How to Stop Being So Anxious and Learn to Be Calmer

Approaches to help stop anxiety take a number of different forms, depending on the source of your anxiousness. The support you need depends on whether your feelings derive from depression, mood swings or phobia. Anti-stress techniques can help you quit feeling anxious but you may still need to rid yourself of the emotions as much as possible in order to avoid panic.

Panicked Thinking Patterns

Panicking is a frightening state that is very difficult to break. Once you have experienced significant panic, you become anxious at the very thought of the experience. This can lead to more stress, making your attempts to overcome anxiety practically futile.

Part of the problem is that you may be harboring the stress in your subconscious mind. When you try to control this emotion on a conscious level, you wind up creating more stress in the end. The cycle begins with your pattern of thought and it ends with your behavior.

Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches

You can achieve some success with the involved use of cognitive-behavioral approaches that seek to change the chain of responses you have to stressful situations. The target behavior is calmness and this goal is accomplished by exercising new thought processes in order to help stop anxiety before it even develops.
The problem with these approaches is that they tend to take a tremendous amount of time to achieve results. This is simply because you have to think about your anxiety constantly in order to make the necessary changes in your thought processes in your conscious mind. Instead of trying to control your thoughts on a solely conscious level, you might want to work with the subconscious as well.

Help Stop Anxiety with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Think about neuro-linguistic programming as a type of communication between your mind-subconscious and conscious-and your body. These two elements need to work together effectively in order to achieve success. Sometimes, your emotions and thought processes run out of control and you need to develop a way to change the patterns of thought, emotion and behavior in order to remove the anxiousness from your experience.

NLP and hypnotherapy work as a communicative tool between the conscious and subconscious realms of your mind. These approaches seek behavioral responses as a goal. Your behaviors are very important in this process because they determine the success of the intervention.

Your mind and your body need to have open communication, otherwise they fall out-of-sync. When this happens, your emotional state can run wild while your thoughts feed into the anxiousness. You can change this by changing the way your mind and your body communicate. Your new thoughts create new emotions that foster desirable behaviors.

When you live with anxiousness and stress in your life, you feel the ramifications in nearly every aspect of your being. These negative emotions do not have to take control of your life. You can make the necessary changes in your thoughts and actions to help stop anxiety before it starts.

 

While anxiety can result from a reaction to life events and circumstances, it is also true that this condition can be related to biochemical or physiological imbalance in the body.

One quite common symptom of anxiety is a feeling that the throat is constricted and this can lead to problems with swallowing. This condition, usually referred to as 'hysterical dysphagia', usually resolves once the underlying anxiety is dealt with.

Anxiety, and in particular, panic attacks, are often associated with rapid, shallow breathing known as 'hyperventilation'. Although hyperventilation is often a consequence of anxiety, it is also true that it can worsen symptoms of anxiety.

Learning controlled, deep breathing can often help to reduce the risk of anxiety and panic attacks. 'The Breath Book' by Stella Weller (Thorsons 1999) contains advice on deep breathing and is available in good book stores.

Anxiety is often associated with an increase in the level of a substance called lactate in the blood. Caffeine, alcohol and sugar are all known to increase lactate levels and should therefore be avoided as much as possible.

Caffeine also has powerful stimulant activity in the body and is well known for its ability to worsen anxiety. In one study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, the severity of individuals' anxiety and depression correlated with the amount of caffeine they consumed. Interestingly, patients with panic disorder seemed to be sensitive to the amount of caffeine in just one cup of coffee. It seems, for those individuals who are prone to anxiety, the safest amount of caffeine to consume is none.

Many people find that they are more likely to feel anxious or suffer a panic attack if they haven't eaten. This suggests that low levels of sugar in the blood stream may trigger attacks. For this reason, I recommend that you eat regular meals based around foods which give a sustained release of sugar into the blood stream such as meat, fish, eggs, brown rice, wholemeal bread, wholewheat pasta and vegetables other than the potato.
In addition to all this, it may well help you to try a preparation of the herb Kava kava. Rich in a group of compounds called the kavalactones, Kava kava has been shown to reduce anxiety and tends to promote greater feelings of contentment and well-being. This herb has become very popular in the West as a treatment for anxiety. You will find preparations of Kava kava in your local health food store. The recommended dose is 50 mg of kavalactones, three times a day.