How do I deal with anxiety?

Most of us will face some form of anxiety sooner or later in our lives. I definitely experience anxiety attacks from time to time when dealing with difficult life situations (or checking Instagram).

Jokes aside, it’s not a pleasant experience, and ideally, it would be minimal or better yet, nonexistent.

It’s important to note that in this article, I am not discussing how to deal with serious anxiety disorders where professional help is needed. In those cases, please seek help. There is no shame in it. Mental health issues are just like physical issues; you wouldn’t hesitate to see a doctor for a broken leg, so if you're suffering mentally, do the same!

I will discuss the everyday anxiety that most of us sometimes experience at work, in our personal lives, in relationships, or due to financial stresses—and how to handle it. But perhaps more importantly, I’ll talk about how to prevent it from even happening.

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is essentially the body's natural response to stress, involving feelings of fear, apprehension, or worry about what is to come, such as a challenging event or situation.

Anxiety is a normal part of life to some extent and can even be beneficial in certain situations, providing alertness and improving performance. However, when anxiety becomes excessive, it can fall into the category of an anxiety disorder, which is among the most common mental health issues.

Physical Symptoms:

• Increased Heart Rate: Anxiety can cause the heart to beat faster and stronger, leading to palpitations.

• Sweating: It is common to experience excessive sweating during anxious moments, even without physical exertion.

• Trembling or Shaking: Fine or noticeable shaking of the body or limbs is another physical manifestation of anxiety.

• Gastrointestinal Issues: Anxiety can upset the digestive system, resulting in symptoms like nausea, diarrhea, or constipation.

• Fatigue: Despite potentially causing hyperactivity and alertness initially, chronic anxiety often leads to significant tiredness and exhaustion.

• Muscle Tension: Persistent anxiety often causes muscles to tighten and become sore, particularly in the neck, shoulders, and back.

Psychological Symptoms:

• Persistent Worry: One of the hallmark signs of anxiety is excessive worrying about various aspects of daily life that is disproportionate to the actual impact of the events.

• Restlessness: People with anxiety may feel like they can’t relax or sit still, often feeling on edge.

• Irritability: Anxiety can make individuals easily agitated and more sensitive to their surroundings.

• Difficulty Concentrating: The preoccupation with worrisome thoughts can impair one’s ability to focus on tasks or make decisions.

• Sleep Disturbances: This includes trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or experiencing unrestful sleep.

• Fear: Intense and irrational fears about ordinary situations or objects can also signify anxiety, especially when these fears significantly interfere with normal functioning.

For me, anxiety worsened over time as I aged and took on more responsibilities for my family and assets. Although I am financially savvy, I still tend to worry.

Even with a healthy safety net, unexpectedly losing my job during the last market downturn gave me anxiety.

I’ve experienced quite a few of the symptoms, mostly the psychological ones: excessive sweating, especially in the middle of the night, increased heart rate, persistent worry, restlessness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and fear.

What bothered me the most were the restlessness, irritability, and difficulty concentrating. This can easily affect your family life. For example, I have a small child, and I couldn’t properly focus on our play. It’s not nice.

However, fortunately, most of the time the anxiety is mild and short-lived.

Just usual concerns like, "Am I doing well at work? Will that task I didn’t finish on Friday be a problem next week?", "Should I have spent that much money on [something expensive]?", "Am I going to raise my child well?" There are a million different smaller or bigger anxieties we go through in our lives on a daily basis.

Impact on Daily Life

When you check the list of the symptoms, I'm sure you can imagine how a few of them can make your life worse.

I personally dislike the psychological symptoms the most. Sure, having night sweats is not nice, but I can somehow live with it. However, not being able to focus on my work or family is tough.

This channel is all about personal goals, planning our life, and being productive. So, the difficulty to concentrate is quite a big one. If you can’t concentrate, can’t sleep properly, and are restless, you can’t start performing and reduce your anxiety. It goes in circles, and you need to somehow break out.

Once You Are In, How Do You Get Out?

There are the usual things that you will find in every guide:

• Breathing Exercises

• Meditation

• Exercise

And they definitely help. However, what helped me the most was:

• Having goals

  Yeah right, you might think. This blog is about goal-setting, so surely I have to mention it. But the truth is it helps. Having goals set, written down, ideally aligned with your values or Ikigai, reduces anxiety with one simple thing. It gives you direction and clarity. It gives you a sense of control.

  If you can’t focus on anything, at least you have this set. What’s the point of worrying? You have your plan, take the first task from the list, and start working on it.

  When you set a goal and begin to see progress, even if small, it reinforces the belief that you have influence over your life’s direction.

