6 Ideas to Adopt (and 6 to Lose) to Manage Anxiety
Anxiety Collection
Anxiety serves a purpose when channeled correctly. These six ideas offer remedies for anxiety and ways to reconnect with yourself and your community.
We’re all familiar with anxiety, that feeling of unease and worry. To some, anxiety is a mild irritant that has little (if any) impact on daily living. For others, anxiety can be a persistent and debilitating force that wreaks havoc on our internal and external lives, paralyzing us into inaction. On any given day, we might find ourselves experiencing something between these two extremes.
Fear lies at the root of anxiety. Buddhist author and teacher Tara Brach describes fear as the feeling that arises when we anticipate pain or distress. I think of anxiety as our relationship with our imagined future pain and suffering. Is your relationship with imagined future pain and suffering contemptuous or copacetic?
Our nervous system cannot distinguish between real and imagined pain. In both cases, it chooses from the same trauma-response menu: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, with maybe a little fine (denial in the aftermath) for dessert.
We might want to eliminate anxiety entirely from our lives, but it serves a purpose. Evolutionarily, it kept our species alive when life-or-death dangers were much more immediate and literal. Today, it can help us mitigate risk and prevent harm. The key is to have a healthy relationship with anxiety so that it is not the primary driver of our decisions. To do that, consider taking a “More and Less” approach, adding more of one quality into your life while engaging less with another.
1. More Present, Less Future (or Past)
A couple’s therapist once told my partner and me that our relationship anxieties were time-oriented: I was trying too hard not to repeat past mistakes, and my partner was trying too hard to anticipate and prevent future issues. She advised us to spend more time with each other in the present, attending to and nurturing the relationship we have now rather than viewing it through the lens of what we don’t want to experience.
While it’s natural (even advisable) to reflect on and learn from our past and to think about what’s ahead of us, staying present is a tried-and-true mindfulness practice that helps us move beyond regret (disappointment about the past) and worry (misuse of our imagination). Many of us believe that if we can anticipate danger and control the factors that might lead to it, we will be safe. Control becomes a proxy for the safety we desperately want to always feel. The truth is, we have no idea what’s coming our way. The more we surrender to the reality that we cannot prevent or manifest future events, the more we can learn to go with the flow, build resilience, and mitigate anxieties.
2. More Authenticity, Less Conformity
We all crave belonging. But too often, we conflate belonging with fitting in, and to fit in, we conform. We contort to fit parameters that are not our shape, not who we are, not what we want. We believe the alternative is rejection, isolation, and loneliness. But it’s not. Our ego lies to us to protect us from future pain—or at least it doesn’t tell us the whole truth.
Yes, when we show up as our whole, authentic selves, some will reject us, and it will likely hurt. But the more comfortable we get with the pain of rejection, the more resilient we become, allowing us to create more space for those who do want us just as we are. It’s really a process of elimination: The ones who want us just as we are will be the only ones who are left. The more we discover and share the deepest, most authentic layers of ourselves, the better our chances are of finding our tribe and a sense of true belonging to ourselves and others.
3. More Body, Less Brain
We likely think of anxiety as a mental issue to resolve. What many of us need to learn, though on some level we have always known, is that we feel and hold our emotions in our bodies. While it’s important to address the mental and intellectual aspects of anxiety, we also need to explore physical and somatic relief.
Anxiety triggers our nervous system, which activates a survival response in our body (remember fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and fine?). If we’re always anxious, then our body is constantly under stress, which is an unsustainable state that can lead to injury and disease.
By becoming more aware of the body’s state and engaging in practices that bring physical relief, we can recognize the signs of when our anxiety grows and soothe our nervous system before it fully takes over, helping us spend less time on high alert. Regular embodiment practices and exercise can help us manage our anxiety before there’s anything to be anxious about.
4. More Generosity, Less Hoarding
There’s nothing wrong with saving for a rainy day, but late-stage capitalism lies to us when it says that “more is better” and that there’s no such thing as “enough.” As a result, many of us define our worth and status by the endless accumulation of money, property, objects, and experiences. We envy the lives of billionaires, feeling inadequate and equating money with freedom and power. Money itself is neutral, and we need it to survive in our modern world. But when the fear of not having it is persistent and overwhelming, especially when we have more than enough to survive and thrive, we become stuck in scarcity consciousness and will always be anxious.
It’s also worth noting that given how capitalism works, it’s virtually impossible to become excessively rich without exploiting others and thus multiplying our collective anxiety. Generosity is a major key to dismantling capitalism and shifting our consciousness. The more we give—in both quantity and frequency—the more we learn how to settle into the flow of reciprocity and a consciousness of enough. Being enough will no longer be defined by having more than enough.
5. More Social, Less Media
Social media companies entice us by providing online spaces where we can instantly and constantly stay connected to loved ones regardless of location, easily share what we love and what inspires us, find our tribe, and have a platform to showcase our talents. It may have started that way—remember Twitter meet-ups, or “tweetups”?—but now we’re left with an algorithm-driven, politically divisive, ad-strewn, emotionally harmful, time-sucking slew of platforms filled with unfettered misinformation and shady influencers. We are also inundated with 24-hour news networks that are tailored to reinforce divisive beliefs instead of sharing unbiased facts.
It’s time to stop doom-scrolling, turn off our screens, and turn our attention to each other. One of the habits shared by people in so-called Blue Zones (areas of the world where life span and quality of life are higher than average) is the habit of almost daily in-person social interactions with friends. Capitalism has commodified us, pushing us to see one another as products. We need to prioritize personalizing one another, seeing the heart and soul of one another—and that can’t happen through a screen.
6. More Eroticism, Less Consumerism
There is a mantra I live by: “Find your passion, find your peace.” Thanks to late-stage capitalism, we’re born into a consumer culture, where people are treated as statistics, customers who are constantly under pressure and psychologically manipulated to buy more to feel better. A healthier way to feel better is discovering what we’re passionate about, what makes us feel alive, and doing more of it. Or, as best-selling author and psychotherapist Esther Perel calls it, “unlocking our erotic intelligence.”
Eroticism is often isolated to a sexual context, and though sex can indeed be life-affirming, eroticism transcends sex. To live in an erotic state of consciousness is to prioritize pleasure, which is its own reward. When we create experiences that make us feel more satisfied for a longer period of time, we become less reliant on the quick dopamine hits that we get from buying new things. We will be more fulfilled, more at peace, and a lot less anxious.
by Rev. Ogun Holder
