3 Simple Steps to Tame Your Anxiety

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Panic Disorder often feel like a Jack in the Box. You never know when it will go off. Learning how to manage the feelings of anxiety and the negative thoughts that tend to take over during those moments takes practice and persistence. Many people need someone with expertise to teach them the skills needed to get their anxiety under control. But once you "get it", you can effectively manage your symptoms.

Once you know how to calm your nervous system down manually, you can work with a good counselor to explore what is underneath the symptoms. This is where the real healing begins. It is hard work, of course, but learning how to manage your emotions first gives you the stability you need in your life and the confidence you crave in yourself to do the hard stuff.

The first step involves knowing what you are feeling and how strong it is.

Many people are only aware of their feelings when they are in the panic zone. Often admitting to day-to-day anxiety is thought of as weak or whining. However, if we can avoid self-judgment and catch the emotion early, our emotional train is much easier to stop.

Waiting until it is going full force is like trying to stop a roller coaster after that first car or two has already gone over the brink. At that point, you just have to wait out the ride and hope your support rails are strong enough to keep you from a total disaster.

Early awareness involves taking the time to sort through what actually happens in your body, behavior, and thoughts when you feel anxious. Once you know what happens, you can start to put that on a scale from 1-10 to rate the intensity. For younger kids, a stoplight analogy usually works. Green for low-grade symptoms, Yellow for medium intensity, and Red for really strong feelings/symptoms.

Once you have caught your feelings early, you can now choose a healthy coping skill.

We all want to feel better, but sometimes our impulses when we are feeling negative feelings are not healthy. Examples might include cutting, emotional eating, drugs/alcohol, or even working too much. The thing you have to remember is that these things really do work…at least in the beginning. The problem is that unhealthy coping skills end up creating more problems in the long run.

Another common issue is not having enough variety in your coping skills. Anything that you do too much becomes unhealthy. Even water can kill you if you drink too much at once and disrupt your electrolytes.

So, we have to learn to choose a variety of healthy coping skills. If we choose wisely, we can become more and more effective at anxiety management.

The final step is taking a step back and trying to objectively evaluate the situation.

Many people make the mistake of doing this while they are still really anxious. I don't know about you, but if I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm likely to think thoughts like, "I'll never get this done" or "I can't ever finish anything I start." All or nothing and judgmental thinking will only increase my anxiety–not help me manage it.

So, it's better to table these thoughts (i.e., ignore them) until you are calm again and able to be more objective. Ask yourself what triggered the emotion. Is there anything you can do about it, or (this is more often the case) are you trying to control a situation where you have no control? If so, the task is just letting it go.

If you have PTSD and are experiencing a flashback, then you might want to look at all the little ways the current moment is different from your memory. Have you aged? Is the time of day or year different? Are you inside now? Can you smell, hear, taste, and touch things that are different than what occurred during the bad time? Then get curious about what felt similar. This becomes part of your list of "known triggers". Once you know your triggers, you can begin to either actively avoid them or increase your tolerance to them. Being objective allows you to observe and ultimately choose how you want to respond.