Ways to cope with anxiety

(≈16 min read)

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A bird trapped in a cage for a long time, when given the opportunity to escape, will almost always prefer the cage to freedom. Why? Well because in the bird’s mind, the comfort and security that the cage provides is now far more appealing than the potential risk of freedom – starving out in the wild.

But being fearful of starvation means that this bird will never experience true liberation, something every other bird takes for granted. It’ll never know what it feels like to soar in the clouds above. It’ll never see the mountains or the oceans or the forests.

Instead, as every other bird flies freely, this bird will be content sitting idly in its cage, secure and safe, oblivious to the experiences it’s missing out on. And in that cage it’ll stay until eventually it passes away; its one life…gone, wasted.

Anxiety is the internal voice which convinces you that you must stay in your cage. To escape would be to expose your fragile self to threat, and to your internal voice, any form of threat should be avoided at whatever cost. Perhaps sometimes you’ll be able to ignore it and venture out for an hour or two, encounter a brief glimpse of freedom.

But before long, that voice will begin to talk, slowly persuade you that you must get back into your cage, that if you don’t the worst case scenario is really going to happen. You know it’s irrational, that the worst case is not likely, but that knowledge doesn’t change a thing.

No matter how hard you try to shut it up, you can’t help but succumb to that voice. Then when you’re back in your cage, clutching those iron bars, you feel your stomach sink as you think about just how lonely, just how infuriating your situation is.

That internal voice sure keeps you alive, but it also prevents you from living.

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder: are you the one overthinking or is everyone else is just underthinking?

You want to function like a normal person. You want to go to parties and make friends and fall in love. But a part of you knows that in order for that to happen, you’re going to need to escape from that cage. And a part of you doesn’t want to escape. Why? Well because it’s afraid that to rid the annoying voice, the constant overanalysing, would be to lose what makes you you.

The truth is however: your anxiety is not the real you. That annoying voice in your head, that’s not you either.

To begin…

It’s estimated by the National Institute of Mental Health that nearly 1 in 3 of all adolescents aged 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. Although this doesn’t take into consideration the fact that anxiety ranges in severity, it’s still a really frightening stat.

Before I begin offering any form of advice, I should first emphasise that the techniques and tips I give in this article have come from personal experience. I’ve gone through the process of going through book after book and watching countless YouTube videos for my own anxiety and these are the tips, over the years, I’ve personally found to be most useful. But obviously everyone is different and what works for me may not work for you.

It also goes without saying that these tips should not be used as a substitute for any treatment you are currently undergoing. They’re just supplementary techniques I personally find to be effective. If your anxiety is really affecting you, I’d strongly recommend seeing a psychologist. Not only will they be able to offer personalised advice, but talking through exactly how you feel to someone can really help.

Don’t try and suppress your anxiety

Perhaps paradoxically, attempting to push unwanted thoughts away will only make anxiety worse. Think back to that unwanted voice I talked about earlier, the one feeding you intrusive thoughts.

Since the thoughts and desires you have are in your mind, it’s only natural for you to take ownership of them. After all, they are your thoughts. But just because you have a thought or desire, you don’t have to take ownership. The rational portion of your brain didn’t ask for that thought or desire to be there; it in a sense bubbled up from a deeper more primitive part.

William Irvine, professor of philosophy and proponent of stoicism, uses the ‘roommate analogy.’

He suggests that living with this primitive subconscious mind that provides intrusive thoughts is like having a roommate who keeps telling you what you should think, want and feel.

You might succeed to get the roommate to shut up for a bit but soon they’ll be right back at it, making new suggestions. If you actually had a roommate like this, it’s plausible to think you’d go insane. The problem is, you and this roommate are stuck together in your skull until your very last day on Earth.

You need to devise a strategy to deal with this roommate situation because exercising willpower to shut up your roommate constantly is too exhausting.

ACT

ACT or acceptance and commitment therapy, enables you, in the roommate analogy, to know the dynamics of the situation better. By beginning to adopt some of the techniques ACT suggests, you can learn to cultivate a better relationship with this roommate and realise that although they can tell you what to think, you don’t have to listen.

You don’t have to take ownership of the thoughts this roommate provides. The idea is that by using the rational part of the mind you can better deal with the sub-rational part (the roommate).

