10 Effective Ways to Reduce Anxiety

What is anxiety?

Everyone has anxious thoughts and feelings from time to time, we may worry about a problem that we can't seem to resolve, or making important decisions. It's completely normal to worry and feel anxious, in fact it can be helpful to stop us from taking certain risks that would have a negative impact on our lives. It is also normal to feel stress, again this is a helpful motivator, to give us the energy to perform certain tasks and if managed and used effectively it can even improve our performance.

Both of these things can have a negative effect on our lives if we struggle to move past the initial thoughts and worries, to reduce our stress levels and complete the stress cycle signalling that the stress 'threat' has now passed.

When we leave our anxiety and stress to continue to rise over a long period of time this will result in severe or chronic anxiety and may affect your relationships, school performance, or job. Generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and social anxiety are some of the more common forms of how anxiety can manifest.

There are ways to help reduce our overall anxiety and stress levels that are extremely effective when practiced and can be adapted to work for you as an individual.

10 ways to reduce anxiety

1. Breathing exercises - we probably don't notice how we are breathing most of the time, but the way that we inhale and exhale can influence the central nervous system. Rectangular breathing, where you find an object in the room shaped as a rectangle, and following the object with your eyes you inhale on the shorter side, exhale on the longer side. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system - rest and digest, and sends messages to the brain that you are calm and safe.
2. Self hypnosis - there are various methods to practice, the key is repetition so practicing regularly. Often colour is used to imagine being surrounded by a colour that represents calm, this is really effective when in a stressful situation imagining the colour triggers that calm response in the brain.
3. Meditation - practicing meditation has been shown to change activity in the pre-frontal cortex, similar to self hypnosis it relies on doing this often in small bursts, to train the brain. Creating space to not respond immediately to the stressor and choose the preferred response.
4. Three good things - writing down three things that have gone well or you have noticed that have been good each night is another way of changing the activity in the pre-frontal cortex. This also trains the brain to look for the good things rather than focus solely on the problems we face. The more we focus on a problem the more our anxiety and stress increases and it becomes harder to find a solution.
5. Positive action - taking time to do things that you enjoy is one of the best ways over time to have a big impact on our overall mood. It doesn't have to be hours a day simply 5 mins of reading a good book is allowing you to unwind and release serotonin, the neurotransmitter that helps to regulate our mood.

1. Positive interaction - we are tribes people and so isolation or feeling alone is detrimental to our overall wellbeing. We don't have to physically be with someone to get the benefit of serotonin from interactions there are many ways we can feel connected and part of a community. The key is feeling part of something and enjoying that interaction.
2. Sleep - getting your 7-8 hours a night is so important in reducing our stress and anxiety, during our sleep our hormones rest and balance, we also have REM where we are able to move our thoughts and memories from an emotional to a rational place so it is vital that we get enough of this important sleep.
3. Reduce consumed stressors, such as caffeine, alcohol, foods that lead to a sharp increase in blood sugar, these will all exasperate stress.
4. Limit screen time - not just to allow yourself a good nights sleep, also to allow your brain to rest and not concentrate, resting our mind is so important. It is also important to limit how much external information we absorb as this indirectly leads to increased stress if we are then negatively focused on external stressors.
5. Journaling - getting our repetitive thoughts out onto paper can help us to create some distance between the thought and feeling a need to act, it can also help us observe and start to decide if the thoughts are true and helpful or false and limiting us. There are some guides to use when journaling some offer questions you can answer or you can just try writing whatever comes to mind.

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There are many things that we can do to reduce our stress and anxiety, some of which are possible at the time of the high stress situation, whereas some require more practice and consistency to get the benefits next time we find ourselves in that high stress situation or to reduce the effect of general stress and worry we face in life.

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I work with clients online and face to face to help them create tools and techniques to reduce stress, and to start to retrain the mind allowing it to solve problems and focus on the positive future rather than what ifs and should haves. I work 1:1 using psychotherapy, CBT techniques, hypnotherapy and offer a free consultation.

Book A Free Consultation with Focused Hypnotherapy

If you would like to discuss how hypnotherapy can work for you please get in touch with Emma to book your free consultation. There is more information and a link to book at https://www.focusedhypnotherapy.co.uk/services/1-1-sessions-for-anxiety

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