Practical ways to handle anxiety

We don't always have the time or energy to implement massive lifestyle changes

It’s no secret that there are lots of people, especially young people, that are really struggling with their mental health. There’s also no shortage of people that are ready to give tons of advice about improving mental health.

“Get a therapist!” “Establish a routine!” “Read these incredible books!” “Hit the gym!”

It’s obviously a lot easier said than done.

Listen, I’d love to set up a recurring appointment with a great, trusted therapist, but I barely have enough energy to make it to my classes, what makes you think I’m going to have the energy to set up and make it to regular voluntary appointments?

Honestly, I’d love to establish a routine meditation and journaling practice, but I’m sorry between stressing about my overwhelming responsibilities and scrambling to get everything done, where am I supposed squeeze these in every day?

I promise, I’d love to read these 5 transformational books, but my god it takes so much effort just to crack open my textbooks and study, why would I throw myself into more books in my free time and where am I supposed to find the energy to not only get through them but implement their advice?

Dude I’d love to hit the gym, but where am I going to find time to research a routine and stick to it on a daily basis? I already feel like such a dweeb on a day to day basis, I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic for my self-esteem to go into an environment where I clearly don’t belong.

From my experience, even though all of these pieces of advice can be really healthy, they’re next to impossible to implement when we’re already struggling to keep up with our baseline responsibilities.

Often times, advice like this just made me feel worse. My current responsibilities were already enough to make me feel inadequate, and all this advice provided was another standard that I was unable to reach. Another thing for me to look at and say “yeah I should be doing all these things, but I just can’t”. Another reason to think less of myself.

So what do we do? Does this mean that all is lost? I don’t think so. Sure it might not be possible to make drastic lifestyle changes and immediately achieve monk-like levels of happiness and contentment in your current situation. That doesn’t mean we’re helpless.

Instead of the big picture advice I typically received, I think what I really could have used is a toolkit that I could utilize at a moments notice, without any effort, that would momentarily make things a little bit easier to handle.

So that’s what I’m trying to provide in this post! If you’re feeling consumed and overwhelmed by anxiety, stress, or anything else, here are 7 things that you can do at any time in any place. They will not solve all your problems or make them go away, but they definitely can provide you momentary peace and relief which will help you approach whatever you’re dealing with with a much clearer mind.

1. Move

I’ve found that there’s a real sense of heaviness that exists in my body when I’m feeling extremely overwhelmed or anxious. I think energy inertia is a real thing - it’s a lot harder to get up after 3 hours of binging a TV show than it is after 3 minutes. There’s a real, physical feeling of your energy dipping deeper and deeper the longer you stay in one place, and that’s usually associated with your mood dipping lower and lower as well.

This is why moving can help! This can be as simple as just standing up, spinning in a circle, and sitting back down. Literally do anything. For me, I’ve found that a 10 minute walk on a treadmill has been really powerful at jumpstarting my energy. I usually do this like a half hour after lunch because that’s when the food coma starts to hit, the sun starts to dip, and I start sinking lower and lower into my chair and start like physically scowling and scrunching my eyebrows. It’s not pretty. 10 minute walk on the treadmill, throw a couple of my stuffed animals across the room, scream into my blanket, and boom we’re live.

Like seriously, it doesn’t have to be that deep. Just do anything to get the blood flowing for a second, and you’ll find a moment of peace and clarity.

2. Connect to your senses

Pretty much all the time, the things that are bothering us are rooted in either the past or the future. Regret, guilt, and pain from the past, or worry and uncertainty about the future. We can escape those feelings briefly by getting in touch with our senses which are overloaded with things they're experiencing in the present.

You can ask yourself things like what are 5 things in your immediate field of vision? How does your left big toe feel? Can you recall the taste of the last thing you ate? Take a second and try to answer these questions or whatever other questions you come up with and you’ll find that in those moments, the feelings that where overwhelming you are temporarily pushed away.

3. One moment of gratitude

Gratitude is like a superpower. It’s crazy. Once you let a little beauty and gratitude enter your mind and body, it reduces some of the space that whatever is bothering you is taking. Even one moment is enough. It’s especially empowering when you’re feeling small or unworthy - no matter how small you feel, you will always have a limitless supply of gratitude to give, and even one instance is enough to remind us of our power.

This can be as simple as being thankful for the apple you had this morning or that Selena Gomez exists because her music gives you life. Anything. Just take one moment to really feel that gratitude, let a little love and compassion enter your body, and it will almost certainly bring some momentary relief.

4. One moment of forgiveness

Usually, the part of us that’s hurting has to do with our ego or our pride. And our ego and pride are awful problem solvers - they usually make things worse. When we forgive, we stop giving a voice to our ego. We’re letting it go and choosing to bring our attention instead on what to do about the problem, giving voice to the parts of our mind that are able to think clearly and figure things out.

