Anxiety can be difficult to handle. Given that anxiety is essentially an unintentional misuse of your body’s natural fight-or-flight response to imminent threats, it can be quite challenging for those who live with severe anxiety or who experience serious anxiety in certain circumstances.
At Evolution Wellness in Wilmington, our mental health counselors help people everyday to build constructive strategies to ease their anxiety and enjoy happy, successful lives. While counseling and proper treatment is irreplaceable for dealing with significant anxiety, there are several easy steps you can take everyday to soothe your anxiety and ease your mind in between sessions, or to supplement any medications you may be taking for your condition.
Read on for some easy ways to soothe your anxiety symptoms! Please note that these tips are intended to help ease the symptoms of general, mild anxiety. Do not take these suggestions as a replacement for regular counseling treatments, and avoid any method that may aggravate any trigger-related anxieties you may have.
Meditation
Meditation can be very beneficial if you suffer from anxiety! Take a moment to sit by yourself in a quiet room. Find a comfortable seated position or lie down and close your eyes. Slow down your breathing progressively until you can breathe in slowly for three seconds, and out for four. Do your best to clear your mind, and just be.
Taking a moment to exist without thinking or taking in any sensory stimulation can do wonders for your levels of stress and anxiety. You may still feel anxious, but meditating for a few minutes can help ease the stress your anxiety may be causing.
Hypnotherapy
The true effectiveness of hypnotherapy as a legitimate form of therapy is still being studied, but the ‘trance-like state’ hypnotherapists claim to put patients in is very similar to meditation and is excellent for relaxing the mind. Hypnotherapists will often have patients sit or lie down with eyes closed and then have them do mental exercises, such as counting down from 10 or visualizing a scene in their minds, in order to clear other thoughts from their head. Like meditation, hypnotherapy offers anxious minds the ability to release stress and simply exist for a couple minutes.
You don’t actually have to consult a hypnotherapist to enjoy the benefits of hypnotherapy — there are several creators online that produce videos you can watch or listen to in order to try hypnotherapy on your own time.
ASMR
ASMR stands for audio sensory meridian response, a condition that’s experienced by an estimated 10% of people. Those with ASMR can experience tingling along their spine, the back of their head, and on their ears when they see or hear specific things that trigger their condition. The most common triggers for ASMR include whispers, tapping, scratching, physical touch, personal attention, and light.
For those without the condition, watching ASMR content is often a relaxing, intimate experience. Many producers of ASMR content, or ASMRtists, speak very closely to the camera and use hypersensitive microphones to make it appear as if they’re almost in the room with you. The simulated interpersonal intimacy is intended to relax and soothe the viewer, and many videos are made specifically for viewers with anxiety. Watching ASMR can be a good method for relieving anxiety-related stressors, particularly if your schedule doesn’t afford you much alone time, as ASMR can be watched or listened to anywhere with an Internet connection and a set of earbuds.
Tea
Drinking tea can be a nice way to relieve anxiety symptoms while you’re busy with work or other responsibilities. Tea comes in countless varieties and is typically pretty inexpensive, and there are certain strains that can relax you and ease your anxiety symptoms. Jasmine, peppermint, chamomile, lavender, kava, and green tea are all popular strains of tea that people drink to take the edge off their stress and anxiety.
Counseling
Of course, none of these methods are replacements for legitimate healthy treatment of your anxiety. While it can be beneficial and soothing to use these and other methods to lessen your anxiety symptoms, you should not use them as a replacement for routine counseling sessions. Our mental health counselors at Evolution Wellness have years of experience helping people just like you manage their anxiety and build constructive strategies for dealing with it. We can help you do more than temporarily relieve your anxieties — we can help you plot a path forward. Schedule an appointment today to start making progress yourself!