"Quick" tips to beat anxiety

As I said last time I am generally not a fan of click-baity “do these simple things and you’re cured!” sort of lists. I find them all too often to be the lowest hanging kind of fruit, and usually lacking any kind of real substance. Anxiety disorders affect roughly 40 million Americans each year, or about 18% of the US population (https://adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics). If anxiety were easily avoided by checking a series of “to-do” style tasks that number wouldn’t be so high. Same as last time, my intention is to provide some things that are “quick” in the sense that they don’t have to take up much of your time, but they have some substance and are scalable. They aren’t meant to just provide quick relief, they are intended to change the trajectory out of anxiety into more fulfilling things.


1. Mindfulness (I know, I know…)

Some clarification first: this isn’t a panacea for eliminating anxiety and finding calm and relaxation. I view mindfulness more as a life skill with myriad benefits, not just something to help manage anxiety. I’m not a fan of the “McMindfulness” that has proliferated pop-culture with promises of conjuring relaxation on demand and silencing your mind. I wrote a longer article about what mindfulness is and isn’t recently, and an approach to mindfulness I emphasize there is in line with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition: “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. This simple take on mindfulness helps to expand our awareness in a given moment, whereas anxiety has a tendency to narrow our experience and thoughts. When anxious thoughts and feelings crop up they tend to grab our attention. We can wrestle with that anxious thought until it is “solved” (when of course it can’t be solved), and while struggling to solve the unsolvable you are checked out of everything else. That tightness in your chest, or knot in your stomach, is now the only thing you are feeling.

But what else is there? What else do you feel in your body? What else can you hear? What else can you see? A lot can happen even in the most mundane of moments. Take a moment right now to observe your surroundings and see what you can notice. Take a moment to see what you feel and where you feel it. Doing this doesn’t stop anxiety, and it also isn’t intended to find a distraction from it. The more you notice, the less space that anxiety takes up, and the less space it takes up the less intense it tends to be.

Imagine a cup of coffee and pretend that you hate to take it black. In its default state it is just too bitter and acrid. Now imagine trying to remove the compounds that make it that way. Imagine attempting to un-extract the oils, acids, and sugars from that cup of coffee. I imagine the only way to go about this would be with some highly specialized laboratory equipment that is able to pick things apart on a molecular level, and even then I don’t know if such a machine actually exists.

You can’t remove the things that make a cup of coffee bitter, but you can add cream and sugar. You can’t realistically, molecularly dissect unwanted parts of the coffee, but you can add to the experience to change its overall quality.

Anxiety and mindfulness function similarly. Often times you can’t remove anxiety from a given moment, but what else can you add to it? If you are aware of and “add” enough to a given moment it changes the overall quality, just like cream does to a cup of coffee. If you are able to mindfully add to a moment if may no longer be defined by anxiety.



2. Slow down

Anxiety has a tendency to speed things up. It can warp our sense of reality a bit, and we tend to speed up with it. Attempting to keep up with anxiety is usually a losing prospect. The faster we move, the faster that anxiety gets. Colluding with anxiety, doing what it would have us do, tends to move us in the wrong direction.

Most of my mornings start off feeling like I am already behind (a feeling that many of the guys who come into my office also share). I have two small boys to take care of, a marriage to maintain, and a business to run. All tasks that never end. I tend towards the anxious myself, and the “to-do” list starts the second I open my eyes. A day can go downhill fast just trying to engage my morning routine and get everyone where they need to go. There are no shortage of potential anxieties there. The truth is I will never move fast enough to please that anxiety. The only way I might please that anxiety is to truly get “caught up”, but the goal posts are always moving, making that an unattainable goal. So I can’t please it, but I can make things a lot harder on myself attempting to do so. I try to move too fast and spill my smoothie. Now I’ve got a mess to clean up, and my mind has another thing to worry about (“you’re running out of time already, you don’t have time to clean that up!”). I’m so preoccupied with speeding up I miss a task and only realize it remains undone when it is too late. The anxiety moves up another notch.

When anxiety tries to coerce me to speed up I have a choice to listen, or not. Slowing down doesn’t necessarily mean I have to physically slow down. That may not be realistic most mornings. My wife has somewhere to be, I have a client expecting to see me at a certain time, my son’s school starts definitively at 8am. These are legitimate time constraints. But I can choose the level of expediency with which I move instead of my anxiety choosing for me.

This has some overlap with mindfulness (truth be told mindfulness really underlies everything here). Mindfulness doesn’t have to be a formal daily practice, it can really be a sort of intentionality you insert into your day. Here, in the example two paragraphs above I can be judicious in how I engage the tasks in my morning routine; I can choose if I am attempting to keep pace with anxiety or not.

You can, of course, literally slow down in the face of anxiety as well. It can be a fun experiment to see what you notice by doing a routine task at half speed. Something revelatory for me was checking my phone at half speed. Some time ago I noticed how reflexively and mindlessly I would check my phone. I would pick up my phone and start checking emails without much thought as to what I was doing and how much time I was wasting. Practicing this task I performed countless times a day at half speed added a sort of deliberateness I had been sorely lacking. Slowing down to half speed takes reflexive behaviors off of autopilot. Often times we respond reflexively to anxiety, responses that typically serve to make anxiety worse. Getting practiced at slowing down to half speed can go along way in taking those anxious responses off of autopilot so that we can instead do the things that serve us better.

