Tips For Dealing With Anxiety

Anxiety is a topic I want to feature on my blog, as it is something I deal with every day. Anxiety is something I've always found difficult to define, as it comes in so many different levels of severity and in so many different situations. No one has the same experiences with anxiety, as we all encounter it through different things in our life, and it's kind of a scary and weird thing, if you think about it. I used to get to anxious to the point where I would throw up, and thankfully I've got out of that stage, but I still suffer with varying levels of anxiety every day. I am still trying to learn to control and reduce my anxiety, and slowly but surely I've been overcoming some of the things that have given me the most anxiety.

I thought this would be a useful post to do for my very first anxiety-related post, as I hope it will provide some useful tips for you guys in your every day life.

"Be gentle with yourself, you're doing the best you can."

Breathing Techniques

Practising breathing techniques has helped me a lot when I feel the start of a panic attack or the earlier stages of anxiety. I haven't had a panic attack years and this is probably the main thing that has helped me. Usually when you're in the middle of a panic attack, or just feeling anxious, your breathing is very rapid and not controlled, which is something you aren't even aware of at the time. But when you are able to control your breathing and slow it down, it makes a big difference to how you feel. There's a lot of different techniques out there that I've tried from google searches, so I'd recommend just trying a few and seeing which works best for you. 

One that I've found works well is the 7-11 technique, where you breathe in for 7 seconds and breathe out for 11, which helps to slow down your breathing. It's important also to push your diaphragm out when you breathe in, and then pull it in more when breathing out, as it is important that the breaths are very deep to get the maximum benefit. 

Meditation

This is another method that has helped me a lot. I find my meditation videos on Youtube, just by a simple search. There are lot of different ones for different situations and differing levels of anxiety, such as ones that can help you right when you're in the middle of a panic attack, and ones which generally calm you down during the day. I especially love to listen to these the day/night before I have something coming up which is anxiety-provoking for me, such as an exam or travelling. If I listen to these before I've stirred up a lot of anxiety, it helps me to stay calm on the day of the event, as I haven't let any anxiety in the day before. I also find it helps to pop my earphones in and listen to these when I'm feeling anxious in a public situation, for example when sitting in the terminal at an airport. 

My playlist of some meditation videos I enjoy!

Apps

There's a fair few apps out there for anxiety, so I'd suggest having a look and seeing what you think looks best. I've only ever used one app, and its called Calm. I mostly like it for the different videos they have of beaches and rain and so on, as the sounds and the imagery really help me to calm down. I use these mostly when out in public and I need something to quickly calm me down. Another aspect I like about the app is the breathing tool which helps you to sync your breathing with a moving image that displays how long to breathe in, hold, and breathe out for.  They have a lot of relaxing music you can listen to, as well as relaxing bedtime stories, kind of like an audiobook!

They also do some guided meditations which sound amazing but most of them you need a subscription for, meaning you have to pay, and your girl is a student so is living the no-money life!

Dealing with Travel Anxiety

I used to get travel sickness a lot when I was younger, which I presume is where my anxiety came from, as I used to dread having to travel and end up being sick. Luckily my travel sickness has died down a lot but I do still get anxious when it comes to travelling. This mainly comes from flying, but I've managed to get better with it over a few years. One of the first things I had to do was ensure I never had any early morning flights, as I'm just not a morning person at all, so having to travel so early in the morning would make me feel very ill and anxious. 

Another thing which helps me is combatting travel sickness with tablets and travel bands (which you put on your wrists), as my anxiety is much more reduced knowing I won't end up feeling sick on the flight. 

Again, I like to meditate the day and night before the flight, as well as listening to recordings on my phone while at the airport. On the plane, I play music quite loud in my earphones for take-off, so that I don't have to listen to all the weird plane sounds and I can take my mind off everything. Having things to do like watching movies and reading books definitely helps during the flight as well.

I think that's basically it for my anxiety tips! They're mostly just random, little things that can help a lot in your every day life. Obviously anxiety is a mind-over-matter situation, and there are ways to train your brain into not having these thoughts, but I haven't quite got there yet! I hope you found this post useful in some way nonetheless. Comment below any good anxiety tips which have helped you!

Lots of love,

Andrea x