5 Therapist-Approved & Simple Techniques to Calm Anxiety and Find Relief
Dealing with persistent worries and the physical symptoms of anxiety can (and often will) impact your daily life. At Therapy with Olivia, we understand the difficulties with finding effective anxiety management and are dedicated to help our clients find anxiety coping techniques that work well for them. Here are five of my favorite (both personally and professionally), simple yet effective anxiety relief techniques you can try today to calm your anxious mind and regain a sense of control.
Understanding Anxiety: Symptoms and its purpose.
Anxiety is a feeling so many of us are familiar with. In fact, anxiety is one of the most common symptoms people come to Therapy with Olivia to work on. While everyone’s experience with anxiety differs from one another and may even differ depending on the trigger, several central points and experiences are more universal.
Anxiety is an overwhelmingly physical emotion. Generally speaking, we often feel our anxiety physically before consciously and emotionally recognizing it. The most common trait I’ve seen amongst patients struggling with anxiety is what I refer to as the ‘anxious belly’ — the feeling of queasiness you feel in your gut, the feeling of your stomach being imbalanced, or, in some cases, the anxious shits. Fun fact: our gut has the most neuron receptors than anywhere else in our body, which is why it’s often called the second brain. This is why my somatic work (and work as a therapist) strongly emphasizes healing the relationship with your gut or your intuition — your stomach is one of the most intelligent parts of your body (if not the smartest). It is often what signals to the brain that something is off before your brain even registers it. When your stomach is fluttering and you feel butterflies, your gut is signaling to you you’re feeling anxious or uneasy.
Beyond the stomach, as a therapist, I often hear symptoms of extreme sweating, restlessness, a fast heart rate, and shallow, heavy breathing. All of these are ways our nervous system attempts to regulate itself and prepare you for possible fight-flight-freeze mode.
Anxiety involves rapid, doomsday thinking thoughts. Not only do I often hear the physical side of anxiety, I also commonly work with the catastrophic thinking (or doomsday thinking) that is commonly associated with anxiety. While anxiety often starts physically, the brain is quick to catch up and begin to list off all the ways things can (and will) go wrong. These thoughts may include “If I fail this exam, I’m never going to get into the college of my dreams,” “If my work isn’t perfect, I will get fired,” or “If I tell my partner they hurt my feelings, they’ll leave me, and I’ll be alone forever.” While we can look back at these thoughts and know, in hindsight, they’re unhelpful thoughts that create more anxiety, these thoughts will often disguise themselves as valuable thoughts, helping you prepare for the ‘inevitable.’
While in present day, anxiety isn’t necessarily the most helpful emotion to experience and often doesn’t serve us, this feeling is something left from our ‘monkey brain’ and was necessary at one point. In theory, anxiety was created to keep us safe — it was a way for our bodies to signal to us that something is wrong and we are in danger. Without anxiety, and without the nervous system automatically scanning for any signs of danger, we (as a species) would not survive. Anxiety is straight survival. But, as time has continued on and the world has developed, not all anxiety is based on survival but the brains perception of what is necessary to survive. Instead of the feeling being triggered because there’s a big animal that wants to eat us, anxiety can be triggered when our perceived safety is at risk. Is your physical safety and wellbeing at risk because you have an upcoming exam? No, but since we don’t typically experience extreme danger, our brains have developed to believing that an exam is the same thing as safety. And, to some extent, this could be true — if you do poorly in school, you are less likely to get into a college, and without that you could be ‘at risk’ with your income and livelihood. But, the same level of vigilance is often unnecessary.
The above is a generalization and does not consider the entire world’s climate. While there are plenty of things to feel anxious about that is valid and scary, the above statement is made as a generalization of the original purpose of anxiety versus how people most commonly experience it now. Even with valid and fair anxiety, it’s still important to learn how to regulate and calm yourself, as this will often be what keeps you the safest at the end of the day.
How does anxiety impact everyday life?
Or better yet, how does being dysregulated impact your everyday life? In my practice, I view all emotions as valid and offering useful information to you about your situation, experience, or those around you, including anxiety. It’s often the ways in which the emotion expresses itself that negatively impacts your everyday life. With anxiety in particular, not only does the physical sensation and the doomsday thinking impact you, but when you experience anxiety on a regular basis, you may also develop avoidance of situations, places, or people you associate with your anxiety.