When we experience negative thoughts, it’s super tempting to want to immediately push them away. Let’s say you’re about to do a presentation. Your roommate might be telling you:

“This presentation is going to go terribly. You’re going to forget literally everything you prepared and freeze on the spot as everyone stares at you.”

The problem is, the more you try and push this thought away, the more powerful it becomes. Repressing a thought is like trying to push an inflatable ball underwater. No matter how hard you press down or for how long, that ball will still come flying up to the surface, often with even more force than if you were to have simply let it be.

So rather than repressing thoughts, try instead to acknowledge thoughts as they come. Question them and determine whether they are actually useful. If they’re not useful then just let them be, don’t try and push them away, and they should naturally subside, like a dark cloud drifting away.

Let’s go back to the presentation example. Imagine you’ve just had an intrusive thought about how you’re going to freeze on the spot. Now instead of giving that thought power and saying to yourself “I’m going to freeze on the spot”, you might say something like:

“Ah, I’m noticing I’m having the thought that I’m going to freeze on the spot.”

The addition of the “I’m having the thought that…” is there to remind you that you are not your thoughts. Whatever thoughts your roommate feeds you have literally no bearing on how you have to act. You are in complete control of your actions. You might even go a step further and say something like:

“Ah, I’ve noticed my roommate has given me this thought about me freezing again. But I know that doesn’t mean that this thought is true, s/he’s just feeding me meaningless words that aren’t useful.”

From then, you can simply acknowledge the presence of the thought and wait for it to naturally fade.

The idea is that your thoughts are somewhat like a background radio constantly playing. You can either choose to simply let it play, unbothered, tuning in only for the helpful bits or you can choose to try and actively not listen. But imagine what’d happen if you were in a car and were actively trying not to listen to the radio; it would only make things worse.

It’s important to remember that the anxiety part of your brain, your roommate, is not you. By practising ACT and learning to distance your irrational thoughts from yourself, you can start to slowly unveil who you really are and start to show that version to the world.

What’s the worst that could happen?

A question I often ask myself before putting myself into a scenario I know I’ll experience anxiety in is as follows:

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

More often than not, the answer is something along the lines of: I could momentarily embarrass myself in front of a bunch of people I’ll never see again. Whatever conceivable worst case scenario you conjure, you’ll generally start to realise that the worst case is actually not that bad.

I know it might not feel like it, but the likelihood is that whatever happens, in a week or two, no one will remember a thing. The truth is, everyone is really only obsessed with themselves and what might happen if they mess up. Trust me when I say people care much less about you than you’d think. In fact, in most cases, they actually don’t care at all.

Generally, when you notice yourself worrying about how others might be looking at you, you’re never really worried about a single person’s opinion. You could pick out any individual and you wouldn’t care what they think. What you fear is the collective opinion in your head. It’s imaginary and when you consider the worst case, this usually helps put things into perspective.

Another method that might help is asking yourself why you are anxious about something and then repeatedly asking yourself “so what?” in order to challenge faulty thoughts or beliefs. For example, let’s say that you’re anxious about going to a shop you’ve never been to before and ordering something. You first might ask yourself: “what exactly am I anxious about?”

This question in itself can often be insanely difficult to answer. The anxiety is there, but we don’t know why. Perhaps your answer might be something like:

“I’m anxious that I won’t know the procedure of how to order something and mess up and make the workers there annoyed and make all the people queuing up annoyed that I’m wasting their time.”

You’d then ask yourself:

“So what? So what if I mess up the procedure and they have to tell me how to order. Will I ever see them again? So what if I annoy the people queuing up? Will I ever see them again? Will they remember that I annoyed them after about three minutes?”

Sometimes, as opposed to the previous ACT method I mentioned earlier which centres on acknowledging thoughts as simply powerless and making room for them until they pass, it can be useful to instead interrogate negative thoughts. Sometimes making room for a thought isn’t enough if it is founded on a flawed and highly irrational belief.

That means as opposed to simply allowing the roommate to speak in the background, there are times, when s/he says something really hurtful or nasty, that you need to confront him/her and have a conversation; question why your roommate holds this belief and by asking him/her logical questions, discover why this belief the roommate has provided you with is faulty or irrational.

