Your Anxiety Management Toolkit

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th,: 2024

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Whether stress is just an occasional occurrence for you or you’re battling a more entrenched anxiety disorder, there are thankfully countless scientifically proven methods for cultivating a calmer, happier, and more balanced life. We’ll start this chapter with a few key strategies that will help you understand your anxiety so you can consciously take control. The first step is always to become aware of where we stand. Only then can we start to challenge our beliefs, put labels on our experiences, and start to pick apart the stress response as it plays out in our day-to-day lives. Let’s dive in. 1. LABEL YOUR EMOTIONS. When you’re stuck in an anxiety spiral, it can be hard to even put a finger on what’s happening to you. All you know is one thing - it feels bad! Your thoughts are racing all over the place, and you may even feel physically ill. It’s like overthinking, worry, and anxiety are an overwhelming flood that completely washes over you, and you can’t escape or defend yourself.

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Think about the last time you felt completely swamped with anxiety and overthinking—what did it feel like? If you find it difficult to find the right words to describe the intense feelings, then this following tip will help you. Dan Siegel is a professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, and teaches people how to “name it and tame it.". According to Siegel, When we label our strong emotions, we create distance between us and them. Giving how we feel a name is one way we can almost step outside of that flood of anxiety, rather than being swallowed up by it! It’s a question of controlling your feelings or allowing yourself to be controlled by them. Or a handy way to think of it is - if you can see an emotion, you don’t have to be an emotion. Psychological distance is the feeling of perspective we gain over our ourselves. The thing is, when we’re caught in an overthinking loop or anxious rumination, we lack awareness.

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Psychological Science back in: 2007

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When Liberman’s test subjects underwent fMRI scans while experiencing strong emotions, simply labeling these emotions decreased activity in all the regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation, particularly the amygdala. This is the little gap. Once the strong emotional response is dampened, then we can go in and allow our rational brains to step in and solve problems for us. And this is the lesson that mindfulness practitioners have been teaching for years. When we label an emotion, it is no longer something we are but something we are aware of. And so we disengage. And when that strong anxiety is not so firmly attached to us, we can make decisions from a calmer, more deliberate place psychologically. How do we name emotions as we’re experiencing them? It can be difficult in the heat of the moment—but that’s exactly when we need to learn to do it!

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Here’s a step-by-step guide - •First, simply become aware of what your body is doing. Your body is in the moment and will be the first to alert you to strong emotions. Let’s say you’ve just gotten off the phone with your father, and a few minutes later, you become aware of an awful antsy feeling around your shoulders and chest and a horrible tight lump in the back of your throat. •When you notice this physical response, stop. Just pause and bring awareness to it. Let’s say you excuse yourself and go and sit quietly in your room for a moment. •Next, breathe a little more slowly and focus on the physical sensation while you try to identify what you’re feeling. You are only looking for a label—not an accusation, diagnosis, or judgment. Maybe after a few breaths, you say to yourself out loud, “I am feeling anxiety ...I’m having worried and panicky thoughts ..."

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•At this point, you can literally imagine the word “anxiety” as separate from you. Visualize the word “anxiety” in letters that you hold in your hands or which you can pin to your clothing. •Keep breathing and notice how you feel after you give your experience a name. Here, you might be wondering if you need to get away from the anxiety, or somehow visualize yourself destroying it. But you don’t! Simple awareness is enough to create distance. You don’t have to fight with what you feel or analyze it or rush to find a solution. You just need to be aware and feel what you feel. Before any meaningful action can take place, you need to be able to see what you’re feeling.

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So just focus on that for a moment. Try not to say, “I am stressed.". You are not stressed, you’re just you, and you’re experiencing stress. There is stress. Stress is occurring. As you breathe in and out, try simply saying “stress”—because once you can identify the phenomenon unfolding, you can see that it is not especially attached to you ...if you don’t want it to be. It is just something that is happening. Sometimes with anxiety, we can get caught in a trap feeling anxious about how anxious we feel. So, for this exercise, don’t fight anything.

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Our awareness is not a “solution” to anything; it’s simply an emergency stop on a runaway thought process. It allows us to gently remove the hand from in front of our face. 2. BUILD SELF-AWARENESS. To be able to label our emotions and to question our beliefs and thoughts, there is one thing we cannot do without - self-awareness. Anxious rumination can feel like we’re thinking, like we’re being aware, but it’s usually an illusion. We’re not really solving any problems, clarifying the situation, or getting anywhere—we’re just going round in circles and making ourselves feel bad. A moment of self-awareness in the midst of an anxiety spiral can be a life raft, but it also pays to cultivate an overall greater sense of self-awareness in everyday life. It’s almost as though you’re inoculating yourself against runaway thoughts in the future. Self-awareness is not just a skill but a stable long-term trait. It is about knowing and understanding yourself, including your strengths, weaknesses, triggers, and joys.

