3 Best Practices for Coping With Anxiety

Anxiety, fears, and phobias limit your life, but there are tools for coping with anxiety and overcoming these limits.

What does anxiety look like?

You wake up with a new idea, a new goal, an ambition that you know would change your life for the better.

Then suddenly, something changes, you start to feel nervous; you worry about failing, and uncertainty takes control of your mind.

This gut feeling stops you from taking action.

A lack of action stops you from developing and improving your life.

Before long, you are unfilled, sad, and depressed.

Coping with anxiety can help you take back control of your life.

You can live your life to the full by using these simple tools.

You Feel What You Focus On

People living with anxiety, fears, and phobias focus on the negative of situations, presuming that things will always go wrong.

If you focus on the negative, you will feel negative.

This negative focus only increases your anxiety.

Imagine you are asked to speak publicly; your anxiety focuses your mind on past negative public speaking experiences.

You feel the associated negative emotions; you imagine people laughing at you, doubling your feeling of anxiety.

To change your emotional feeling, you need to change what you focus on.

You can only feel one emotion at a time.

What you see in the real world or what you imagine, dream or think about creates associated (positive or negative) emotions.

Think about the situation that makes you anxious.

Now, think about the same situation, but this time imagine yourself in this situation as a confident, relaxed version of yourself.

See you acting confident, communicating calmly.

Imagine yourself enjoying the experience and notice how others respond to this confident and relaxed version of yourself.

If you imagine yourself acting confident and relaxed in a situation, you will feel this associated emotion in the real world.

The more you practice this, the stronger the associated emotion will become, and soon this emotion will be associated with the real-world experience.

If you’re enjoying this article, you might also like our collection of anxiety quotes to help relax your mind and ease fears.

Position Your Posture Positively

Your mind and body are connected.

Your stance, posture, the way you hold yourself, your body language, and posture change your current emotion.

Think back to two past experiences.

The first, an experience when you will sad, anxious or depressed.

For the second experience, remember a time when you were confident, excited, and happy.

Next, compare these two memories and notice the difference in your stance and posture.

Compare your body language and stance.

When feeling negative, people will often see themselves with their head down, slump shoulders, often hugging themselves or fidgeting.

The happier you will often display a positive stance; head held high, shoulders back, feet stood shoulder-width apart, and a confident smile on your face.

To feel more confident and less anxious, change your stance.

Confident Communication and coping with anxiety

When anxious, you often find that your own negative self-talk, that little devil in your head, increases your anxiety by whispering negative affirmations.

“You can’t do that” “you have always been a failure” “others are better than you”.

To feel confident, you need to kill the devil in your head.

Think about this negative self-talk; the volume, the voice tone and whose voice it is.

Turn the volume down, or imagine changing the voice into the voice of a cartoon character.

Next, state a positive affirmation using a strong and confident voice.

The tone of voice and the positive affirmations creates confidence.