That’s why although you can construct the ‘worst case’ scenario, it can also be useful to really think through how likely it is, based on past experience, that the worst case scenario will actually occur.

A Buddhist mantra that you might say to yourself if the worst case does somehow happen and you’re feeling particularly anxious is as follows:

“This too shall pass”

Whatever feeling you’re currently experiencing, no matter how bad it is, that feeling will pass.  Our mood and our emotions are in a state of perpetual change. You might feel bad today, but with time, things will get better.

Remind yourself of exactly what’s in your control

Stoicism is this branch of philosophy that has changed my life in so many different ways. Not only does it offer ways to provide our lives with more meaning but a large portion of it revolves around learning how to live a life independent of what others think of us.

There are two aspects of stoicism that are especially useful to consider when it comes to quelling anxiety: remembering what’s in your control and considering the inevitability of death. 

Stoicism pushes the idea that we should always bear in mind what’s in our control and what’s not. It proposes that we draw a kind of imaginary line. There are things in this world that you can control and there are things you cannot. The only two things that are under your control: your thoughts (the rational ones [not the roommate]) and your actions.

Nothing else is in your control. So when you’re about to do something that might induce anxiety, it can be very useful to acknowledge just which side of the line the things associated to that something fall on.

Imagine you’re anxious about going to a social event where you don’t know anyone.

You might first list the things you have no control over: you have no control over whether the people there will be nice or not, whether people will like you, what people might think of you, what might happen when you arrive. It’s therefore kinda pointless to worry about any of these things; nothing you think beforehand will change what happens.

Alan Watts – “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

Instead, you should realise that when you get there, you can use the only two things in your control (your thoughts and your actions) to manage the situation as best you can. All you can do is be your honest and authentic self and how people react is there prerogative, it has nothing to do with you.

You never want to disappoint people, but you also just can’t be anything other than who you are. If people are disappointed by you just being you, then let them be, that’s on them. Find people who like you for you instead.

The same goes for events that have already occurred. There’s a tendency for people with anxiety to ruminate over past events for extensive periods of time. But worrying constantly about an event that has happened, dwelling on how you might have come across and what things you did wrong will not change a thing. The event’s already happened and no amount of thinking will change that. All you’re doing is causing yourself unnecessary pain.

Having said that, spending a short while analysing and learning from past events can be super useful. A quote from the lion king:

“The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it.”

My advice would be: if you still have a negative emotional response to an old memory, perhaps a memory that evokes feelings of anxiety, you should take steps to address that memory.

Think about why the bad thing that happened, happened. Was there anything you could have done about it? What could you have done differently? What would you do if the same situation occurred in the future?

The more painful memories you hold, the more enslaved you are to your own brain. By consciously going through and addressing painful memories, you’re liberating yourself from yourself (as weird as that sounds); from an evolutionary standpoint, the memory has served its purpose, you’ve learnt from it for the future.

The inevitability of death

This might seem like an incredibly weird piece of advice, but for me bearing in mind the inevitability of death is a technique I fall back on over and over.

The fact of the matter is this: soon you’re going to be dead. And so is every single person who’s contributing to your anxiety.

If everything’s going to end, if it’s inevitable that eventually you’ll become nothing but a distant memory, a name on a grave that no one visits, why should you really care about what others think of you? It’s all going to end soon anyway; you may as well live life to its fullest while you’re alive (as easy as that sounds).

For me, it’s impossible to live with the ‘death will wash everything away anyway’ mind-set constantly and so instead, I remind myself of it every time I’m about to do something that might induce anxiety, every time I need to conjure up some bravery. Let’s say I’m about to walk into a crowded room. I’ll say something fun like this to myself:

“Look, I’m going to die soon and every concern, every worry I’ll ever have will be gone. There’s no point not living fully before it’s all over. I get this one short life and that’s it, no second chances. To waste this life in thought about what others think of me would be stupid. Every single person I meet here today, they’re all going to die soon too. Even if something goes wrong, who really cares? In the grand scheme of things, none of this will even matter anyway.”

Mindfulness

The basic concept behind mindfulness is that we, as humans, experience a great degree of psychological pain through either intense rumination about the past or intense worry about the future. With anxiety, this overthinking can get out of hand. Mindfulness teaches us how to better access the present, to live free from the burden of the past or the future.

