How to cope with anxiety: Keep a mental journal, break down steps, and do relaxation exercises.

How to cope with anxiety

1. View anxiety correctly

Undoubtedly, long-term anxiety is harmful to a person's physical and mental health. As Freud pointed out, if an individual cannot properly cope with anxiety, then that anxiety will become a trauma, causing the person to regress to the inability to be independent in infancy.

However, psychologists also believe that anxiety is the driving force behind a person's tense state of behavior. In other words, anxiety stems from tension, and everyone needs to be in a certain degree of tension in their work and studies; otherwise, they will achieve nothing. Imagine an athlete who is relaxed and carefree before a fierce competition-can they have the fighting spirit and excellent performance? Psychologists have found through research on athletes that their performance is directly related to their level of anxiety; both excessively high and low levels of anxiety are undesirable. Therefore, some psychologists have specifically developed an anxiety scale for athletes to adjust their anxiety level to an optimal state before a competition, thus achieving better results.

Furthermore, although anxiety reactions present with various uncomfortable symptoms, the temporary anxiety reaction itself does not cause harmful physical consequences. Once the anxiety reaction subsides, normal function is immediately restored, and it does not cause permanent physical ailments such as heart disease.

Anxiety can also spur you to muster the courage to face an impending crisis. For example, encountering a tiger in the wilderness would cause anxiety, tension, and fear. This reaction is entirely beneficial; it stimulates and mobilizes individual energy to cope with the threat of unexpected external events, thereby increasing the individual's chances of survival and continuation. This is the first important significance of anxiety for us. It has an early warning function and therefore significant adaptive value.

Therefore, short-term anxiety is an adaptive emotion. Anxiety is only destructive when a person feels anxious about anxiety itself. For example, if you worry about an upcoming speech contest, this worry is actually a form of self-adjustment. As long as you eventually give the speech, you return to normal emotional state, and perhaps you won't worry about it the next time you give a speech. However, if you don't participate in the speech, and the worry intensifies, then the worry becomes a symptom. You will feel a sense of fear and hostility towards this feeling.

2. Keep a self-healing diary or blog.

The fast pace and high competitiveness of modern society have made anxiety a common and frequently experienced emotional state. However, many people, when suffering from this emotion, often cannot figure out what they are really anxious about, whether it is worth it, and never seriously consider coping strategies. As a result, they let this emotion spread and intensify, eventually evolving into worrying for the sake of worrying and being anxious for the sake of being anxious. Many serious psychological disorders arise from this.

To combat this anxiety, those experiencing anxiety might consider keeping a "psychological self-treatment diary." Record everything that troubles you each day, the anxieties it generates, and the contradictory feelings it manifests in. People trapped in severe anxiety often unconsciously exaggerate the negative consequences of their anxieties through subjective imagination. Therefore, when writing a psychological self-treatment diary, maintain an objective and factual approach. This will inevitably eliminate subjective "falsehoods" and clarify objective "truths," freeing your energy from wasting on false fantasies. Initially, you'll have many thoughts and facts to record, but gradually the source of material will dry up, and you'll discover that in many ways, you're scaring yourself rather than the anxiety itself.

When you encounter things that cause anxiety or even affect your normal work, study, and life, you can write down all the possible consequences, especially listing all the worst possible outcomes, and prepare yourself mentally. Then, for each possible situation, find corresponding coping strategies. This will definitely make you feel much more at ease, and you will transform constant anxiety into continuous effort, so things will develop in a better direction.

3. Break down your tasks into a series of small steps.

A psychologist once investigated the pre-competition anxiety levels of winners and losers in a gymnastics competition, finding that both groups had similar anxiety levels. The difference lay in how they dealt with anxiety. Those athletes who performed poorly only worried, constantly imagining how they would perform badly, thus falling into a near-panic state. The winners, on the other hand, generally avoided thinking about their anxiety and focused solely on what they needed to do. They broke down their tasks into a series of small steps, thereby overcoming their anxiety.

4. Relaxation exercises can reduce anxiety or fear.

A standard relaxation technique involves tensing and then relaxing the muscles in different parts of the body; another method is to lie in the shade of a park or on a soft sandy beach. The latter type of relaxation can have immediate effects, such as slowing the heart rate, slowing breathing, and reducing oxygen consumption.