You are not alone. Excessive anxiety is incredibly common.

Today, I want to share some reasons we feel so much anxiety and some exercises to help quiet your anxiety. 

A key to beginning to heal from anxiety is to fully understand the cycle of feelings, behaviors and thoughts that happens for you. 

If there is an external event that "causes" your anxiety, where does the anxiety start? A thought, a feeling? Or does your anxiety start without any trigger event? 

Recognizing where your anxiety responses start can help you see where you need to intervene to change the cycle.

And if you simply feel anxious all the time, no beginning or end, these exercises will still help.

Exercise 1 - Know that your thoughts are just thoughts. 

We tend to give our thoughts too much importance. Bring in your “observer mind” to feel more distance from your thoughts. 

Exercise 2 - Think through cognitive distortions.

We may find ourselves catastrophizing in our thoughts and quickly coming to the worst-case scenario.

Recognize that these thoughts are distorted and not your reality.

Exercise 3 - Visualize a calming and enjoyable activity.

There is a simple way to calm your mind.

If you visualize a calming and enjoyable activity, with all the bells and whistles, your body will respond with the chemicals that kick in when you actually do that activity! 

Your body will naturally follow your imagination to a calm state.

One thing I love to do is to float on a body of water. So, I often use that as my visualization to relax my mind.

I'd recommend practicing this regularly (not in the midst of a spike of anxiety). This will help strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part of the nervous system that helps us relax, feel safe, sleep. 

Exercise 4 - Let yourself feel other emotions.

Develop awareness of other feelings you have in your body.

If we give ourselves the space to feel all of our emotions, we also get to experience the "good" feelings. 

Something that has helped me greatly in developing my observer mind and being able to sit with my feelings is meditation. 

I recognize that meditation can be challenging for many people with anxiety. If that is the case for you, I recommend starting with a guided meditation to help. 

Oh, and by the way, I recently joined a meditation app as a meditation guide. This link gives you a 30 day free guesst pass from me: Aura Health.

Exercise 5 - Write down all of your anxious thoughts.

Set aside 5-10 minutes to write down all of your anxious thoughts.

Then, place them in a box and set the box away on a shelf or closet. Throughout the day, if one of those anxious thoughts pops back up, imagine yourself putting it away into the box.

This allows you to have a specific time to get out all of your anxious worries and then set them aside so you can go through your day. 

There is freedom and healing from anxiety! 

For more detail on these exercises, watch my video here: 5 Ways to Help Anxiety.