Anxiety can be a normal human response to stress. However, suppose anxiety begins to impact your ability to cope with stress and manage day-to-day activities. In that case, you could be living with generalized anxiety disorder, which one of our therapists can help you navigate.
Living with anxiety can cause you to feel overwhelmed by uncertainty, fear, and racing thoughts. You may also experience physical symptoms such as a fast heartbeat, stomach issues, and headaches. These things can leave you feeling decentered and disconnected from yourself and your body.
By recentering yourself after spiraling with anxiety, you can become grounded in your body and anchored in the present moment again. Here are some tips to help you regain control of your emotions when dealing with anxiety.
Meet Yourself Where You Are
Meeting yourself where you are is an act of radical acceptance of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences in the present moment. Often, we do not choose to accept what we are experiencing for fear of staying stuck where we are. However, the opposite of this is true. As the saying goes: what we resist persists. Acceptance is the vessel by which you can create sustainable change.
Externalize Anxiety From YourselfÂ
You are not your thoughts and feelings. Although you may be experiencing thoughts that create the sensations of anxiety, the anxiety is not you, and you are not the anxiety. Even though these thoughts and feelings are valid as you are experiencing them, they are not absolute truth. Externalizing anxiety can take power away from the stress and give it back to you.
Grounding and Centering PracticesÂ
Having practices and routines in your back pocket that you can depend on in moments of distress can anchor you back into the present moment after you feel you have lost contact with it. Whether it be through giving yourself the space to practice deep breathing techniques, moving your body in ways that feel good, or journaling to reconnect to your senses, the possibilities are practically endless.
Resisting anxiety is what causes it to persist. By choosing to meet yourself where you are at in accepting anxiety, externalizing the thoughts and feelings from you, and practicing habits that ground you instead of derail you, you can move through it rather than stay stuck. At Avalon Malibu, our anxiety treatment program focuses on the individual’s underlying causes of anxiety through awareness, observation, challenge, and experience. If you are struggling with an anxiety disorder, your life can change with treatment. To learn more, call us today at (844) 857-5992.
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