Even if right now you’re not upset at something or someone, things usually stack on top of one another, and there’s something that upset you in the last few days that’s still bothering you and making your entire situation worse. For example, I used to get pretty intense road rage and held on to it for a really long time which made me even more annoyed and upset by every other little thing that happened. I probably should’ve taken a second to forgive and not let it affect anything else. Maybe the dude on the road was really hungry and in a rush to get to the nearest Taco Bell. Of course I can forgive that.

Forgiveness is really powerful. Even if you don’t think the other person or thing deserves it, you’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it for you, to give yourself some greater mental peace in this moment and to let you bring back your focus from the past to the present.

5. Exert agency over the situation

It is easy to feel like everything is just happening to you. That you’re a passenger in your own life and just getting rammed from every direction, creating a feeling of helplessness, desperation, and lack of control. Just the simple act of saying ‘I chose this’ can help alleviate a lot of that feeling of helplessness.

This obviously isn’t true in an absolute sense. I know you didn’t choose one of your group members to delete your whole Google Drive or completely drop the ball on their section of the paper and not communicate. But somewhere higher up along the line you made a decision that played a role in putting you in the situation that you’re currently in whether it was your major choice, your choice to take this elective class, or whatever. At some point, you made a decision that introduced this problem into your life. By saying you chose that problem and by exerting agency over it, you’re giving yourself power over the situation! By taking responsibility, you’re regaining control and empowering yourself to figure it out.

This prevents us from getting sucked into the feeling of despair which only magnifies our anxiety.

To a certain extent, I think this applies even in situations in which you have no control and are faced with pain and tragedy for no rhyme or reason. While you can’t take responsibility for the tragedy occurring at any level, you can still take responsibility for your own healing and your own suffering no matter how difficult a step that is to take.

6. Eat

As humans, we’re awful at understanding ourselves. Most of us have this model in our head where we feel something inside of us, like a pit or a sense of emptiness, and we tell ourselves holy shit I’m really anxious right now or really just going through it right now. And then all of a sudden you start creating a narrative to justify that feeling of anxiety. Before you know it, you’re sitting in your room at 2 AM thinking that you’re extremely anxious about things going on with your friends, and then asking yourself why you’re feeling anxious about it when you don’t even know what specifically happened, and then your mind is going down an insane rabbit hole. 

There’s a really, really easy alternative explanation. You were probably just really hungry. This is a real thing! For example, parole judges are significantly less lenient in cases that are presented right before lunchtime than cases presented right after lunchtime. What’s their explanation? That they had a bad gut feeling about the cases right before lunch. Maybe someone should’ve given them a midday snack.

Next time you find yourself overthinking for a second, try eating a banana or a granola bar first and then come back to thinking about the situation. You’ll likely find that the bad feeling you had inside you isn’t as intense.

7. Set small targets

We’ve been fooled our entire life into thinking that motivation is a necessary prerequisite for action. It’s actually the other way around. Action creates motivation.

I’ll give you an example. If you set your target to study for 5 minutes instead of finish studying for your entire midterm, you’ll generally find that after 5 minutes its a lot easier to continue studying than it was before, and you’ll also just be filled with more energy by acknowledging that you achieved something. The action of studying just for 5 minutes creates the motivation and momentum to continue doing it. This is the reason why a lot of people say that the most important thing you can do in your day is to make your bed - that simple action is enough to generate a feeling of achievement and accomplishment at the start of the day that can give you a lot of momentum.

So set smaller targets for yourself so that you can get the ball rolling and have more to celebrate during the day! Typically we can’t really distinguish between completing something large and something small - finishing a 5-hour long homework assignment will give us the same energy boost and self-esteem lift as finishing a 5-minute email - so why not break up a larger goal into much smaller chunks that are like layups instead of 3 pointers? You’ll have a lot more energy throughout the day and a lot more to feel good about.

Bringing it all together

You’ll find that there’s one general theme that’s woven through most of these pieces of advice, and that is detachment.

We often say things like ‘I am anxious’, ‘I am depressed’, ‘I am stressed’, etc. This isn’t really accurate. You are not anxiety. You are not depression. You are not stress. You are just you. You are experiencing feelings of anxiety, depression, or stress, and the fact that you can observe these things just shows that it’s not you. And just like every single feeling you’ve ever experienced in your life, these feelings too shall pass.

So that’s what we’re trying to do with these tips - momentarily detach ourselves from these feelings that in the moment feel like they’re completely consuming us. In the moment that we practice these things, we’re creating space. And it’s within this space that exists when you create distance between you and what you’re feeling that you can think clearly and act, alleviating the feeling of paralysis that often exists when we’re consumed by our feelings.

These tips won’t make our anxiety or depression disappear forever. But they will almost certainly help in the moment. And as we continue to practice them, we may finally get to the point where when anxiety comes knocking, instead of sprinting away from it and letting fear engulf us, we simply invite it in, graciously seat it and provide it some tea, and have a heart to heart conversation about why it’s been such a frequent visitor lately. That’s often the starting point to truly unpacking our trauma.

But for most of us, that day is not today. We have plenty of other things on our plate and simply need a moment of peace and quiet and tranquility to catch our breath. I hope that these 7 pieces of advice give you a toolkit from which you can create those moments every day.