Around 4% of the population suffers from anxiety. Whether it’s a moment of panic or something you experience every day, anxiety can affect our ability to make good decisions.
When anxiety creeps in, the fight-or-flight response releases hormones and endorphins that put us in a state of panic and can cloud our judgment.
That is why it’s important to be able to recognize anxiety and have a few good go-to coping strategies that help you curb it early on. This also includes avoiding things that may make your anxiety worse.
Avoid Keeping Your Anxiety a Secret
Whether it’s to a friend or family member, talking about your anxiety is an important step in having people understand your experience.
The more secrets we keep, the more we try to deny or hide our anxiety, and the worse it can potentially get.
Rather than avoiding or running from it, facing it head-on and creating an open dialogue around it may help put things in perspective and give you the strength you need to gain control over it. Talking about your anxiety can also allow your support network to help you demystify the unknown that is causing you to worry. This helps take some of the pressure off you.
Sometimes, because of the societal stigma around mental health, people may feel ashamed or guilty to talk about their conditions to others, however, learning to be open about your experiences will help end the stigma around mental health and more importantly, help you build a support network you can rely on.
Remember, many people have had shared experiences and friends and family should be there to support you, not criticize you.
If you feel like your support network won't understand, or that you don’t feel comfortable enough to open up, consider speaking with a professional.
A therapist or counsellor is a great resource and can provide you with healthy coping strategies to help you deal with anxiety.
Avoid Anger or Suppressing Your Thoughts
No one wants to experience negative emotions, point blank. Of course, if we could, we would choose to experience happy, blissful emotions all day long. But that’s not the reality.
It is painful for us to experience negative thoughts and emotions. Oftentimes our first reaction to negative emotions is to avoid, suppress or become angry at ourselves about these emotions.
Avoid suppressing or getting angry about your thoughts. Experiencing negative emotions and thoughts is a natural part of the human experience, when we deny these parts of ourselves we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to learn how to cope and deal with them.
Attempting to battle or ignore your thoughts throughout the day can be more detrimental in the long run. This can result in more stress and anxiety. As we know, when we don’t deal with our emotions, they tend to build up inside of us like pressure cookers.
Learning to process emotions and working towards building coping strategies that are productive is a step in becoming more emotionally resilient and improving our overall wellbeing.
Do Not Avoid Emotional Triggers
Avoiding triggers may feel like a natural reaction to anything that induces fear, but actually, all it does is validate the fearful thought and push you further away from facing the things you are afraid of.
For example, if someone thinks that the dark clouds in the sky are the trigger that induces anxiety, not going outside on a cloudy day may validate, rather than challenge these thoughts, as that person may sit inside worrying about getting anxious and thus, become anxious.
Avoiding emotional triggers can increase stress and change the way you live your life. Remember, you control your thoughts, not the other way around.
If your triggers are causing you to avoid certain situations and creating more anxiety in your life, it may be time to seek professional help.
A counsellor can help you understand your own emotional triggers, help build healthy coping strategies, and walk you through healthy ways to cope with feelings of anxiety.
Avoid Using Vices to Cope
Avoiding unhealthy coping strategies can teach us how to deal with our anxiety in a healthy and more productive way.
Using vices like alcohol, gambling, or sex temporarily masks anxiety and has negative consequences. Avoid any coping strategies that will not be beneficial for your well-being long term.
The guilt and shame you may feel as a result of unhealthy coping strategies can increase anxiety and may have you dealing with more negative emotions related to those habits.
Turning to vices can potentially take your anxiety from bad to worse while never teaching you how to properly deal with your anxiety.
Learning healthy coping strategies and using things like nutrition, grounding, exercise, use journal prompts for mental health or positive hobbies to deal with anxiety will give you more lasting results.
Avoid Isolating Yourself
When anxiety is present our first thought may be to run and hide. However, being alone and sitting with anxiety can intensify it and create an opportunity for your anxiety to take over.
Avoid isolating yourself when you are feeling anxious and try reaching out to a friend, family member or co-worker. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to talk about how you are feeling, but just being in the presence of someone else can help you take your mind off of the intense feelings that anxiety is known to induce.
If someone is not available to distract you there are some healthy coping methods to help you break a negative spiral and bring you back to the present moment using somatic strategies.
Do Not Allow Anxiety To Define You
Anxiety may be something you experience but it’s not something that defines your character. Avoid allowing your anxiety to define you and remind yourself that there are many aspects to who you are outside of your anxiety.
If you feel like this is something that is weighing you down, remind yourself of the other aspects of your life that you can be proud of.
This helps you to categorize your anxiety as a condition that you deal with and not as a personality or character flaw.
Draw strength from the other aspects of your life such as your family, friends, pets or work and use that to take control of your anxiety.
Learning healthy coping strategies is also a good way to curb feelings of anxiety and can help you get through those days when you are stuck in your head and body.
Final Thoughts
Although some days anxiety may feel like an uphill battle, learning what to avoid is just as important in building helpful coping strategies.
Avoiding triggers, isolating yourself, keeping your anxiety a secret and avoiding vices will help break the negative cycle that anxiety can induce.
With the help of a counsellor, healthy coping strategies can teach you how to manage your anxiety so it becomes a symptom you deal with rather than being the star focus of your life.
Remember, anxiety is a completely normal thing that many of us experience. Learning healthy ways to cope is the difference between gaining control over your anxiety and allowing it to negatively impact your life.
If you feel like this is something you have been trying to cope with unsuccessfully on your own, our counsellors are trained in providing individuals with healthy coping strategies to help curb their anxiety and improve the quality of their lives.
