How To Deal With Generalized Anxiety

Anxiety sucks, especially when we don’t know what’s causing it and what to do about it. When we feel anxious all the time for no obvious reason, it’s called generalized anxiety. However there are often things we can do to reduce, eliminate or manage generalized anxiety so that it doesn’t ruin our life.

There are many reasons why we may feel anxious. Solving this problem can sometimes involve trying a number of different approaches until we find one or more that work for us. Based on my experience of what works for me and my clients when feeling anxious, here are some strategies to try:

Stop Trying To Fight It

One of the paradoxes in dealing with emotions is that the more we try to push them away, the stronger they tend to get. Anxiety needs to be acknowledged, expressed and released. We can do this by talking, writing, crying, trembling or shaking it out. Life is dangerous and it’s normal to feel anxious sometimes, especially when we perceive a threat or think that things aren’t going well for us. Acceptance is the first step in dealing with any problem.

Acceptance is the first step in managing anxiety.

Heal Your Childhood Trauma

Unresolved childhood trauma can manifest in adulthood as anxiety. Emotional abandonment, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, ongoing bullying, unresolved parental conflict, divorce or separation of parents, systematic discrimination or any form of unfair treatment by other people in childhood can leave an emotional residue in our nervous system. This is known as trauma.

Any experience that overwhelms us emotionally can be traumatic. If the overwhelming feelings didn’t feel safe to fully express and release at the time, they stay in our nervous system and can leave us feeling restless and anxious. In this case I recommend working it through with a trauma-informed therapist. Look for one familiar with somatic body-based techniques that can release the emotional energy from your nervous system.

Deal With Your Parental Issues

A difficult relationship with our parents is a rich potential source of emotions that can manifest as generalized anxiety in adulthood. If we had a controlling mother, a passive father, overly critical or narcissistic parents who were unwilling or unable to offer the empathy our infant brains needed to learn how to self-soothe our nervous system, we can end up experiencing anxiety later in life that we can’t easily resolve.

The ideal solution to this is to stand up to our parents if they continue to treat us like a child, and establish a new adult-adult relationship with them on equal terms. Facing our primal fear of abandonment by challenging parental behavior that we don’t like as adults leaves us feeling much more grounded and less anxious in the world generally.

If our parents are no longer alive or are just too toxic for us to maintain contact with, we can find other parental figures to establish healthy relationships with and learn to be assertive with everyone whose behavior reminds us of our parents.

Get Into Your Body

Anxiety isn’t just a mental state: the connection via our nervous system means it’s also associated with stress and tension in our physical body. This is especially true when we have unresolved trauma as mentioned above.

Body-based practices such as yoga, tai chi, qi gong and massage can shift the nervous energy, facilitate emotional release and help alleviate anxiety. Engaging in a sport, exercise and working out in a gym can all make us feel more confident and less anxious generally.

Getting our body moving with activities such as boxing or martial arts is also a good way to access and release suppressed rage and aggression that can sometimes feel like nervous energy. Just make sure nobody gets hurt and nothing gets damaged in the process.

Change Your Habitual Thoughts

Generally speaking, our conscious thoughts reflect our unconscious emotions; but it can also work the opposite way to some degree: our emotions are also a reflection of our habitual thought patterns.

Nature has endowed us with a negativity bias because the world is a dangerous place and it’s better to be anxious when faced with a potential threat that turns out to be benign, than to be killed by something that seemed innocuous because we weren’t careful enough. This means it can take some effort to shift our mind away from fearful or worrisome thoughts into peaceful or grateful thoughts.

Engage In A Spiritual Discipline

Spiritual disciplines such as meditation, prayer and worship are a great way to reduce anxiety by strengthening our focus on thoughts of compassion, peace and gratitude. The effect is cumulative when we practice over time. Practicing in a group can also help us feel more connected, further lessening our anxiety.

If you feel too restless or anxious to just sit and meditate, it could be a sign that you have some unhealed trauma in your nervous system bubbling up that needs to be released. Notice the emotions that arise during meditation, write them down or talk them over with an empathic friend or therapist. Consider active forms of meditation such as yoga, tai chi, qi gong, dynamic meditation or conscious dance.

Face Your Fears Voluntarily

Anxiety tends to make us want to withdraw from the world so that we can feel safe. When we feel anxious for no good reason though, this causes our world to shrink leaving us feeling powerless and this can make us even more anxious. It can become a vicious cycle.

The solution is to face our fears voluntarily and gradually in a controlled environment where we can get a reasonably predictable positive outcome. Each successful venture into the unknown builds courage and resilience. A sensible starting point is one-on-one therapy, then group therapy followed by real world interactions. Psychologists call this “systematic desensitization” and it’s one of the most powerful techniques known for overcoming anxiety. If you don’t know where to start, check out The Confident Man Program.

Stop Listening To Your Inner Critic

A strong inner critic can fill our minds with fearful self-limiting thoughts. This is often the result of growing up with a critical parent, a dogmatic religion or a strict and punitive school or social environment.

