I am always amazed at the way that people handle themselves when under a lot of pressure. Often times, people experience anxiety, and do not even recognize its presence.
Here are a list of anxiety symptoms:
- irritability
- restlessness
- hypervigilance
- lack of concentration
- racing/unwanted thoughts
- fatigue or sweating
- excessive worry
- fear
- Feeling of impending doom
- insomnia
- nausea
- palpitations
- trembling
- If you experience between three and five of any symptoms at any given time, there may be causes for concern.
Fortunately, anxiety can be treated naturally. Here’s how:
Exercise at least three times a week. Exercise produces endorphins (also known as feel good hormone) which helps your body to relax. Other benefits of exercise include: neural growth, reduced inflammation, and new activity patterns that promote feelings of calm and well-being. To enhance the outcome of anxiety reduction by way of exercise, you can practice Mindfulness while you exercise as well. This will allow your brain to focus on things like the beat of your heart beat or the impact of your feet on the pavement while jogging. By practicing mindfulness and exercise concurrently, you provide your brain with a double opportunity to separate from your stressful situation and soothe your anxiety.
Engage in aromatherapy as much as possible. Speaking of mindfulness, there is nothing like getting into a mindfulness state, that compares to engaging the senses. Aromatherapy, is the smell of various senses. One study found that even a small use of essential oil’s can reduce your heart rate, while longer use can promote better sleep hygiene.
Speaking of sleep, try to get at least 7 1/2 to 8 hours of sleep per night to reduce anxiety. Things that you do to enhance your sleep, include not drinking caffeine late at night, limiting your screen time, and listening to relaxing/meditation music. Essential oils, as listed earlier, can also serve to help you relax and go to sleep.
Meditation is one of the best resources to reduce anxiety, because it’s the practice of control of your mind in a way that welcomes peace and calm. It’s hard to do once anxiety has introduced itself, but the practice of meditation on a regular basis can be useful in order to eliminate anxious thoughts or to introduce them before anxiety presents itself. Tools that can help with meditation include aromatherapy, comfortable seating arrangements, calm/serene meditative environments, and meditative music.
Journaling is the writing of your thoughts and emotions, and has huge anxiety reduction benefits. It certainly helps to reduce anxiety by getting your thoughts and ideas out of your head and onto paper. Unlike the thoughts that ruminate in your head, journaling provides you an opportunity to create a new narrative which can be reflected back on at a later date. One of the many benefits of journaling is that it helps to introduce you into a meditative state. Furthermore, the act of journaling can be used to monitor your progress from one moment in your life to another because you can go back and reflect on it. Sometimes, it’s helpful to see how you manage to get through one anxiety provoking situation in the past, as the predecessor for how to get through future anxious episodes. It helps to know that if you survived anxiety before, and you will certainly survive it again.
As you can see, experiencing anxiety is not an easy experience. Nonetheless, it’s one that most of us will experience at least at some point in life. If you would like support in reducing your feelings of anxiety, please schedule your free, 15 minute consultation today.