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Greater self-awareness is not some abstract quality—it results in real self-esteem, greater calm, and a more internal locus of control (i.e., the feeling that you are in charge and not merely reacting to outside forces). Here are three practical tips to try in order to deepen your self-awareness. Tip 1 - Keep a thought diary. This an easy, accessible way to constantly monitor/tune into your feelings and plans. Eventually, you internalize the ability to notice what you’re feeling and when without pausing to put pen to paper. When you write your thoughts down, you practice labeling (and the distance it brings) and you also see more clearly your own self-talk—what effect does it have on you to think these thoughts? When you’re flustered, sit down and pour everything onto the page. But rather than ruminating, use the journal to go on a fact-finding mission. How are you feeling?

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What came before these feelings? What are you thinking? What is in your control here and what isn’t? How accurate are your appraisals? What resources do you have right now? What are you trying to achieve and is your approach working? What action can you take? You’ll know a journaling session has been successful when you close the pages and feel like you’ve reached an end and gained some insight into where to go next. One tip - focus on the what rather than the why.

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Tip 2 - Engage in mindfulness practices. You don’t need to have a full-blown yoga practice or a daily meditation session to benefit from mindfulness. Remember, the key is to gain awareness—and even a moment of awareness can bring distance, control, and a sense of relief from overthinking. Practice strengthening the body-mind connection by doing some deep breathing and stretching exercises, or spend some time in quiet contemplation. The only goal is to stay present in your body, in your breath, and in the moment. You are not trying to accomplish anything, play “gotcha!" with your thoughts, or judge how mindful you’re being. Try to aim for a few seconds of still, calm awareness peppered all throughout the day whenever you can remember. Tip 3 - Take a personal inventory.

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When trapped in anxious overthinking, your mind can convince you that everything is awful and that you’re completely hopeless. But the truth is that you have many strengths, skills, and resources at your disposal. You always have options. Beyond that, you can strengthen your self-esteem by frankly acknowledging your limitations and weaknesses. When you’re aware of your flaws, you can own them. There are many ways to learn more about yourself and what makes you tick—good and bad. An easy example is to simply acknowledge the fact that you have a tendency to ruminate. If you know this about yourself, then you’re instantly empowered to work around these limitations. You’re never caught off guard, unaware of why you do what you do.

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You recognize your triggers when they emerge, and you know the ways to manage them. You could take psychometric tests or do self-assessments like the MBTI, which will help you better understand your personality. You could also ask those closest to you to share what they understand about your strengths and weaknesses as people looking from the outside in. One interesting exercise is to make a list of what you think your ten best and worst traits are (for example, “dedicated” or “aloof”) and then compare them to a list you ask a close friend or family member to compile. You may be surprised! Alternatively, ask mentors or work colleagues to give you (considerate) feedback to help you better appreciate aspects of your behavior you might not see clearly. A therapist is another person who can help you gain a clear, balanced, and accurate view of yourself that can help moderate the tendency to overthink. One big caveat about self-awareness and introspection, however - we do not necessarily gain any self-awareness by simply turning inward and contemplating our navels. There is, in fact, a wrong way to be self-aware!

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It’s easy to imagine why - you only replicate any bias or blind spots you have, and never get to test your theories against reality. There are actually two kinds of self-awareness—internal and external. The former is about how well we know our own needs, goals, and feelings, and the latter is about understanding how others see us. Introspection typically only helps us with internal self-awareness, but we need both types to be balanced, well-functioning people. Simply being aware of what we think and feel doesn’t mean that these thoughts or feelings are right or helpful. In fact, research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich has shown that people who introspect a lot may actually be worse at self-awareness! Seeing that ninety-five percent of people claim to be self-aware when just fifteen percent are, Eurich said that “eighty percent of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves." Anxiety and overthinking thrive in the private spaces in our own minds. If we can open up those spaces, shine some light on them, and invite in others’ perspectives to moderate our own, we can reshape the thought patterns that cause us anxiety.

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For example, you could argue with yourself for years about whether people secretly dislike you at work, writing fruitlessly in a diary under the guise of gaining awareness about why you’re so unlikable. But if you go out there and gather genuinely given feedback from your colleagues and discover that you are in fact not disliked at all, you gain real, usable self-awareness that will diminish your anxiety, not increase it! 3. QUESTION YOURSELF USING SOCRATIC METHOD. If you suffer from anxiety and overthinking, you can sometimes start to think of your brain as an enemy. You might start to view thinking of any kind as stressful and exhausting. But the truth is, your brain and the rationality it is capable of is a wonderful thing. The mind is a terrible master and a wonderful servant, as they say. Borrowing some cognitive tools from the philosopher Socrates can help us train our faculties to work for us rather than against us. Socrates once said, “I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.".

