, skipping, etc.), and the music has a lot of predictability to its structure and loudness, without the accelerations and crescendoes that can be used in later music to produce excitement (or dread).

11. Take a break. If your anxiety or stress is from constantly going, then take a break. It’s okay not to be doing something all the time. It’s okay to take a break, and to cut yourself a break.

Over the next two weeks, I will be doing individual posts on all or most of the items in these lists, as a way of providing you with more information on each of these techniques. Check back daily for new posts.

I hope you will advance through the many posts here on the website and take advantage of the exercises and downloads. If you would like to purchase a compilation and slight expansion of these posts, I have rounded them up and made them available in an e-book that is available for purchase.