5 Things That Help with Anxiety
1. Medication
My fellow therapists won’t thank me for saying this – and especially for listing it in the Number 1 spot – but it’s true. Severe anxiety is almost unbearable, and medication can help. So why wouldn’t you get that help? I won’t go into all the options here, but there’s a ton of them. You’ll need to see your GP to get a script, and the GP can advise you on which medication will suit you best. Having said all that, medication is only going to tackle the symptoms of anxiety. It’s never going to address the cause. For that, nothing beats therapy.
2. Meditation
Most people have never tried meditation. Despite the fact there are numerous scientific studies which have proved its effectiveness, it still has a lingering reputation for being a ‘woo-woo fad’. It isn’t. If you’ve never tried this powerful tool, I strongly suggest you give it a go. A good place to start is YouTube, or Spotify, where you’ll find numerous guided meditations that will give you all the instructions you need. There are also various meditation centres in Sydney where you can take a course. It may not be for you, but it’s definitely worth a try.
3. Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)
This is a technique that once again has a ton of scientific research behind it. So much so, it’s one of the few therapies other than CBT that Australian psychologists are authorised to deliver under Medicare. If you haven’t heard of it – and most people haven’t – PMR trains you to gradually relax your entire body, usually from the toes up. Many people find it effective for reducing anxiety. Try it. Again, a YouTube search will give you what you need.
4. Therapy
Of course I have to put therapy on there. Anxiety can have numerous causes. But there’s always something behind it. While medication, meditation and PMR can help you tackle those horrible anxiety symptoms – like racing heart, negative thoughts, and shortness of breath – they won’t address the cause. In the same way that you need to pull a weed out by the root to make sure it won’t grow back, you need to get to the root cause of your anxiety to get rid of it. And talking to a skilled therapist can help you do that.
5. Understanding
For such a highly debilitating condition, which affects so many millions of people a year, it’s surprising how little the average person understands about anxiety. And that tends to make it even more scary. As with any enemy, it helps to know what you’re dealing with. The short answer to the question ‘what is anxiety?’ is that it’s the activation of our threat-response system. You’ve probably heard of ‘Fight or Flight’. That’s how the body responds to danger. It’s a set of physical and mental changes that humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, which essentially prepare us to either fight a threat, or run away from it. These changes include raising our heartrate (so we can run faster) and switching our breathing to faster and shallower breaths (like how you breathe when you’re doing vigorous exercise). Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that – see this article if you want the full story. And understanding what anxiety is will certainly not cure it. But in the same way that we’re less scared of the monster in a horror movie when we have a complete picture of it, the more you know about anxiety, the less scary it may seem.