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For people who find their ruminating takes on an endless, compulsive quality, questions can act as a clarifier, cutting away at useless rumination and allowing us to see ourselves and our thought processes more clearly. Using the Socratic method, you will be able to assess the credibility and logic of your own thoughts, and this can be a powerful antidote to the illogic of our most anxious obsessions. You will also be able to identify your own thought patterns and recognize inconsistencies and assumptions. First of all, let’s make a distinction - Here is an anxious question - “What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong?" Here is a more useful question - “What evidence do I have that this is a problem?" Both are questions, but they act in very different ways. The first one is open-ended, vague, and, actually, when you look closely, cannot have a real answer. This is the kind of question that encourages, you guessed it, more overthinking.

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The second question, however, is focused, deliberate, and intended to bring clarity. It has an answer. And that answer can be acted upon. When you practice Socratic questioning, you are emptying your mind and assuming you know nothing, then proceeding methodically and logically. What do you really know? Instead of running away with assumptions, guesses, and foregone conclusions, you discover the answer step by step. The usual outcome is that you realize your anxiety was an illusion created by faulty assumptions, not objective reality. Let’s say you do the exercise from the previous section and uncover an anxious thought - “My elderly father is really ill and may not last the rest of the year.". This leads to, “He’s probably going to die any day now, and I won’t be able to cope when it happens ..."

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ccording to Clark & Egen (: 2015

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Are you making assumptions about his illness? Uncovering evidence - Can you find any proof that death is imminent? Do you have all the information you need to reach that conclusion? Exploring alternatives - Is it possible that he may in fact live? How are his doctors framing his illness? Exploring implications - What effect is this fear having on your life? How does this impact others? By asking these questions, the person in our example could soon realize that although his father’s illness is serious, there is actually very little evidence to suggest that he will die. He can look again at his original thought - “He’s probably going to die any day now and I won’t be able to cope when it happens ...” This thought causes anxiety and launches a whole avalanche of other equally anxious thoughts.

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But can it be modified? After gently questioning himself, he can arrive at a milder idea - “There is always a chance that he could die, and that is the case for any of us at any time, but he is alive and well now, and there is absolutely no reason to overthink it.". What’s more, in the calm that this more balanced idea creates, he could start to see that he actually has very little information and can take action by talking to his father or his father’s doctor to better understand the situation rather than passively panicking about it. When it comes to overthinking, Socratic dialogue can help us slow down and not simply take our own word for it! Your brain can be your worst enemy or your best friend. Commit to using your brainpower for good, and you can actually reduce anxiety by finding clarity and useful ways forward. The next time you’ve identified a stressful thought in yourself, put it under the microscope and ask it to defend itself. Why should you allow an irrational, inaccurate, or flat-out wrong idea to torment and bother you? Try this process - Step 1 - Put your anxious thoughts or ideas into a sentence.

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Step 2 - Ask, is there any evidence to believe it? Also ask what you one hundred percent know and what is merely bias, expectation, fear, assumption, exaggeration, or catastrophic thinking. Step 3 - Challenge yourself. If something seems a little shaky, look closer. Deliberately look for alternatives or counterexamples to challenge what you currently think. Step 4 - Rewrite this thought into something more moderate. Even if you can remember none of these steps in the heat of the moment, just remind yourself to challenge your assumptions, ask questions, and look for evidence. Decide that you won’t grasp hold of a thought until it has stood on trial to justify itself! 4. TEST YOUR FALSE BELIEFS. The funny thing about anxiety is how unreal it is.

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You can convince yourself that something is really a Very Big Problem, but if you look at it with another perspective, all you can see is a person sitting safely and comfortably in their living room, having a series of electro-chemical signals run through their brain. That’s literally it. The Very Big Problem is simply a story they’re telling themselves. When we worry and ruminate, we can take any old story and behave as if it were true. We can start with “what if they were laughing at me?" and end with “I’m an awful human being and everyone hates me for sure,” all with zero correction or input from the objective world around us. The brain has an amazing capacity to entertain thoughts and ideas that simply aren’t true. This is an amazing ability that allows us to be creative, to plan, to dream, and to think up new solutions that don’t yet exist. But it also allows us to dream up awful hypotheticals and fictitious theories that act like mental torture devices we make for ourselves.

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There’s one blindingly obvious way to counter this tendency of the brain to run off unchecked into the unreal—test it. Do an experiment. Compare what’s in your head with what’s out there in the world and see if your anxious model of reality actually stands up to scrutiny. It sounds like an odd way to go about it, but how often have you worked yourself up into a froth over an idea that you never once stopped to check the veracity of? How often have you told yourself a mental story and simply assumed it was true without ever checking to see if it was? Much research is now focused on revealing the relationship between anxiety disorders, perception, and the inability to tolerate uncertainty. Psychologist Aaron Beck and his colleagues claimed that anxiety “is an uncontrollable affective response dependent upon the interpretation of a situation and the appraisal of a possible threat of negative events.". Basically, the anxiety is not a result of the stimulus itself but our interpretation of that stimulus as a threat. We decide how anxious we feel based on - •How likely we think the threat is to occur.

