How To Relieve Anxiety

So, many of us can become anxious. There are ways of dealing with it. The first is to acknowledge it.

If you try and ignore the fact you're anxious and pretend it's not there, you'll become anxious about that. It will intensify your anxiety because you haven't addressed the problem. But anxiety can come as quickly as it goes.

Now, the Buddhists wouldn't say, “I'm anxious”. They'd say something along the lines of “I'm with anxiety,” almost suggesting it's by their side. So, as quickly as its come, it can go.

Anxiety can be very temporary and you're not always going to be anxious but then, you need to look at why you do feel anxious. Whatever the scenario, whether it be emotional, social, professional, financial, and look at practical steps to help deal with it. Look at your fears and, actually, one exercise you can do is try and make yourself as anxious as possible at that moment.

See what happens. This is actually very hard to maintain but it gives you perspective, and sometimes, you look at it and think, “Why am I feeling so anxious? I put all that energy into it”. Rather than putting energy into feeling positive and less anxious, because when you're feeling anxious, you're not using up energy, mental and physical energy, to focus on what you need to overcome, the challenges that you need to overcome, what you do is an audit of all your strengths and successes.

List them down. This is a long term project, as well as a short, a medium term project. Make a list with one column, the left hand column, of all your strengths.

It could be the fact that you have a great bottom. It could be the fact you're very funny or very beautiful, or very popular or very perceptive. And then, in the other column, the right hand column of a page, write down all your successes.

It could be the fact you won a swimming prize at school. You were voted employer of the month. It could be a whole variety of things, whether small or significant, and it will prove to you what strengths you have and why you have an increasingly smaller, yet more significant cause to feel anxious about things.

Talk to people who you find inspiring and moving and reassuring. Read, watch, and listen to things that are moving and inspirational, and know that we all have anxiety, at times, about different things that appear to frighten us. But actually, when you get through at the other side, you realize, actually, have no real cause to cause you anxiety.

Because when you get to the other side and you overcome the fear or the cause of your anxiety, that you'll realize, actually, there was no reason to worry at all. And that, in turn, will give you strength which will reinforce itself, the more you overcome these challenges and fears. .