Insights on anxiety and natural ways to overcome it

If anxiety has become an almost constant in your life, you may be wondering if there are ways to overcome it. It’s normal to have anxiety occasionally about specific issues and in certain situations, but when anxiety starts to take over your life, then you might be looking for a way to overcome it.

As a therapist who has both personally overcome anxiety and helped many clients to overcome it too, I've learnt many things over the last few decades about anxiety and how to help clients to overcome their specific issues that lead them to feel anxious, as well as many tools and techniques to help them calm their nervous system. 

In this article, I share some helpful insights about anxiety and how you might be able to gain back control. 

The nature of anxiety

The protective paradox

The anxiety response is a part of your natural fight-or-flight response that helps to keep you safe when in danger. However, past negative experiences that led you to feel unsafe and develop particular fears can lead you to feel overanxious in certain situations. You might even start to overreact as the mind can sometimes find it hard to distinguish between genuine threats and harmless situations. Even subconscious triggers can lead us to react with anxious thoughts and accompanying bodily responses, such as a rapid heartbeat. It’s a normal and natural response when you feel in danger, whether it's a physical or psychological threat. 

If you are highly anxious, understanding that this is how anxiety works can help you to realise that anxiety is a normal response to perceived threats and have more understanding towards yourself instead of self-judgment. 

The time-travelling mind

If you are feeling anxious, it’s likely that you are either replaying past events or conversations and worrying about the consequences of what you said or did, or worrying about other kinds of future events, thinking of worst-case scenarios, even if it’s only about the next few minutes. 

When you can recognise that these types of thoughts are a symptom of anxiety rather than an actual real forecast of reality, then you can use calming techniques like the ones I describe below to mindfully centre yourself. Then it becomes easier to think more positively and realistically. Even when there are potential problems, it becomes much easier to deal with situations resourcefully when you are in a state of calm. 

The body-mind connection

Anxiety is both a mental and physical response. When you worry and have fearful thoughts, you can start to feel very uneasy. This signals to the fear part of your brain that you are in danger and triggers your fight or flight (or freeze) response, and you feel anxious. The physical sensations in your body, such as a rapid heartbeat, might make you feel even more anxious, and it can become a self-perpetuating cycle.

When you become more chronically anxious, your body can start to develop ongoing symptoms such as muscle tension, digestive issues, dizziness and other symptoms. Your breathing will likely be shallow, and shallow breathing increases anxiety.

Understanding that the sensations and symptoms in your body are part of your natural fight or flight response and not something to be feared can be reassuring. Also, knowing that it’s a two-way system helps you to understand how certain breathing techniques and shifting your thoughts can both help you to feel calmer because each affects the other.

Ways you can gain control over your anxiety

There are many self-help strategies and techniques that can help you feel calmer and more at ease in your life. Here are some that you might find helpful.

Breathing techniques to calm your anxiety

Your breath is both influenced by and influences your emotional state. Anxiety typically leads to shallow, rapid chest breathing. It’s designed to increase oxygen to your muscles so that you can act to protect yourself in dangerous situations. However, most of the time when we feel anxious, we are not in actual physical danger. It might be something like a perceived social threat, such as the fear of being judged, and in that case, you don’t need extra oxygen to your muscles. 

By using calming, breathing techniques, you activate your relaxation response system (your parasympathetic nervous system), which is the opposite system to the fight or flight response. 

There are a number of different breathing techniques that can help you feel calm and relaxed. Practising breathing techniques a few times a day and whenever you notice you are starting to feel a little bit anxious can help you to reduce your overall levels of anxiety.

Diaphragmatic breathing

I always recommend clients practice diaphragmatic breathing (also called abdominal or belly breathing) first because that’s how we naturally meant to breathe, and it helps us to feel calm. When we are anxious, we breathe more from the chest, and that makes us feel more anxious. Diaphragmatic breathing reverses this.

4-7-8 breathing 

This pattern is also good for helping you reduce stress and feel relaxed and calm. I learned this many years ago from a recording of Dr Andrew Weil, who developed the technique.

Grounding

Being ungrounded can make us feel scattered, lost, and chaotic. You might be restlessly going from one task to another, feeling jumpy and unfocused, and with this goes a feeling of anxiety. Your breathing would likely be shallow and erratic, which would increase your feelings of anxiety. 

Being grounded can help us to feel much more present and at ease. There are a number of different grounding techniques that you might find helpful. Here are some examples below:

• Start by making sure you are breathing from your diaphragm.
• Sit somewhere you find comfortable. Bring your mind to the present, notice the sensations in your body, your feet on the floor, and objects and colours in your surroundings.
• Mindfully eat something healthy and nourishing.
• Go out into nature and connect to the earth beneath you, and the sights, sounds, and smells around you.

A healthy diet for a healthy mind

Our diet is important for all aspects of our health, including our mental health. What you consume can impact your levels of anxiety. Caffeine, alcohol, foods high in sugar, and nutritional deficiencies can all have negative influences on your emotional and mental state.

Fluctuations in blood sugar can trigger symptoms that feel very much like anxiety. Regular meals containing protein, healthy fats, and complex carbohydrates can help you stabilise your blood sugar levels.

Gut health is also important for many aspects of our health and well-being. Poor gut health can be a major contributor to your levels of anxiety.

Breaking the fearful thought spiral

Have you ever felt like your thoughts are like a runaway train? Fearful thoughts can feed on themselves, creating increasingly intense spirals of worry and anxiety. You might worry about an upcoming event going badly, and then worry about what people might think or say. Your mind might draw on past negative experiences to add to the mix and use them as predictions of what might happen next as you become more and more anxious. 

You can help yourself come back to a state of calm by focusing on the present moment, such as by gently focusing on your breath or focusing on neutral things in your environment. Then you can imagine things going well and notice how that changes how you feel.

Sometimes worries can feel too intense and persistent to overcome by just using all the calming techniques above and trying to imagine things going well. In that case, you might want to seek help from a qualified therapist who specialises in anxiety issues. 

Therapy for anxiety

Sometimes, when anxiety becomes too much and you need something more than self-help techniques, you can benefit greatly from seeking help from a qualified therapist. Hypnotherapy is highly effective for helping you to overcome anxiety and the issues triggering you to feel anxious, such as stress, trauma, fears, negative thinking patterns and lack of confidence. 

Hypnotherapy can be combined with many other therapy techniques tailored to you to help you gain lasting relief.