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•How bad we think it’ll be when it happens. •How well we predict we can cope. •How much help we can expect from the outside. As you can see, all of the above are about perception of reality, not reality. If we appraise something as a threat (for example, people laughing when we walk into a room), we may respond with a racing heart, a blush, and a flood of negative thoughts, i.e., “they’re laughing at me.". Almost without knowing you’re doing it, you could create a rich inner theory about this experience designed to deal with the perceived threat and uncertainty. Your anxiety, once started, seems to feed on itself so quickly that you never stop to ask, “Are they actually laughing at me?" Testing our false beliefs can act like a safety valve that breaks the anxiety cycle. For a simple example, you could straight out ask in the moment if people are laughing at you, or pull someone aside and ask them in private what their interpretation of events was.

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“Oh no, Emma just told a really funny joke the moment you walked in!". Using Socratic dialogue, too, is a way to test our assumptions before we get carried away with them. True, sometimes you really don’t know—but this is where tolerance of uncertainty comes into play. If you have no way of knowing whether people were in fact laughing at you, for example, you could still conclude, “Well, I have no evidence either way.". Sometimes, you may have a more vague and general belief, such as, “My whole friend group secretly dislikes me.". This belief, too, can be tested. See if you can ask yourself questions to test this potentially false belief - •How likely we think the threat is to occur—How likely is it really that people you consider friends all secretly dislike you? Is it really all that possible, given how often they choose to spend time with you? •How bad we think it’ll be when it happens—Even if your friends occasionally didn’t get on with you, would that be so bad?

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Is it the end of the world if someone doesn’t like you one hundred percent? Does one person disliking you mean that others won’t or that you’re completely unlikable? •How well we predict we can cope—Is being a little concerned about this really such a big deal? Is it really crucial that you find out how others feel deep down, or can you handle a little ambiguity? •How much help we can expect from the outside—“If you struggle with this idea, isn’t it possible you can talk to your friends about how you feel? Could you sort out your feelings with a therapist or someone else you trust?" Another very direct way to test our potentially false beliefs is through exposure therapy. Traditionally, psychologists have used this approach to help people overcome specific phobias. The idea is that if you repeatedly expose yourself to a stimulus you firmly believe you can’t tolerate, you show yourself that you can tolerate it—you give yourself proof that the thought “I can’t get on a plane because I’ll crash” is actually not true.

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Your brain makes an interpretation of a stimulus and decides it’s a threat. But when you repeatedly encounter this “threat” and nothing bad happens, your brain soon has to adjust its appraisal. Importantly, this isn’t something that happens abstractly in your head. It’s something you do out there in the world. To make exposure therapy work, however, you have to tolerate the stimulus until it no longer provokes a fear response. Quit before this point and you only reinforce that the stimulus is a bad thing to fear and avoid. How can you use exposure therapy in your own life when dealing with overthinking? First, identify a thought or story you’re telling yourself that is causing you to feel anxious; for example, “I’m incapable of public speaking.". Let’s say the thought of public speaking causes a major anxiety response.

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The next step is to see if this can be tested in reality. Sit down and write a list of graded steps you can take to gradually expose yourself to the idea of public speaking. Remember to tolerate the stimulus until it doesn’t cause a fear response anymore. Maybe you sign up for an amateur acting class and practice, in baby steps, getting on stage and speaking a few lines, then gradually increasing the time you spend on stage. Work up to offering to give a presentation at work where you have to speak for a longer period. Every time you expose yourself to the stimulus, challenge yourself to observe what is happening - is it really as bad as you thought? Are you absolutely “incapable,” or do you just find it a little unfamiliar and uncomfortable? Finally, keep going and allow your experiences to gently challenge your original thought. Maybe you eventually arrive at a more balanced view.

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“I don’t really enjoy public speaking, but it’s something I can do if I need to, and I’m sure I could get better if I practiced." Not all beliefs and thoughts can be challenged with exposure therapy. If that’s the case for you, try to embrace the uncertainty rather than rush in with a story or theory to help counter the perceived “threat.". It can take practice to simply say “I don’t know yet what kind of situation this is” instead of “this is a bad situation.". The next time you encounter an ambiguous or unresolved situation, choose to deliberately interpret it as unknown rather than threatening. “That girl from last night’s date hasn’t replied to my text. I don’t know how she feels about me yet,” is far less anxiety-provoking than, “She hasn’t replied. She’s definitely not interested. I hate dating!"

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published a meta-analysis in: 2011

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Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered and stay awesome.