3 Strategies for Managing Anxiety

 

05.12.2023 3 STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING ANXIETY Anxiety is a natural response to being human. Whether it appears during public speaking, in social settings, or when feeling a general state of unease, we all experience anxiety to various degrees in our everyday lives. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by anxiety, sometimes to the point that it feels like our anxiety controls us instead of the other way around. However, it’s not so much the feeling of anxiety that controls us, but how we relate to it. In my own life, I’ve found the following three strategies allow me to accept and work with anxiety. They may sound counterintuitive, or even anxiety-inducing, but when put into practice, they can each help reduce anxiety while allowing us to be more compassionate and patient with ourselves. 1. Stop Trying To Cope   Even practices that are good for us can become coping mechanisms in the face of anxiety. If you stop to meditate, do yoga, initiate breathwork, or perform another coping mechanism every time you feel anxious, you might wind up conditioning your brain to believe that it’s not okay to feel anxious. When anxiety arises, you can instead choose to accept what you’re feeling and simply allow your anxiety to be there. Practicing mindful awareness of anxious feelings and allowing yourself to feel them and without immediately trying to change your state, allows your brain to recognize that anxious feelings aren’t necessarily a threat. Over time, your over-stimulated fight or flight response can diminish. 2. Change Your Story The stories we tell ourselves eventually become embedded in our identity, so when it comes to anxiety, it’s helpful to stop telling yourself your anxiety origin story. You might remember the time when you first felt anxious — maybe you witnessed your parents go through a divorce at a young age, or experienced ridicule at school when you spoke your mind. When we feel anxious, we might go right back to those places in our minds, but regardless of the origin of your anxiety, it’s not the current cause of it. You can take back control by skillfully addressing your anxiety through the lens of the present moment and working with your feelings in the here and now. The narratives you tell yourself are what maintains those initial causes — unless you address them in the present they will continue to persist into the future. 3. Set Better Boundaries If you’re a people-pleasing person and find it hard to say no, or constantly find yourself worrying about what other people will say, do, or think before you consider what’s in your best interest, you’re likely going to face a steady stream of anxiety as a result. Assertive actions like setting boundaries with others and saying no to requests that you’re unable to fulfill might bring up feelings of guilt and shame, but they’re necessary actions to take for your overall well-being. While initially uncomfortable, they can allow you to feel less anxious in the long run.   If you found these tips helpful, you might be interested in Lion’s Roar’s new online course Working With Anxiety & Difficult Emotions, a collection of six workshops filled with Buddhist wisdom aimed at helping you navigate anxiety with mindfulness and compassion. Click here to learn more. For more Buddhist wisdom on managing anxiety, check out the three pieces from the Lion’s Roar archives featured below. —Chris Pacheco, Content Marketing Editor, Lion’s Roar

How to Work With Anxiety: 3 Techniques For Lasting Change Anxiety is a natural response to being human, says Lion’s Roar’s Chris Pacheco. When we try to control our anxious feelings instead of accepting them, we might end up exacerbating fear and worry. Here, he outlines three main strategies for moving through anxiety. Much of the advice around working with anxiety focuses on managing stressors and practicing calming techniques. These strategies are helpful, to a point, but they might ultimately distract one from the real issue at hand: Anxiety itself is probably not going anywhere. It’s a natural response to being human. When we try to pretend that we can actually cure anxiety — especially by focusing on controlling it — we might actually delude ourselves and end up exacerbating our anxiety.

How to Make Friends With Your Beautiful Monsters Anger, fear, envy — usually we’re ashamed of our so-called monstrous emotional patterns. Yet if we make friends with our monsters, says Tsoknyi Rinpoche, magic happens. We are no longer afraid.  The beautiful monsters have two types of beauty: the first is by their very nature. No matter how monstrous an emotion might seem, its deep underlying nature is very different. Like the raw material of full-colored 3D images projected on a screen is pure light, the underlying raw material of our beautiful monsters is openness, clarity, and energy. So beautiful monsters have that beauty. The second is that beautiful monsters seem ugly at first, but when we heal one, it becomes beautiful.

How I Stopped My Panic Attacks Stricken with anxiety as a child, Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche learned how to heal his panic with awareness. He teaches us three techniques that helped him. Knowing how I struggled, my father, a famed meditation teacher, advised me to welcome my panic. So I dutifully began to greet each panic episode with, “Oh, hello, anxiety, welcome!” It did help somewhat, but because my motivation hadn’t actually changed, I was not handling it much differently. My basic attitude was still aversion. Now I was just trying to outsmart the fear, thinking that if I welcomed the panic it would go away and not come back. You could almost say I was faking it. Even this fake welcoming helped somewhat, but it didn’t resolve the issue. I was still going in circles — experiencing anxiety and being anxious to be rid of it, which would in turn reinforce it.

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