• Focus on only one thing at a time

  Pick the most important goal or task for the current situation and focus only on it. When I lost my job, the most important task at hand was to start applying for other jobs. So, instead of worrying and trying to figure out how not to lose the house, just sit down, update your LinkedIn profile, connect with your connections, go to job portals, and start applying.

  Sooner or later you get some responses, and anxiety will slowly go away as you see the progress.

• Meditation and Mindfulness

  I have had migraines for a few years already. They usually come from a combination of stress, caffeine, and sugar, with stress being the main factor. So, I had to do something to reduce my stress. I started to practice very simple meditation/breathing exercises, and it really helps. With both stress and anxiety. They usually go hand in hand anyway.

  Note: I might create an article about different styles of meditation I explored. Basically, you need to find one that works for you. What works best for me, is a very simple exercise of counting every breath out while I am trying to clear my mind, not to think about anything. When a random thought spills in, I restart the counting. After a while, I stop counting and do only the breathing.

  This really calms me down and relaxes me. It helps with migraines and it helps with the anxiety. Anxiety, stress, migraines—they all go hand in hand.

• Exercise

  I like to exercise, so this one is a no-brainer for me. However, it helps. When you are physically exhausted, it’s difficult to not sleep, and the muscle pain and tiredness take the focus from worrying about the future to the present.

  Physical activity also stimulates the production of endorphins, which are neurotransmitters in the brain that act as natural painkillers and mood elevators.

  Regular exercise also helps in regulating and reducing levels of the body's stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, which can actually exacerbate anxiety.

Lifestyle Changes and Long-Term Strategies

Let's explore long-term strategies to prevent anxiety from occurring.

It goes without saying that personal goal-setting and the regular exercise mentioned above are long-term strategies you can adopt to mitigate anxiety.

Other strategies include:

Diet and Nutrition

Anxiety may decrease your appetite, but it’s important to eat. When you do eat, you might find yourself reaching for junk food, often something sugary, which is the worst option. Sugar rushes can enhance your anxiety.

The better approach is to eat balanced meals at regular intervals to help maintain stable blood sugar levels.

Caffeine and alcohol have similar effects. Caffeine can stimulate the nervous system, leading to an increased heart rate and restlessness, which might mimic or worsen anxiety symptoms. Alcohol, while initially acting as a sedative, can disrupt neurotransmitters in the brain and worsen anxiety as it wears off.

Ideally, you should cut it out completely, but as someone who loves morning coffee and the occasional beer, I find moderation is key. Also, decaffeinated coffee is very decent these days, so I mostly opt for decaf and have regular coffee only once or twice a week when I really need a boost.

Sleep Hygiene

Good sleep is absolutely necessary, yet, at least for me, it’s one of the biggest challenges. If you don’t get enough sleep like me, establishing proper routines is crucial.

Having a consistent sleep schedule—going to bed and waking up at the same time every day—helps regulate the body's internal clock and improves the quality of sleep. I wake up every day at 4:50 AM. My body is so accustomed to it that I wake up around that time naturally, even without an alarm. And I never go to sleep after 10 PM.

Obviously, doing regular exercise helps with sleeping well, and having coffee beforehand makes it difficult to sleep. You want more of the former and less of the latter.

Reducing screen time before bed is absolutely necessary. If you lie down in bed and pick up your phone or tablet, it will be very difficult to fall asleep.

Looking at mobile devices before sleep can make it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep for several reasons related to how these devices affect our brain's chemistry. Exposure to blue light suppresses the production of melatonin, the hormone that signals to our body it's time to sleep. The use of mobile devices often involves activities that keep the mind engaged, such as playing games, browsing social media, or reading news articles. This mental stimulation produces cognitive arousal, which counters the relaxation needed for sleep. The list goes on.

Drink Less Water Before Going to Bed

While hydration is absolutely essential throughout the day, I prefer not to drink any water 2 hours before going to bed to avoid waking up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, which can disrupt sleep.

It’s quite simple not to have anxiety if you live a well-balanced life. Yet, living a well-balanced life is actually quite challenging, especially nowadays with so many distractions that push us away from good habits.

Also, it requires a lot of work.

Exercising regularly is not easy. If it were, we wouldn’t have widespread problems with obesity.

Avoiding junk food is not easy either. It’s everywhere, affordable, and widely available. Especially in Western society (definitely in the US and UK), it feels like everything has excess sugar in it.

Mobile phones, tablets, streaming services, and social media all want your attention as long as possible, at the expense of your good night's sleep.

You might even feel anxious just reading this list of things to do to avoid anxiety.

I won’t lie to you. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be a problem. Your body needs regular maintenance. The good news is that it all compounds. For example, eating healthier helps reduce your weight, makes you stronger, which in turn helps you achieve some of your health-related personal goals, boosts your motivation, reduces your anxiety, and improves your sleep, which reduces your stress and anxiety even more, and so on.

Life is good.