In this case it can help to acknowledge that our inner critic is trying to help us stay safe, while gradually turning down the volume so that we no longer pay attention to it. Facing our fears in a safe and controlled environment also helps build a sense of courage that actively disproves and eventually negates the messages from our inner critic.

Connect With A Community

One of the most stressful things you can do to a human being is isolate them. When we feel isolated, we naturally feel anxious. When we feel connected to others, it helps calm our nervous system. Just living in a big city isn’t enough; you generally need to feel like you’re a part of a smaller group in the community in order to feel connected. It doesn’t matter too much what the common element is: It could be a spiritual community, sporting team, musical group/band/choir, service club, charity organisation, social or recreational club. The important thing is that you hang out with other like-minded people who you can relate to.

Check With A Doctor

There are many medical conditions that can cause anxiety. Sometimes it’s not psychological at all; it can just be a biological process. I had undiagnosed sleep apnea for over ten years and it made me very sick. Being so sick all the time made me extremely anxious. Visit a doctor and explore your symptoms to see if there is some physical illness going on that explains why you feel anxious all the time.

Get A Good Nights Sleep Regularly

Poor sleep patterns can leave us feeling chronically tired and this will affect our physical and mental health. Insomnia can leave us irritable and edgy during the day. The best way to get a good nights sleep is to synchronize our circadian rhythm with the sun by getting up each morning soon after sunrise and going outside for at least 20 minutes without sunglasses on. Go to bed at night when you feel ready to fall asleep but don’t lie in bed if you’re unable to fall asleep and avoid sleeping long past sunrise even if you feel tired in the morning. Eventually your body will synchronise with the sun and you’ll be sleeping optimally the way nature intended.

Breathe Through Your Nose

Nasal breathing helps activate our parasympathetic nervous system which causes us to relax. Mouth breathing on the other hand is associated with sympathetic fight-or-flight response and gave our ancestors enough oxygen to escape predators. If you’re really anxious, practice slow alternate nostril breathing until you calm down.

Learning to regularly breathe through your nose instead of your mouth can help keep you more calm and centered. There are also more elaborate breathing methods that can help with anxiety such as Buteyko Breathing Technique or go hard-core and try the Wim Hoff method.

Channel Your Suppressed Anger Into Assertiveness

If you grew up around role models who expressed their anger in ways that felt destructive or frightening to you, it’s possible that you learned to internalize your own anger and the energy is now showing up as anxiety. This is particularly likely if you never seem to get angry even when people are treating you badly.

The antidote to this form of anxiety is to learn to stand up for yourself and act assertively when other people treat you in ways you don’t actually like. Acknowledge your suppressed anger and use it to set healthy boundaries and go after what you want in life generally. Once you’re consistently getting what you want out of life, you won’t feel so anxious any more.

Decide On Your Life Purpose

When we have no idea what we are doing with our lives, this lack of purpose and direction is likely to leave us feeling restless and anxious. Choosing our path in life is our responsibility. Sometimes the choice isn’t obvious, especially if we’ve been conditioned in childhood by family, religion or society to distrust our instincts. A good life coach, mentor or therapists can help us get more in touch with our own core values so we can make a good choice, and ultimately the choice is up to us.

It’s better to actively choose some purpose to work towards and see how it goes than to wait around idly until we feel the perfect sense of purpose. Our values and goals naturally evolve over time as we mature. There are many life purposes that could potentially fulfill each of us long-term. If we choose poorly we can always change our mind later; but this generally only becomes apparent once we make an initial choice and start working towards it. We’re not likely to come across a compelling life purpose playing video games or looking at social media in our bedroom all day.

Be Open With Others About Anxiety

A burden shared is a burden lightened, and this is certainly true of anxiety. Talking about our fears with a compassionate, empathic friend can help us release the emotion while also deepening the relationship. Choose a friend who you trust to listen to your feelings without trying to solve the problem for you, so you feel empowered about your situation. If you don’t have such a friend you can trust, seek out an empathic therapist.

Beware of well-meaning friends who avoid uncomfortable feeling by jumping in and trying to rescue us or solve the problem for us, as this tends to be disempowering; which is the exact opposite of what we need.

Talk To A Therapist

The ultimate goal of any effective therapy is to help us manage our own emotions and solve our own problems. When our anxiety is caused by unresolved past trauma, empathy is a particularly important ingredient in the process. An empathic connection is essential for healing trauma in a therapeutic relationship. It allows us to bring overwhelming emotions from the past down to manageable levels by modeling the empathic bond an ideal parent has with their infant child.

When seeking a therapist look for one you feel comfortable expressing your feelings to, especially any feeling you may feel ashamed of like anxiety, sadness or anger. A good therapist will identify, reflect and validate our feelings; even ones we may not be aware of. The process can feel uncomfortable at times since these feelings can feel unpleasant and we may have developed a habit of avoiding them, but it should always feel safe. If you find your therapist responding negatively or judgmentally towards your feelings or not validating them empathically, try someone else.