Most people
feel anxious from time to time. However, anxiety can become abnormal if it
interferes with your everyday life which it did to me a few years ago. When my anxiety kicked in, I would feel
fearful and tense and normally this would escalate into physical symptoms. My heart rate would increase, and begin
thumping (palpitations), I felt sick, chest pains, experienced headache and
rapid breathing…the list continues... Initially, I thought I was having a heart
attack and I ended up taking myself to A&E MANY times! However, I gradually began to understand that
these physical feelings were actually my anxiety and I needed to learn how to
control it.
Here are a few things I used
to practice to help me overcome my moments of extreme anxiety and moments of
feeling incredibly low:
· A simple breathing exercise:
Sitting down, relax
your body. Drop your shoulders and let your jaw relax. Now breathe in slowly
through your nose and count to four, keep your shoulders down and allow your
stomach to expand as you breathe in. Hold the breath for a moment. Now release
your breath slowly out of your mouth and smoothly as you count to seven. Repeat
for a couple of minutes.
· What we say to ourselves has an
amazing impact on how we feel. Turn your
negative thoughts into positive thoughts – it helps to write them down on
paper. This can be very hard to do but
the more you practise it, the more you will become aware of it and the easier
it will become. Some examples: “I am
wonderful just being me”, “It's an opportunity to learn something new”, “I am
going to live today as if it’s my last”.
· Start speaking to yourself as you
would to your best friends. What we say to ourselves has an amazing impact on
how we feel and what we do. For example, telling yourself things like; “I’m so
stupid for doing that”, “I’m so fat”, “I’m so useless” – is destructive and
critical.
· Cut these words out of your
vocabulary – “Cant”, “shouldn’t” and “not allowed” and replace with words like
“I will” and “I can”.
