Anxiety is totally normal. I feel anxiety every day. And with all the uncertainty and change that’s happening at the moment, it’s even more understandable to be feeling fearful.
But through practising the techniques I’ve listed below, I have reduced it massively, and I have taught hundreds of people to do the same.
You might not find every technique effective, but I’m sure you will find at least a few of these exercises helpful.
- Deep breathing with a longer out breath
I usually start my meditations with taking some really deep breaths — filling my lungs to maximum capacity and then blowing all the air out of them. Every last drop. This brings more awareness into the body, and away from anxious thoughts, and also activates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system, or rest and digest response, calming you down.
2. 7/11
Another breathing technique involves not changing how you are breathing. Instead, you pay close attention to it whilst counting to seven on the way in and eleven on the way you.
People often find their outbreath naturally lengthens, their mind becomes quieter and they feel calmer in less than a minute.
Here’s an audio recording where I guide you through it.
3. Switching from thinking to sensing
One of the key aspects of depression and anxiety is overthinking: rumination, where you have the same thought again and again and catastrophising, where you think about the worst possible thing that could happen to you or the people you care about.
One way to stop the runaway train of negative thoughts is to switch to sensing mode. Simply notice what you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell. It’s very hard to really pay attention to your senses and be doing a lot of negative thinking at the same time.
4. Meditation
Meditation is simply training the mind. Once you realise that it’s your mind that’s making you suffer, and not other people or the world out there, your task actually becomes simpler and clearer. How do I train a happy mind?
Studies of people who practice meditation have shown they are happier, healthier, less anxious and depressed, age more slowly, and are more compassionate.
5. Meditating on your breath
Divide your meditation into two. In the first half, focus on the sensations of breath coming in and out of your nostrils. When you get distracted, just keep coming back to the sensations.
In the second half, notice when something stops. The end of the in breath, the end of the out breath, the end of a thought stream, the end of a sound.
You could do this for five minutes, or even an hour.
Anything can happen when you do this, especially for longer periods. You might experience discomfort, restlessness, anxiety, impatience, doubt… but stick with it long enough and it will usually melt into a calm, still presence.
6. Acceptance
When you feel an uncomfortable, anxious feeling, it’s very common for people to want to get rid of it. This is like pushing a football underwater — it just springs straight back again!
Instead, ask yourself the question ‘Can I be with this?’ or ‘Can I be OK with this?’ Letting the feeling be there will allow it to move through you much faster and be at peace.
If the answer is ‘no’, notice how that feels. Here’s a meditation called ‘Everything’s OK’, that will help you practice accepting whatever you are experiencing.
7. Ask what if there was no problem to solve?
The anxious mind is constantly trying to fix problems. ‘How do I get everything done before the deadline?’ ‘How can I make more money?’ ‘How do I get rid of this feeling?’
Try asking yourself, particularly in meditation, when it’s not the time to be taking action, ‘What if, in this moment, there was no problem to solve?’
This is meditation, ‘Letting go of problems’, will help you practice this.
8. Gratitude
You can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. Gratitude is about focusing on what’s positive, what’s good the way it is, what you don’t need to be afraid of. You could write a gratitude list before you sleep and and/or when you wake up. You could express it before eating, for all the people involved in growing, producing and cooking the food. You could write messages to people you appreciate… There are so many ways to practice it.
9. Loving-kindness meditation
Often when we’re anxious we’re worrying what other people think of us. Of course we can’t control that, but we can change the way we’re relating to them.
This is a meditation that involves wishing for yourself and others to be happy. You develop positive emotion which replaces the negative ones.
10. Lester Levenson’s Love Exercise
In 1952, aged 42, Lester Levenson was told my doctors he was terminally ill and had only a few weeks to live. While reflecting on his life he realised that his problems weren’t caused by the world, or people in it, but by his own feelings about them.
He developed a method for changing those feelings to positive ones. The first step is to think of a person and ask yourself what emotions arise.
Then ask ‘Can I change this feeling to love?’ It’s amazing how effortlessly you can change how you feel. Start with people you like and build up to people you find more difficult.
Lester lived until 85 years-old.
11. Body awareness
When we’re feeling angry, sad or anxious for long periods of time, it’s usually because we’re doing a lot of ruminating, resenting, catastrophising — a lot of negative, repetitive thoughts.
