How to Manage Chronic Stress And Ease Anxiety With Mindfulness

I don’t remember the exact moment–or day for that matter–when I realized I might be living with unhealthy levels of anxiety. It wasn’t an aha moment, but a slow realization that this was no way to live. Life seemed like an ever-ending battle and I deserved better. My family deserved better.

Everyone is anxious from time to time. Speaking in front of a group, taking an important test, or meeting your in-laws for the first time are all anxiety-inducing. There is nothing wrong with getting nervous and a bit anxious from time to time. It’s a protective mechanism.

The problem is when tension is a frequent companion and your anxiety is ever-present. When you can’t relax because there’s always something you’re worried about, your kids, your aging parents, your relationships, finances, health. When you are living according to self-imposed shoulds instead of following your own internal compass. When you’re trying to control every outcome, perfect and perform, yet never feel it’s good enough. When shame and blame on you. When you never drop from fight-flight into a restorative state of balance.

Stress is inevitable. How we handle it is everything.

Part of the journey of life is learning to deal with unavoidable stress. You have to know yourself, and how you react habitually to stress in order to deal with it in a healthy way. You have to learn how to handle the occasional panic within, how to tame your animal brain, how to surround yourself with love and care so that you have the internal strength to ride out the bumps of life.

If you run from it, it will resurface somewhere else, unexpectedly. You might end up on a gurney one day wandering how you got there. A better question is, why did you ignore your own voice begging for attention? See, anxiety is our teacher. It reminds us that we lost our way.

At some point, you have to take stock of your life. You might then discover that while you were busy chasing a career and building a family, you perhaps neglected your own health and well-being, whether mental, emotional, or physical. And if as a child you didn’t get enough love, care, and attention–and so many of us didn’t–it only makes sense that as an adult now you neglect yourself as well. So now, you owe yourself some love, care, and attention. You must face yourself and how you’re contributing to your anxiety. If you want to recover and heal, you must look within.

3 Tools For Managing Chronic Stress And Healing Anxiety

This process is tri-fold.

Self-discovery

Start by getting to know your needs, your boundaries, and your desires better, so that you can recognize when you are abandoning and neglecting yourself. You must then learn to live more attuned with who you are at the core, with love, care, and compassion – this will shift you from anxiety into authenticity. Writing can be a great healing tool for this. By uncovering your mental patterns, your habitual reactions, and how they came to be, you can then remove what doesn’t serve you and learn new ways of responding to life’s challenges. Authenticity requires self-knowledge and self-awareness – and writing is a great tool to help you process your hurts and worries, uncover unhealthy blocks and patterns, and discover how your fears and self-defeating beliefs fuel anxiety. If you can name it, you can tame it.

Self-care

Modern life is stressful, complicated, and often overwhelming. To balance the barrage of stress and pressure we’re put under every day, we need to focus on our well-being and make self-care a priority. Self-care is not selfish, it is a necessity if we are to care well for others. Pause and take time to be alone, reward yourself for hard work by getting a massage, add more fun and pleasure to your every day, commit to sleeping and eating well, move your body in a way you enjoy (yoga, dance, long walks), get creative and childlike, cuddle, hug or have sex, meditate, say no. Spend at least 30 minutes a day doing something just for you, something that is fun and relaxing. This will restore your balance and give you the mental break you need to avoid overwhelm and burnout.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a practice that teaches us to slow down, tune into and ground ourselves in the now. Living in the present moment calms anxiety. We slowly distance ourselves from the grips of it, first physically as we follow the breath, then mentally and emotionally as we get out of our head and into our body and our current experience. This stepping back gives us a bit of a perspective, we realize we can handle things one step at a time, instead of having to figure it all out at once.

Mindfulness, self-care, and writing saved me. Writing about my experiences and how they shaped me allowed me to uncover some unhealthy emotional and mental blocks and patterns that contributed to my anxiety. Mindfulness allowed me to stay present so difficult emotions that often surfaced didn’t overwhelm me. This process has been healing and truly transforming.

I still get anxious but I’m able to manage it and come out the other side wiser and stronger. Anxiety doesn’t control my life anymore. I do.

[This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on ACEs Connection]