Let’s look at an example. Every time you make an appointment to see your dentist you feel fine, but when it’s time to go, the anxiety starts. Maybe you have a racing heart, your stomach starts to ache, you start sweating and feel like you can pass out, and this feeling doesn’t stop until well after you leave the office. No matter how important it is to go get your teeth cleaned regularly, you experience so much anxiety that lasts so long, you become avoidant of the dentist all together as a way to ‘manage’ your anxiety.
When the way you ‘regulate’ your emotions involve avoidance, you are not actually regulating but cutting yourself off from learning how to manage and self-sooth.
Beyond avoidance, anxiety can make us generally more on edge, increasingly stubborn (demanding things a certain way in order to avoid or ‘manage’ anxiety), physically uncomfortable and unwell, and even cause conflict in relationships. Anxiety is a totally normal emotion but just like with all emotions, it’s how the emotion expresses itself that causes the biggest impact.
Anxiety techniques to help calm the anxious mind.
Anxiety is a completely normal emotion and not one we want to avoid. It can tell us a lot about how we are feeling with ourselves, a situation, a place, or other people; however, sometimes in order to hear what the anxiety is trying to tell you (or potentially warn you about), we have to learn how to self-regulate. The following techniques or either ones that I personally use or ones that I have seen the most effective with my clients. I usually recommend to practice the techniques before you’re in an anxious state so you can familiarize yourself with them and see if you have a preference for any of them.
The Butterfly Hug or Bilateral Stimulation
The butterfly hug is one of my favorite anxiety management techniques to use both personally and professionally — once I learned this technique, it quickly became my go-to to calm my own anxiety. Before going into how to do the technique, let’s first discuss why it works to begin with.
This technique works because of the bilateral stimulation of it, meaning activating one side of your brain than the other. Bilateral stimulation of any kind has been proven to give a calming effect when used, helping you find a more relaxed and regulated state. Bilateral stimulation has the ability to activate our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), or the rest and digest system. Our PNS is what lowers our heart rate, reduces muscle tension, regulates our breathing, and helps us find a calm state. When we’re feeling anxious, our sympathetic nervous system is activated, communicating with our body that we’re in danger and action must take place (this is when you start experiencing the physical symptoms I’ve mentioned above). The only way to for the SNS to find rest is when the PNS is activiated. Through practicing something like the butterfly hug, you are creating communication between your brain hemispheres and starting up your nervous system to find rest. (I know this was more sciency than what I usual write about, but it’s important to know these things!)
So, how do you do it? Fortunately, it’s super easy and something you can do anywhere at anytime. To start, you’ll cross your hands over each other, placing your hands just under opposite shoulders or below the collar bone — your right hand is sitting on your left side, and your left hand is on your right. Once you’re hands are in place, you tap back and forth, right to left, one hand at a time. This movement can be as slow or as fast as you find comfortable and calming (I personally prefer slow taps!). You can tap back and forth as long as you find necessary. If you don’t want to tap on your chest for any reason (maybe you’re in public), then you can also tap back and forth on your knees.
There are other forms of bilateral stimulation as well! These include auditory stimulation — listening to bilateral music (you can find a lot of options online, but wear headphones!) or even snapping back and forth, creating your own rhythm — and more recently, wearable stimulation — there are now things like smart watches that will offer bilateral stimulation, or apps that offer different bilateral stimulation techniques.
Square Breathing
Square breathing, or any form of paced, deep breathing, is another accessible and easy technique that has been proven to help regulate and calm anxiety. When we slow or breathing and focus on full, deep breaths, we work on slowing our heart rate down and activating the PNS. And when we’re taking slower, deeper breaths, we are getting enough oxygen to our brains, signaling that we are safe. The added benefit to square breathing is that counting your inhales and exhales offers a distraction to your mind, allowing you to focus on something else.