One way to circumvent this is to focus your attention on your body. In this meditation, I guide you through doing that for 35 minutes.
12. Attention training
There was a Harvard study called ‘A wandering mind is an unhappy mind’. It found that almost half the time participants’ attention was on something other than the task in hand, and when that was the case, they were experiencing negative emotions.
Simply realising you are no longer present, and bringing your attention back to the here and now results in everyday tasks feeling a lot more satisfying — even joyful. Try eating with your attention fully on the food, for example.
13. Questioning your thoughts
In this little animation you see a man’s fight or flight response being activated by his boss seeming to ignore him when he arrives at work. He gets upset, worried, angry, sweaty and aggressive thinking of all the unpleasant and personal reasons that his boss has done that.
By the end of the clip he realises it was nothing personal — his boss was merely preoccupied.
If you realise that you are imagining that someone is upset with you or that something will turn out for the worse, question those thoughts. Do you have any evidence? What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best that could happen? What’s a likely explanation that’s nothing to do with you?
14. Deshaming through sharing
Feeling shame about something can cause a huge amount of anxiety.
Researcher Brene Brown once said that if shame were a bacteria in a petri dish, what would make it multiply is silence. But if we can share the thing we are ashamed about with someone else, and they don’t judge us, it disappears like darkness having a torch shone onto it.
Hence the power of therapists, coaches, counsellors, mens/womens groups and trusted friends.
15. Being absorbed in an activity
If you become completely absorbed in playing football, listening to music, watching a film, cooking, knitting a quilt or playing tiddlywinks you will no longer be thinking, and you might even enter into a state of ‘flow’, which is defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi as:
- Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
- Merging of action and awareness
- A loss of reflective self-consciousness
- A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
- A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
- Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
In flow, you will be free of anxiety.
16. Attenborough mode
Very often we fight against uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, and this causes suffering. It’s also very common to feel anxious about feeling anxious!
In this clip, watch how David Attenborough behaves with the gorilla. He gives him space, lets him be, he is curious, even in awe. This is a great attitude to practice with your own mind and emotions, particularly when you meditate.
17. RAKs
Random Acts of Kindness! When we’re anxious, it’s almost always the case that we are self-focused. When we do acts of kindness we focus on the happiness of others. It makes you feel happy, them feel happy, and anyone who sees or hears about it.
Here are some science-backed benefits of kindness, and here are some heart-warming examples of kind acts.
18. Write your eulogy
This may sound like a strange, morbid thing to do, but it really helps you to be clear on what kind of a life you want to lead. It might show you that you are on track and help you celebrate your positive attributes and achievements. It might also show you that there is a gap between how you are living and the life that you would be proud of, and inspire you to make some changes.
If you know you are living a life you are proud of, you will feel less anxious.
19. Talking to fear
Fear is not the bad guy. It’s there to keep us and the people around us safe. But sometimes it can hold us back from living the life we want, stop us sleeping or cause conflict in relationships, amongst other things.
Instead of trying to suppress or distract away from fear, have a chat with it as if it were a person. Ask it what it wants for you, what it’s most afraid of and how you can help it to feel safer and more secure. Get fear on your side and you will be unstoppable.
20. Goal setting
My mum always said anxiety is praying for what you don’t want to happen. It’s visualising the future you don’t want. So how about visualising the future you do want? If you don’t have a dream, how can you have a dream come true?
It’s a very powerful exercise, and I’ve lost track of the number of very specific things that I and the people I know have had happen when we imagined it and wrote it down, drew it or told someone about it.
Here is a 10 minute recording to help you imagine your ideal life in six-months time.
21. Being headless
Have you ever noticed that from your own perspective, you don’t have a head? You can’t see your own face unless you look in the mirror, and even then it’s the wrong way around and in front of you.
If you point back at the place you are looking out from, you will notice that it is clear, open, boundaryless, and that the world seems to appear within it, or rather within you.
This may sound very strange, but Richard Lang can guide you through a series of short experiments so you can test the idea for yourself.
These experiments often make people feel deeply peaceful.
Conclusion
Many of these techniques can give you instant relief, but if you want your baseline mood to be calm you need to keep practising them!
I suggest meditating every day, and build up to at least twenty minutes.
If you’d like me to help you with your anxiety, you can book a free 1–2–1 taster coaching session here.
