Overcoming Anxiety — Strategies For Living A Better Life
How to stop worrying and remove stress and anxiety from your vocabulary
Over the past two years I’ve immersed myself in trying to understand what constitutes a good life. How could one achieve a happy and content life? What are the magic ingredients, if any?
The good news: The answers are all out there. The bad news: Most of us never come to learn them. Quite the contrary: We are led down a path of becoming experts at sabotaging ourselves in our quest to live a better life. My mission: Helping you to discover actionable strategies with the least effort on your side.
This is the first in a series of essays I will be publishing on the topic of human well-being. It is part of a bigger effort in increasing consciousness and well-being around the world on a large scale. I call this initiative ConsciousX.
Let’s get started.
Six actionable strategies to stop worrying and remove stress and anxiety from your vocabulary
Having gone through my own share of very stressful and difficult situations over the past years, I developed the following techniques to cope with them and significantly improve both my resilience and well-being no matter the circumstances.
Strategy 1: Take a deep breath
In the moment of stress, I often forget this myself: Taking a few deep breaths is probably the simplest tool to immediately feel more relaxed. It lowers your heart rate and thereby immediately calms you down. You can do this anytime and it always works.
When you feel that you are getting stressed, be it because of a red traffic light, someone honking, or seeing a caller id you don’t like, just inhale deeply through the nose into the belly and then further into the chest, hold for a second, and exhale through the mouth. Repeat it several times until you feel the effect. Try it right now.
Strategy 2: Accept what you can’t change
“God [the universe], grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” — Serenity Prayer
When you are confronted with a difficult and stressful situation or have any form of anxiety about the future, the question you should always ask yourself first is: Is there anything I can do about it?
If you are late for an important meeting, stuck in traffic or about to miss a plane, there is not much you can do about beyond letting people know. Therefore you should simply ease yourself into relaxing and accepting that you will be late or miss the flight. Once you accept the outcome, you will immediately feel better.
Strategy 3: Stop worrying and decide
If there is actually something you can do about the situation, you have two options: change it (take action) or accept it (decide to take no action and fully accept the situation). As you can see, worrying is neither one of those options. Worrying simple should prompt you to either do something about it or consciously decide to not do something about it. But in either case you should stop worrying immediately because the only thing that worrying does is to make you suffer without improving the circumstances.
Sometimes there is a third option, especially when there is a person involved: Let it go. You can simply walk away from a relationship, friendship or job if you cannot change the situation that has become unacceptable to you. (If you want to learn more about this approach, read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”.)
Strategy 4: Realize that nothing is wrong
Another tool I use to immediately deescalate stress, worry, anger or regret is to come back to the present moment, observe myself and ask the question: What is fundamentally wrong with or threatening my life in this very moment?
And if you are honest and objective about it, you will have to admit to yourself that the answer is pretty much always: Nothing is fundamentally wrong. You are still breathing, you are alive, and someone could probably cheer you up quickly. It is simply your mind (more specifically a part of the brain called amygdala responsible for our fight or flight response) that gets you worked up.
Gaining this perspective might require some training. One form to improve your calmness, even reduce the actual size of the amygdala is meditation (how to get easily into meditation will be cover in a later post). Another way is to simply rationalize and keep asking the big picture question: What is truly wrong with your life? I guarantee you, you will come to the conclusion that everything is just fine.
Strategy 5: Look at it in hindsight
Ironically, when we worry about something, we vividly visualize the worst case materializing (which in most cases it won’t anyway). Therefore, if you are still struggling with the situation, ask yourself: If the worst case becomes reality, how will I look back on it tomorrow, next week, next month, in a year or in a decade. It will become clear to you that it won’t nearly have the significance in the future that you are assigning it today. In most cases, it will be meaningless in the context of your life.
To give this perspective even more weight, remember your biggest worries or moments when you felt the same negative emotion in the past. And then reflect on how you look back at those situations with hindsight today.
Think of the exam or course you failed, the deal or promotion you missed, or the significant other that broke your heart. You recovered from all of those and often you emerged from them more resilient and more certain of yourself than before.
Strategy 6: Embrace new opportunities
“What doesn’t break you makes you stronger.”
This holds literally true: My biggest leanings, insights, and personal development came as a result of my most difficult moments. It helped me gain new clarity in what I really want and what matters most to me.
Not only do you come out of adversity as a better human being but also everything seemingly negative that happens to us always opens doors to new possibilities. I coined this phrase for myself:
“Adversity creates opportunity.”
The job I got fired from because I did not enjoy it anymore but was too uncertain what to do next to quit myself, opened the door to a completely new career and life. Or in Steve Jobs words:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Life always goes on and who knows what amazing things might be around the next corner. Things you would have never encountered if this seemingly negative event had not taken place.
Try to reflect on your own life and see how events that were negative at first glance lead to ultimately positive outcomes.
Some closing thoughts
I covered a lot of ground here. If you enjoyed these thoughts, I’d like to suggest you go over them once more and try to internalize them. Some of these techniques might be difficult at first for you to deploy effectively.
Our primal biology with the amygdala making us worry about everything all the time is just too deeply engrained. But the more you practice the above strategies, the better you will be able to cope with any type of negative emotion on the spot, be it anxiety, stress, anger, or regret.
There is no reason why you should not be able to use them just as I do.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy exploring ConsciousX — a holistic and pragmatic framework to living a better and happier life.
In my daily 3 minute video insights about life, well-being, and happiness I’m talking about as diverse topics as finding your professional calling, core identity vs. shell-identity, why less is more, falling in love vs. being in love, why you should listen to your gut feeling, and how to know what you truly want.
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