3. Look for the spaces in your thoughts

I was originally turned on to this idea at a workshop with Steve Hayes, and I know, this one may sound really odd. It really is, literally, the opposite of how we are accustomed to thinking. However many people there are on the face of the earth is probably equal to the number of different ways anxious thoughts can sound, but I think they can generally break down into two categories. They tend to have a clear theme or script that plays on repeat and we get caught up in the content of those thoughts, or there is a chorus or chatter that feels indistinguishable, which clearly makes it difficult to get things done. It probably goes without saying that getting caught up in these thoughts is pretty unhelpful, and usually just makes anxiety worse. Looking for the space between these thoughts can be helpful for getting unstuck from them. Expect to be bad at it, I imagine you haven’t practiced anything like this before. If you give it a shot you may not find any spaces at first, or it may be difficult to figure out what the spaces are exactly. One way to approach it is to think about how you speak, or words on a page. When you finish a sentence there’s a pause. Words on a page have a period, which symbolize a pause. Treat each thought like it is a sentence. At the end of each sentence there’s a pause. At the end of each thought there is a pause. The more practiced you get at looking for these pauses the longer they tend to get. When anxiety and the thoughts that come with it kick up they can feel like they all run together. Being able to find, and then lengthen, the pauses between these thoughts can go a long way in turning the intensity down on that anxiety.

Part of what makes anxiety so uncomfortable is the content of the thoughts that come with it. It’s the most catastrophic outcome. It’s all the things that can go wrong, the bad things that could happen. It’s all the mistakes we might make. The content is so uncomfortable and worrisome that we, in a way, get consumed by it in our attempts to get rid of it. By looking for the spaces between these thoughts we can find some freedom from this content. If we get good enough at finding the space around these thoughts it can be like stepping off of the hamster wheel that anxiety can put us on.

4. Let it be there

Probably the most counterintuitive item, and perhaps the most useful. Anxiety is a universal, unavoidable emotion. Heck, it can even be useful sometimes. The fact that it is there isn’t really the problem, it’s the lengths we go to trying to get rid of it that get to be problematic. When we avoid anxiety what else do we avoid? How many things bring some temporary relief from that anxiety, but have a longer term cost?

There’s an old therapy metaphor I use with most (maybe all) of my clients at some point. Imagine a pair of Chinese finger traps. You put your fingers into them, and want to do the intuitive thing to get out by pulling your fingers apart. But that’s the trap. The more you pull the more “stuck” you get. The more you struggle the more constricting the trap becomes. Anxiety works similarly. The more you struggle with it the worse it gets. The not-so-secret secret to escaping the finger trap is doing the counter intuitive thing. You push your fingers in deeper to find the space you need to get out of it. The same thing works with anxiety.

Allowing anxiety to be there goes a long way towards ending the problems that come with it. Allowing anxiety to be there starts to allow space for other things. I watched a YouTube video where comedian Bill Hader talked about his experiences with anxiety and what helped him. He equated his anxiety to the face sucker creatures in Aliens. Anxiety felt like this creature crawling on his skin, and he was compelled to get rid of it. One thing that would have gotten rid of it for sure would have been to quit his gig on Saturday Night Live. Quitting the opportunity of a lifetime was too great a cost to pay. He needed a different way to deal with it. His anxiety improved when he stopped trying to get rid of it and instead allowed the Alien creature to stay perched on his shoulder. It may not be comfortable to have it there, he didn’t like it there, but he could perform on SNL with that creature peached on his shoulder. Allowing it to be there freed up the space to continue pursuing the things he loved. Also, allowing it to be there led to a certain level of familiarity with it, a familiarity that helped lower the intensity of it.

Some bonuses

Similar to last time, diet, exercise, and sleep are your allies here. Easier said than done though, I know. As always the goal isn’t total success with all of these, all of the time. There’s a strong argument that any effort we put into taking care of ourselves in these three areas will serve us. It can be hard to sleep when your mind won’t turn off. One quick exercise I suggest to clients that struggle to fall asleep is to count five things you hear, five things you feel, and five things you see (more visualize from your surroundings, not turning your lights on and looking around your room). Then four things you hear, four things you feel, four things you see. Three things you hear, three things you feel, etc. Ideally you won’t get all the way down to zero. It can be a nice strategy from shifting your mind out of the overthinking and into a state more conducive to sleep.

There isn’t a particular diet or exercise regimen that you ought to be following to feel less anxious, but generally eating an adequate, healthy amount of food helps. Generally being active however you can in ways that appeal to you help. One tip is to be cautious of your caffeine intake (and I say this as a guy that loves coffee). Stimulants can make anxiety worse, so if your caffeine consumption is high that may be a quick and effective tweak to make (no pun intended).

Hopefully something in here can be useful. As always, if you are in the Denver metro area and want to get to work making some meaningful changes I’d be happy to chat.