The more you practise mindfulness and allowing intrusive thoughts to simply pass, the easier it’ll be to stay rooted to the present when you’re in an anxiety inducing situation.

To observe the world in all its beauty without our prejudices, opinions and beliefs interfering can actually be a pretty wonderful thing. Learning to have a heightened sense of awareness about the world also enables you to have a heightened sense of awareness of yourself, thus helping you to better understand the dynamics of the aforementioned ‘roommate’ situation better.

I won’t go into detail on how exactly you might practise mindfulness right now, since I have a whole article especially dedicated to it, but to outline a Buddhist idea, the ultimate aim is for your thoughts “to become like robbers in an empty house”. They cannot affect you or hurt you or take anything away from you.

Cold showers

This, again, might seem like a strange piece of advice but for me, cold showers have been great for helping with anxiety.

With a traditional warm shower, your mind is always active – ruminating about that presentation tomorrow or that awkward conversation you had yesterday. There is no time to simply stop and experience the present moment just as it is, to direct all your attention to the here and now.

Cold showers, in a sense, force you to do this.

When you first go into a cold shower, the first thing you’ll notice is that you’re gasping for air. And so to counteract this, you are forced to breathe deep. You’ll also notice your mind starts becoming vacant and when this happens you should try and simply experience the raw sensations of cold on your skin and notice how it feels for you to breathe deeply in and out.

Your brain reverts to a kind of survival mode, where intrusive thoughts about the past and future almost disappear entirely.

That’s why for me, cold showers act as a kind of meditative experience. To counter the pain, you don’t try and fight it. You just acknowledge its existence and learn to breathe through it, become at one with the present moment in order to endure the cold.

Cold showers also reaffirm that you (and not your mental roommate) are in control. Each and every time you prepare yourself to step into those icy jets of water, you’ll probably hear your mental roommate screaming at you to just turn the water to hot (tempting, I know). But by acknowledging him/her and stepping into that cold shower anyway, you’re saying to him/her:

“You can give me thoughts but these thoughts don’t control my actions. I can do whatever I want, irrespective of whatever thoughts you give me.”

The more you practise this, the more you’re boosting your psychological immune system. In fact, research suggests that cold showers can help reduce stress. Each time you have a cold shower, you’re forcing your body to deal with a small amount of stress.

This gradual process of encouraging your nervous system to deal with stress helps in situations beyond the shower. This process is known as ‘hardening’. Now when you encounter a stress-inducing scenario in real life, your body will have ‘trained’ (in a sense) and be more prepared for dealing with it.

If you’d still like a little more detail on cold showers and their benefits, feel free to check out my article on them here.

Creating a hierarchy of discomfort

I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear but sadly the only way you’re going to grow is through discomfort.

Actions of confidence must come before feelings of confidence.

Fear is that annoying emotion we’re all familiar with in one way or another.

A common psychological technique used to help patients counter phobias is known as systemic desensitisation, which in short involves gradually exposing the person with the phobia to the thing they are afraid of. The same technique can be applied to various forms of anxiety (particularly in the case of social anxiety).

Before I give a rough outline of the technique, I should mention that this is obviously only a brief guide (one that has helped me). If you have a phobia or anxiety disorder that’s significantly affecting your wellbeing, see a psychologist who’ll be able to offer more personalised help.

So how might you use systemic desensitisation (or ‘exposure therapy’) to help with anxiety?

The first stage, before anything, is to establish one or two techniques you can employ when you’re experiencing the sensations of anxiety. These can range from breathing techniques to mindfulness techniques to anything else that you know from previous experience helps you out.

Once this is done, you now need to construct a discomfort hierarchy ranging from 1 to 10 say, where 1 represents an activity you could do with relative ease (perhaps for a socially anxious person this might be saying good morning to a shopkeeper) and 10 is something that is currently out of reach (for a socially anxious person this might be going to a party or giving a public speech for example).

Once these levels have been created, it’s now time to crawl back into your shell and hide away forever. Alternatively, you can begin the upwards ascent up the ladder. After you complete each level, take a step back and analyse exactly what went well and how you dealt with any anxiety you experienced. You could also consider things that didn’t go to plan and what you’d do differently in the future.

