There are many ways to deal with anxiety symptoms right now, whether you’re feeling anxious about doing something or living with an anxiety disorder. If you need to calm down right away, you can do so by doing some simple exercises. Some of these strategies may seem challenging the first time you try them, but with a little practice, they can provide a quick way to calm your mind and ease your anxious feelings. In the continuation of this article, we will express the immediate and immediate limit to anxiety. Hamkade Counseling Center offers face-to-face services and phone psychological counseling to relieve anxiety.
How do you calm down quickly?
Something is bothering you, and soon you feel stuck in an endless loop of intrusive thoughts, thinking about everything that could go wrong. Your body tenses, your breathing quickens, and you can hear your heartbeat in your ears. When your anxiety starts like this, it’s time to calm down. The first step is awareness. It’s a good idea to learn to recognize the first signs of anxiety and take immediate action before you have an attack. By doing this, you can help reduce anxiety temporarily and immediately.
Breathing
One of the best things to do when you feel this familiar feeling of panic is to breathe. It may sound basic, but the basics are great when managing symptoms of anxiety. Deep, slow breathing is the key to fully experiencing its benefits. It’s also a good idea to focus your thoughts on your breathing and nothing else. “When we pay attention to our breathing and really focus on it, our worrying thoughts drift away, our heart rate slows, and we relax,” explains Dawn Streiton, MD, nursing and faculty. From Walden University, some people find 4-7-8 breaths to be very effective.
- Breathe for 4 seconds.
- Hold your breath for 7 seconds.
- Exhale slowly for 8 seconds.
- Repeat until you feel relaxed.
Name how you feel for instant anxiety relief
When you’re going through an anxiety attack, you may not realize what’s going on until you’re in the thick of it. Recognizing your anxiety can help you calm down more quickly. Call it a concern—not a reality—and it will go away,” says Kim Hertz, a psychotherapist at New York Therapy Practice. “When you’re in a heightened state of anxiety, you want to disrupt this cycle, and for some people, thought-stopping techniques are effective, and simply saying ‘stop’ to the internal messages that heighten anxiety is effective.” In other words, think about realizing that what you’re feeling is anxiety and talk to yourself.
“Accept the absolute facts,” says Stephen Sultanov, a clinical psychologist and professor at Pepperdine University. “[Tell yourself] I’m going to pass on this one way or the other.” Naming feelings and situations may help you to get away from them. It’s anxiety, not you, and it won’t last forever.
Try the 5-4-3-2-1 fight style
This technique is very important to reduce momentary and immediate anxiety. When you’re overwhelmed by anxiety, a 5-4-3-2-1 confrontational approach can help calm your thoughts. Here’s how it works:
- Five: Look around the room, then name five things you see around you. These could be objects, points on the wall, or a bird flying outside. The key is to count down those five things.
- Fourth: name the things you can touch. It could be the floor under your feet, the chair you’re sitting on, or the hair you run your fingers through.
- Three: Listen quietly, then acknowledge three things you can hear. These can be external sounds, such as a fan in the room, or internal sounds, such as your breathing.
- Pay attention to two things you can smell. Maybe it’s the perfume you’re wearing or the pencil you’re holding.
- Pay attention to what you can taste in your mouth. Maybe it was the lipstick you used.
This technique works best if you pair it with slow, deep breathing.
Try the “File It” mindfulness exercise for instant anxiety relief
The “record” technique works especially well if you’re lying awake at night thinking about all the things you should or didn’t do, or if you’re repeating something you missed during the day. The steps for performing this exercise are as follows:
- Close your eyes and imagine a desk with file folders and a file cabinet on it.
- Imagine that you pick up any file and write down the name of the idea that comes to your mind – for example, your quarrel with your wife, or the presentation you have to give at work tomorrow,
- Once the name is included in the file, take a moment to acknowledge the idea and its importance to you. Then archive it.
- Repeat this process for every thought that comes to your mind until you feel relaxed (or sleepy).
The idea of this exercise is to take a moment to name your triggers, examine them, and then consciously set them aside and set a deadline for dealing with them. In other words, you are acknowledging your feelings and making a plan to deal with them, one at a time, when the time is best.
Sports performance
You can use this technique to reduce anxiety for a moment. “A brisk exercise that raises the heart rate is good for reducing anxiety,” explains Patricia Celan, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Canada. A quick five-minute jog around the block, Ceylan says, is enough to help reduce anxiety quickly. Of course, if you enjoy something, you can run longer. If running isn’t your thing, you can try walking briskly for 1 minute and then walking slowly for 1 minute for a total of 5 minutes. The main thing is to increase your heart rate with exercise. It is also important not to forget to breathe. While running, focus on how you breathe.
Imagine your favorite comedy moments. These can be real situations, or they can be situations you’ve seen in comics, stories, jokes, or cartoons. If it’s hard for you to get over something at the moment, try to capture some memories beforehand, so you can go to them as soon as you start to feel anxious. Like many mindfulness practices, visualizing humor takes you away from worrying about what might happen in the future and focuses you on the current situation, in the “now.”
It also does some other things. “You experience ‘joy,’ which is an encouraging response to humour. You feel emotions like happiness and joy — all powerful emotions that can help you reduce anxiety quickly. And if you can make yourself laugh by remembering that funny moment, she says, the Imagine humor is more effective.When you laugh, you contract and expand your muscles, which reduces physical anxiety, tension and tension.Laughter also fights the production of cortisol levels in the body.
Distract yourself
Get temporary distractions to relieve instant and immediate anxiety. If nothing seems to distract you from your troubling thoughts, it may be time to find a temporary distraction. For example, if you’re lying in bed, wide awake, obsessed with what’s going to happen tomorrow, and deep breathing and other techniques don’t work, get up and leave your bedroom and find a distraction in another room.
Focusing on something you already enjoy can break the cycle of worrying thoughts and calm you down — at least until you’re in a better mental position to deal with those thoughts. However, this distraction varies from person to person. The idea is to find something relaxing, fun, or thoughtless to distract you from your thoughts. For example, some people consider washing dishes or cleaning the house a distraction. It makes them feel energized and requires focus, but it takes them away from sitting still and anxious.
Others prefer listening to relaxing music, watching a favorite TV show or movie (just avoid scary or stressful shows), reading, drawing, or writing. Sometimes petting the cat or drinking a cup of tea helps. Just be sure to choose a low-stress activity to take your mind off the source of your anxiety.
Take a cold shower (or soak in ice).
If you suffer from severe anxiety, some psychiatrists have an extreme (and unpleasant) way to bring you back to reality: Fill a large bowl with cold water, throw in a few ice cubes, and submerge your face. Stay in the water for 30 seconds. This technique is useful for reducing momentary and immediate anxiety. It tricks your body into thinking you’re swimming, so your heart rate drops and your body becomes more relaxed. Another successful option, and used by some dialectical behavior therapists, is to put your hands or feet in cold water for a minute or so. You can also hold an ice cube in your hand until it melts.
