12 Coping Skills for Anxiety
Anxiety disorders are uncomfortable, but they are not uncommon. Nearly one-third of Americans will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. With the uncertainty of COVID-19 interrupting our lives, we would venture to guess that even more are dealing with high levels of subclinical anxiety.
Overcoming anxiety is not a matter of changing the way you feel, but of changing the way you think. As distressing as they are, you cannot overcome the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety by resisting them. Instead, you have to accept how the anxiety makes you feel, and choose to actively cope with it.
Coping requires the development of specific skills that help you work through feelings of anxiety in a constructive way. These coping skills allow people to “adjust to stressful events while helping them maintain their emotional well-being.” The key to using coping skills successfully is to practice them until they become automatic. You can keep a list of coping skills in a note on your phone or on an index card in your wallet to remind you of healthy ways to deal with anxiety on-the-go.
Consider these 12 hand-picked coping skills, recommended by leading therapists and anxiety organizations, a head start… but you should always feel free to add to (and subtract from) your list as you discover which skills do and don’t work for you!
What are the symptoms of anxiety?
Our minds and bodies are intimately connected. In fact, the physical symptoms of anxiety are sometimes so distressing that they are confused with more serious health concerns. Chronic anxiety can even weaken your immune system, making you more likely to catch a cold.
Here are some of the other ways that anxiety can affect your mind and body:
Feeling nervous, irritable, or on edge
Feeling as if something bad is about to happen
Worrying about many different things at once
Rapid heart rate and/or breathing
Sweating and/or trembling
Difficulty concentrating
Trouble falling or staying asleep
Gastrointestinal distress
Fatigue, dizziness, and/or fainting
Chronic pain
How to Cope with Anxiety
When you’re feeling anxious, the uncomfortable thoughts and sensations can become so overwhelming that they drown out your rational side. Taking time to actively cope with your anxiety, rather than avoiding it, slows your body’s fight-or-flight response, relieving your physical and emotional symptoms. These 12 coping skills will help you build out your anxiety-busting toolkit so you can work through the discomfort in a healthy way.
1. Try Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Progressive muscle relaxation is the act of alternately tensing and relaxing your muscles in a systematic way. This practice calms your anxiety by forcing you to regulate your breathing and relax your muscle groups. Starting with your feet and ending with your face, you breathe in and tense that body part for 5-10 seconds. As you exhale, relax the same body part for 5-10 seconds. You can do this using a guided recording like this one or on your own.
2. Put Your Thoughts On Trial
Anxiety dulls your rational brain and unleashes a flood of irrational worries. When we accept those negative thoughts as facts rather than emotions, we allow them to drive our behavior and our perception of ourselves. Putting your thoughts “on trial” — by reviewing the evidence you have for and against the truth of your thought — is one way to challenge your worries so that they no longer feel like facts.
3. Engage in Daily Exercise
The body’s fight-or-flight response originated as a way of spurring us to run from potential dangers. Adrenaline builds up in the body as a way of initiating action. When we are in situations where we cannot discharge that energy, it can become pent-up in the body, leading to uncomfortable physical symptoms. For that reason, daily exercise is an effective way to release anxiety. Start by setting small goals, such as 15 minutes of exercise per day, before working up to the government recommendation of 2.5 hours of moderate-intensity exercise per week.
4. Imagine the Worst-Case Scenario
When anxiety takes over, we often catastrophize, imagining the worst-case scenario. This can make even the smallest situation feel like our greatest fear. If you have anxiety, you’re likely familiar with this experience — but what you may not know is that you can strip these catastrophes of their power by asking yourself: what would you really do if the worst-case scenario occurred? Imagine your response in extensive detail, until it genuinely feels real. By doing so, you show yourself that you are capable of handling whatever happens — even the “catastrophe” you’re most afraid of.
5. Schedule Worry Time
Anxiety can feel uncontrollable, which is part of what makes it so devastating. Limiting your worries to a short period every day can help you take back control of your life. Most importantly, reducing the amount of time you spend worrying can reduce your overall anxiety level. Try scheduling your “worry time” each day and limiting it to 10 to 20 minutes. Throughout the day, you can jot down any worries you have, assuring yourself that you’ll have time to worry about them later.
6. Practice Good Sleep Hygiene
Having an anxiety disorder makes it more difficult to get a good night’s sleep, and a bad night’s sleep makes you more likely to experience anxiety. It’s a vicious cycle that can only be solved by a concerted effort to improve your sleep habits. Getting a good night’s sleep is easier said than done when worries keep you up at night — but you can give yourself a better shot at a full eight hours by establishing a regular sleeping and waking time, turning off screens one hour before bedtime, and making an effort to do something relaxing (such as meditating or reading a book) before falling asleep.
7. Remember Previous Experiences with Anxiety
Reminding yourself that anxiety is temporary and surmountable provides a much-needed shift in perspective. When experiencing an episode of anxiety, it’s easy to feel like the anxiety will never end, or that we will never find a way to cope. A good way to combat this erroneous thinking is to remember a time when the exact opposite happened. Chances are, if you think back to your previous experiences with anxiety, you’ll realize that nearly everything you’ve worried about has turned out better than expected — and, when it didn’t, you probably found a way, good or bad, to deal with the consequences.
8. Ask Yourself if Worrying is Helpful
Alternatively, you might reflect on other experiences with anxiety, worry, and panic by asking yourself: has worrying ever helped me fix the problem at hand? Chances are that in the past, worrying about all the things that could go wrong did not make things go right, nor did it prevent bad things from happening. Giving into the urge to ruminate almost never improves the outcome of a situation, but it might take time away from coming up with an actual solution to your problem. Instead, breathe through it and remember that worrying won’t change what happens next, but taking concrete action might.
9. Learn to Prioritize
Anxiety can make every task on your to-do list feel urgent, but this perspective almost never increases your productivity. In fact, overwhelming yourself with tasks can lead to fear and paralysis, preventing you from making any progress toward your to-do list whatsoever. That’s why, if you struggle with anxiety, it is crucial to learn to prioritize which tasks are truly urgent and which can wait for another day. One way to do this is to give all of the items on your to-do list a number from 1 to 3, with 1 being the most urgent and 3 being the least. This allows you to focus your energy on the things that really do need to get done today, instead of fretting about your inability to finish everything at once.
10. Avoid Alcohol
You don’t necessarily need to quit drinking cold turkey if you have anxiety, as long as you don’t have a co-occurring substance use problem. However, it’s important to understand how misusing alcohol can aggravate anxiety. Some people with anxiety disorders use alcohol as a coping mechanism to help them “loosen up” or forget about their worries. This is a form of avoidance, rather than a true coping skill. Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol may actually worsen anxiety, due to its effects on serotonin and other chemicals in the brain.
11. Make a Pros and Cons List
It’s normal to experience some anxiety when you need to make a big decision, but high levels of anxiety may prevent you from coming to a consensus. When we spend too much time ruminating on the decision we need to make, we can become so paralyzed by fear that we are unable to choose for ourselves. Making a pros and cons list sounds like a simple trick, but it can work wonders when it comes to organizing your anxious thoughts and zeroing in on the best decision.
12. Talk to a Therapist
Going to therapy is not a sign of weakness: it’s a sign of strength. If you are unable to manage your anxiety on your own, a trained professional can help you reframe unhelpful thoughts and develop healthier coping strategies for dealing with feelings of worry, fear, and overwhelm. Reaching out to a therapist can feel scary. For first-timers, it may be less nerve-wracking to try teletherapy from the comfort of your home. People looking for therapy in California can book an initial consultation with Dyad Health to learn more about our virtual therapy services.