3 Vital Steps To Reduce Your Anxiety Symptoms

Do you know that there are simple steps you can take to instantly reduce the symptoms of your anxiety? I will quickly share them with you here. But before I do that, there is one important thing I want to draw your attention to that will help you make sense of why the below self-analysis works. And this is it:

Your thought (that is your thinking pattern) is the most powerful element regarding whether or not you will defeat your anxiety, agoraphobia, panic, OCD or any other anxiety outlet you may currently have.

Why is this so? It is so because everything in you receives commands from your thoughts. I mean everything – including your brain, mind, soul, body, breathing mechanisms, digestive systems – EVERYTHING!

Your life (feelings, emotions and life experiences) is simply being transmitted by your thought currents. All that you are is basically listening to what you are thinking about “ALL THE TIME” in order to behave in a certain way. I will definitely talk more about this in my future updates.

Now here is what can make an instant positive impact in you: there is a part of your brain called the “Amygdala,” whose main work is to find out what seems to be the biggest threat to your peace, health and happiness.

Immediately the amygdala figures your biggest threat out, it quickly sends a message out to another part of your brain to start your body’s stress response – releasing stress chemicals into your blood streams such as adrenaline and cortisol – this is how your body basically enters into the self-defensive mode.

This is when you start to worry, be fearful, feel panicky and feeling that you are losing control. And imagine, if this scenario continues for weeks, months or even years, things get seriously complicated and all your systems – your mind, brain and body become tremendously in distress because they have been under stress for too long.

Now, notice – how did it all get started? through  your THOUGHTS!

I am aware that there are other things to share with you about thoughts, especially those intrusive thoughts you neither start yourself nor know how to get rid of. But time will not allow me to do that in this update – so I’ll leave that for another time.

But in the meantime, use these simple self-analytical steps to start regaining control from your stress, panic and anxiety almost instantly – many people have noticed a huge drop in their anxiety symptoms by simply following that below suggestions:

1.   Always identify the environments that trigger your anxiety. Your anxiety works by routines. It likes to identify with places, things, sound, smell, people, memories as a trigger to re-invent itself. So, your work from now on, if you’ve not already started, is to become your own life detective and start noticing every atmosphere that seems to bring up your anxiety.

This self-awareness alone can literally halve the power of your anxiety. It took a client of mine ages to realise that one of his favourite friends had become a trigger for his anxiety. I know it’s ridiculous – but that was the truth! Any time he was out with the same person, he would have a panic attack. He absolutely did not know why? We had to work on that together before he became free.

2.   Always analyse your mood. This is very important. Your mood shows how well you are doing at any given time. Why? This is because your life is your emotions – wherever your emotion is heading for, that is where your entire life is also going. And your mood is simply the way your emotion reveals itself. If your mood shows that you are stressed and frustrated, that reveals stressful emotions, etc. So your mood can help you identify the emotions that are controlling your life.

More importantly, your mood can help you identify some of the underlying thoughts that are creating negative emotions such as anger, fear, depressive episodes etc. I will give you an example. Let’s say you suddenly become fearful with a great sense of “something bad is going to happen to me” kind of a thing.

That fear comes from a thought. Now, you might be saying “But I am not thinking anything bad.” But if you pay more attention to every of your thought process prior to that fearful episode, there’s likely to be a clue for you. So you want to really know what could have started your fear for future reference. I know this sounds very simple, but it’s very powerful.

3.   Always identify everything you are avoiding because of your anxiety. Maybe you already know one or two things you are deliberately avoiding because of your anxiety. For example if you have a phobia of spiders, of course you’ll do your best to avoid spiders. Likewise, if you have social anxiety, you will be good at making great excuses for not turning up at events. All these things are normal reactions to anxiety threats.

But there are more things you are avoiding than those few obvious ones. So, your task is to start looking more closely into those less obvious things you are avoiding. The more of them you can discover and expose , the better. An unexposed avoidance will continue sustain your anxiety.

Do you remember the “Amygdala” I talked about earlier on? Your amygdala basically interprets everything you are avoiding as things that are threatening your life. So it sends out a distress message all the time to start your stress response. And that is why your anxiety may be getting worse or is not going away. So keep looking out for more things you are avoiding. It could be a certain type of subject or a TV programme, or sitting down in a social setting, eating in public places or dressing up, etc. Yours will be peculiar to you.

If you notice, all the points above are about self-awareness. When you increase your self-awareness regarding the routines of your anxiety, especially the hidden routines, you are basically beginning to climb your way out of the anxiety ditch.

Eventually, as you continue to learn other important principles (which of course I’ll be giving you from time to time) you’ll find yourself on the high platform of freedom from any form of anxiety disorders.

Focus on paying more attention to all these points everyday and become extremely skilled at playing your own anxiety trigger detective. It is one of the vital steps to freedom.

Hope this is helpful to you today!

Best regards

Wale