Anxiety is not an easy condition to treat. It's forged through years of experiences, complicated genetics, and difficulty understanding the nature of your symptoms. It can take a long time to negate your anxiety symptoms.
But there are ways to prevent, manage, and in rare cases cure anxiety in a matter of days. Below are strategies that will show you how to lose anxiety in less than two weeks.
Anxiety Starts With Your Symptoms
To lose anxiety, you have to make sure that you understand your symptoms thoroughly, both regarding how they're caused and what they mean for treatment.
The secret to losing anxiety in 10 days is to make sure that you've altered your life within those ten days to one that promotes relaxation, healthy thoughts, and anxiety free living. Starting today, do each of the following:
Exercise
As long as your doctor says it's safe for you to exercise, you need to start regularly exercising right now, this very moment. You should be jogging, you should be doing some anaerobic workouts (muscle exercises), and you should be engaging in sports.
Exercise is a crucial part of losing anxiety, you and absolutely cannot expect to get any immediate relief without it. Exercise releases hormones and neurotransmitters in your body that improve mood, giving you essentially instant anxiety relief. Exercise has been compared favorably to some of the world's most well know anxiety medications. Starting today, make sure you're exercising regularly.
Sleep
You also need to guarantee yourself a full night's guaranteed sleep, even if that means going to bed a bit early or missing out on some of your chores or TV shows. Sleep deprivation in small doses may not even be noticeable, yet that level of sleep debt changes hormonal levels and promotes brain stress, which creates nervousness and anxiety. Part of how to lose anxiety involves ensuring you're not doing anything that makes anxiety worse, so ensuring you get enough sleep is crucial.
Expecting Anxiety Problems and Setbacks
You also need to prepare yourself for some severe anxiety symptoms, and accept that they're going to occur along the way. This can be the hardest part for people - especially those that have panic attacks. During your recovery, you need to be okay with the idea that you're going to have some moments of anxiety along the way. You need to make sure you're not avoiding your symptoms. Avoiding them will only make them come back when you stop avoiding them.
Starting Busy, Staying Busy
Anxiety can be incredibly draining. Many people with anxiety want to sit back and get lost in their thoughts. Yet anxiety isn't the type of condition where your thoughts are helpful. Anxiety changes thoughts and makes them much more negative.
That's why part of how to lose anxiety is simply staying busy all day. As soon as you wake up, do things around the house, go jogging, or write. When you're at work, work hard the entire time. When you're home, do art or play with your dog. It doesn't matter what you do as long as it is mentally demanding so that you can't dedicate as much time or thought to your anxiety.
Much of anxiety comes from a fear over anxiety symptoms. Staying busy gives you a break from this fear, which can make it easier to fend off anxiety in the future. Even if you feel drained from an anxiety attack, finding something to do is important.
Goal Setting in the Short or Long Term
Similarly, take the time to schedule goals, both for the next ten days and for the next several years.
Goal setting is an important tool. In the short term, it will reduce confusion and wasted time so that you're staying active and working towards something. Perhaps you have always wanted to finish a painting or you have different places you've always wanted to go to in your home city. Turn those into goals, schedule them, and you'll always have something to do.
But you also need long-term goals. Realistic goals, of course, but long-term goals that you're working to right now. Long-term goals give you something to look forward to and ensure that you're not overly focused on the present. You should also consider telling someone about these goals to keep yourself accountable.
Learn to Breathe Better
If you have anxiety attacks or physical symptoms that make it hard for you to stop anxiety, many of them are probably due to hyperventilation, which is when your breathing habits cause you to expel too much carbon dioxide.
You can stave off hyperventilation by learning to control your breathing whenever you start to feel symptomatic. Take long, deep breaths, breathing in for 5 seconds, holding for 3 seconds, and breathing out for 7 seconds. This type of breathing is much healthier, and will ensure that you don't make your hyperventilation symptoms worse.
Start a Positivity Journal
It's also very important that you learn to think positively again, since anxiety has a tendency to turn off the ability to see the positives. For the next 10 days (or possibly longer), start a positivity journal. Every day challenge yourself to write at minimum 10 (or more) positive things that happened during the day. They should be as specific as possible and not passive aggressive. Things like:
- I received a free donut today from a nice barista.
- My boss said I did a good job on that project.
Every day, write at least 10. By the end of the 10 days, you'll start to be looking for positive things in the environment to ensure that you can reach all 10. It's a great exercise for learning to control some of the negativity that contributes to anxiety.
Diet and Healthy Living
As best you can, you should also make sure that you're living a healthy lifestyle in general. All physical stress can create mental stress. Eat healthy, avoid alcohol, avoid fried foods, and consider vitamin supplements (especially magnesium, which can help fight anxiety) to ensure that your body is as healthy as possible. Each small change will make a big difference.
Starting Your Journey to Being Anxiety Free
It took years for you to develop your anxiety, and it's not the type of thing that is easily lost in just 10 days. But the above tips represent a great start to your ability to fight anxiety forever. Commit to trying them right now, and by the end of 10 days you're certain to have some relief.
Also, remember how important it is to take advantage of long-term treatments as well. You need to learn coping strategies that will keep your anxiety at bay forever.
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