5 steps to accept Anxiety

We know well how much discomfort can be caused by anxiety and also how much difficult is to sit down and listen ourselves while a vortex of crazy thoughts seem to attack us, unleashed.

For this reason, we have created a free 5 step trace to help you start this path to calm down your mind and rediscover calmness.

Please make sure you have read the first part of this article: “Calming Anxiety by Accepting it” before continuing

Step 1 – accept your anxiety

The term “accept” literally means “give consent and receive”.

What you have to do when anxiety get you by surprise is to give consent to anxiety to reach you. Welcome it. Imagine you are the housemaster, carefully hosting this new emotion, inviting it to enter the door without opposing resistance.

Accept consciously that anxiety is coming to visit you. Accept incoming sensations.

Resisting in all ways to anxiety is just making negative effects to last longer. Letting it flow, instead, will help you to get rid of it faster and have a chance to watch it closer, understanding why it happens.

Step 2 – watch your anxiety

When anxiety strikes you, seek a comfortable position and resist to the temptation of reacting immediately, or getting stressed. Watch anxiety without judgment, don’t look at it as an unwanted guest.

Try and feel the precise points of your body where anxiety is stacking up. Chest? Belly?

Concentrate yourself and try to imagine anxiety as it is not like a stacking up of uncontrolled fear, but as a pain that you feel focusing in a precise part of the body.

Concentrate all of your attention in that specific point and imagine that starting from there a sphere of light is expanding until it completely surrounds you.

Feel the pain that expands until it vanishes, watch it grow and then decrease until it disappears.

Remember that you are not your anxiety, it is a guest you allowed to get visited by. The more you separate yourself from the experience you are living, the more you can watch it it carefully. Pay attention to thoughts, sensations, images or intuitions coming while anxiety is with you.

As soon as it will stop, take notes on thoughts you had and sensations you felt.

Step 3 – Act together with Anxiety

Continue doing what you were doing before anxiety visited you, feel free to slow down your actions, but don’t interrupt them.

In this phase it is crucial that you help yourself with breathing. When anxiety takes control of us the breathing gets short, involountarily we begin to breath just with the upper part of or lungs. Focus yourself to breath slowly and profundly, to push your breathing down through the diaphragm.

Ti control your breath will be of enormous help to be able to keep control and stop the temptation to run, typical of an anxiety attack. To phisically run away from the situation you are into can help lowering anxiety pressure but could let your fears grow.

Step 4 – Repeat phases

Keep on accepting your anxiety, watching it, and acting together with it until it will go down at a comfortable level.

Slowly you will feel anxiety to become thinner and thinner, until it will vanish.

Step 5 – Decode the message

Anxiety will come back to visit you until you intimately understand the message it brings. Anxiety is an alarm bell, giving us directions, make us find our way.

How to understand what it wants to tell? The only way is to look inside yourself.

Often anxiety comes from impossibility to look inside, and presents itself when we are no more capable of listening our inner voice and we live driven by outside noises. What to do then?

Meditation can be of big help, becuase it’s the best way to get back and listen your soul’s messages. Though meditation you can bring back your vision when it is darkened by fears. It lets you get back awareness and provides you a precious compass helping you out towards life changes, in a way that is in line with what you are.

You are accustomed to be focused outside, ready to feel what others are expecting from you: your soul does not accept this and anxiety is a signal of its rebellion.

Meditation helps you in driving you back to listen to your inner part, and to be able to listen that message that soul wants to communicate.l’interno e riuscire ad ascoltare quel messaggio che l’anima vuole comunicarti. Getting back to listen to your inner voice gives you the chance to get new strengths whose existance was unknown before. all that meditation requires is a quiet place and some time (10 minutes per day can be of great help).

So invest a bit of time every day to listen to your inner voice. In silence, eyes closed, concentrate your attention on breathing and try to avoid every thought. Slowly, a wellness status will embrace you and answers will begin to flow in.

It’s your turn now…

Now you, how to do you face an anxiety attack?
Do you have strategies? Share them by leaving a comment below!

References

• Types of Mood Disorders, Treatment for Mood Disorders