This is a simple technique following a 4-4-4-4 tempo. I want you to imagine a square in front of you when doing this technique — follow the square up one side counting to 4, this will be your inhale; follow the line across the top of the square for 4, this where you will hold your breath; follow the other side of the square down for 4, this will be your exhale; follow the bottom of the box for 4, this is where you will hold before inhaling. So it’s: inhale for 4 seconds, hold at the top for 4 seconds, exhale for 4 seconds, hold at the bottom for 4 seconds. You can continue this square for as long as you want to.
Connect with Your 5 Senses
Through this technique, you bring your attention away from your stress and put it towards where you currently are. The idea behind connecting to your 5 senses, or the 5-4-3-2-1 technique, is to help you recenter yourself in your body and bring yourself back to the present moment, something many of us lose touch with while feeling anxious.
This is a technique that you can say out loud as you go, or say it in your head — it truly doesn’t matter as long as you’re focusing on your senses. Here’s how it goes:
First, list out 5 things you can see; then list out 4 things you can touch; then 3 things you can hear; then 2 things you can smell; finally, list 1 thing you can taste.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Anxiety impacts the physical body, we’ve already covered that, and one of the main ways it impacts our physical body is in our muscles. Many people who feel anxiety are also experiencing tensed muscles — maybe you notice your jaw being clenched or your shoulders are raised when feeling anxious. A great way to start calming your body (therefore your brain) is to practice progressive muscle relaxation, focusing on one part of your body at a time.
There are all kinds of progressive muscle relaxation techniques and you can find wonderful guided versions on YouTube. But, let’s cover what this could potentially look like.
In a seated position with your feet on the ground or laying down flat on your back, start with closing your eyes. You will be tensing your muscles and holding for 10 seconds before releasing. You only want to tense your muscles enough to feel it, not to the point of strain. You will start from your feet and work your way up:
Beginning at the feet, start to curl and uncurl your toes; create tension in your feet and toes, and release. Moving up your leg, point or flex your feet, feeling the tension in your calves and release. Then, squeeze your thighs tightly together and relax. Moving to your torso, suck in your abdomen, feeling tension in your belly, sigh it out and release. Next, squeeze your shoulder blades together, feeling tension forming in your back, and release. Lift your shoulders up to your ears, squeezing and feeling the tension, and let your shoulders drop to neutral. Next, focus on your hands — make a tight fist, as tight as you can, then release your hands. Then, scrunch your facial features to the center of your face, feeling the muscles tense with your face pinched, then let you face return to neutral. Finally, squeeze all your muscles together, hold for 10 seconds, then release all the tension and sigh it out.
Distract Yourself
For many people, distracting themselves with something unrelated to the anxiety (and the anxiety trigger) is a great way to calm the brain. This can include just about any form of distraction — talking about your favorite food, dancing around to music, watching a funny video, reading a book — or it can include specific forms of distraction that force your brain out of it’s anxious thought loop. Here are some of my go-to examples:
List as many animals/types of food/music genres/languages/etc. that you can; pick any category and list as many things as you can in that category. Count backward from 100 in increments of 7 (this one is tough, but having to think more about math can really force your brain out of the anxious thoughts).
Anxiety can be an overwhelming feeling, both mentally and physically, to experience. It can be all consuming and feel like there will never be a solution, but you’re not alone. It is one of the most normal and human feelings you can experience, having a significant importance that once served us in the past, but doesn’t always serve us in the present. There are ways to calm the anxious body and mind enough for you to be able to find a solution for the anxiety and to move forward. Try out some of the techniques above, preferably before absolutely necessary, and see which ones resonate the most with you. If you would like, click here to download a PDF version of the techniques listed.
While these techniques are proven to help calm the mind and body, they are not a ‘cure’ for the anxiety. If you are experiencing high levels of anxiety that result in avoidance, relationship issues, or extreme discomfort, or if these techniques do not help with your anxiety, you may benefit from beginning therapy. At Therapy with Olivia, we have a team of therapists who all have experience of working with anxiety and are ready to help you overcome these feelings. Are you ready to take the first steps towards managing your anxiety? Contact us directly here for a free, confidential consultation and learn how our experienced therapists can help you find lasting relief! All services are offered online through a secure telehealth network or in person at our office in Den Haag (The Hague), Netherlands.