Rather than immediately moving to the next level once completing the previous one, it’s worth repeating a certain level over and over until you reach a stage where you’re perfectly comfortable doing it.

The aim then is to carry on going until you eventually reach level 10. If at any point the jump between one level and the next seems too large, it’s perfectly fine to create a new level in between the two that might help bridge the gap.

Let’s say for example you have a fear of lifts. Rather than setting the initial target to be actually standing in the lift, which might seem unattainable, your first goal might be to stand a few metres away from the lift.

From then you could close the distance towards the lift, each time going as far as you possibly can. You could repeat each distance over and over until you’re comfortable with it before moving a metre closer. And even it were to take forever, you would eventually get to a stage where you’d feel comfortable in the lift itself. The important thing to remember is this:

The task never gets easier. You just get stronger.

Think of doing these tasks as equivalent to taking small doses of a vaccination that serve to strengthen your psychological immune system. The more vaccinations you give yourself, the more prepared you’ll be when life throws you a situation you were once terrified of. You would have built up the psychological antibodies to better deal with it.

A tip that might help you complete each level on your ladder is to view the level as a kind of game or challenge. In my experience, when you bear in mind that you’re enduring a stressful situation just because it’s part of your game, it alleviates the seriousness of it all and makes the situation easier.

There’ll always be that roommate in your head telling you to take the easy path and avoid pain at all costs. But by engaging in voluntary discomfort you’re telling this voice that he/she is not in control. You’re in charge.

Pain vs fear of pain

Pain is one thing but fear of pain can sometimes be an equally potent force. Imagine you’re about to pricked by a needle for a medical test. The likelihood is that the test itself won’t actually be that painful; perhaps it’ll involve a small prick and a few seconds of mild suffering. What’s likely to have a greater psychological impact on you is the anticipation of the pain, the anxiety you experience as you watch the needle being prepared.

There’s a tendency for us to convince ourselves that we genuinely don’t want to put ourselves into situations that make us anxious. The truth is, in a lot of cases, if we had the choice, we would. If you suffer from social anxiety for example, it might not be the case that you don’t want to go the party, just that you feel like you can’t.

Even if you know it’s irrational, if you know everything will be fine, there’s still that voice within that has you on a rope, telling you that you need to stay in your comfort zone, tugging you back into that cage whenever you try and defy it.

All that voice wants to do is keep you safe. From an evolutionary standpoint, anxiety exists to maximise survival odds, to try and ensure you’re safe in whatever situation you encounter. And that means that when your internal voice compels you to avoid certain situations, it does so because it believes those situations entail too significant a degree of risk.

With anxiety sufferers, the ‘threat detection’ function doesn’t work like it should; the perception of threat is dialled up way too far meaning situations that pose virtually no risk are still viewed by our brains as situations we should avoid regardless.

A question to ask yourself when you find yourself not wanting to immerse yourself in a certain setting that might induce anxiety is this:

Are you scared or are you scared of being scared?

In a lot of cases, the situation itself will not actually be that bad. Our brain just blows it up to seem much worse than it actually is in order to keep us captive in that cage. In that cage, there is no risk of harm and that’s what it wants. But by shielding yourself of potential short term discomfort you’re simultaneously depriving yourself of a whole lot of potential joy.

As I discuss in my article, ‘Does success require suffering?’, most good things in life require prior suffering. Author of ‘The Happiness Trap’, Russ Harris says:

“So here is the happiness trap in a nutshell: to find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.”

A natural progression from ‘I need to feel good’ is ‘I must not feel bad’. This leads to something known as experiential avoidance which is essentially the mentality of ‘I must avoid all painful feelings’. This mind-set however is super damaging and strips you not just of pain but also of joy.

Often, things that you’re initially anxious about, you end up actually really enjoying and you never would have experienced that joy, if you’d been completely discomfort avoidant.

You can’t have love without fear of rejection. You can’t achieve great things without fear of failure. You can’t make friends if you can’t trust and you can’t trust without opening yourself up to the possibility of being hurt. By removing the possibility of pain, you are simultaneously removing the possibility of joy.

Anxiety makes it incredibly difficult to do things other people find easy but by reminding yourself that in order to grow you’re going to have to experience some kind of discomfort, it might hopefully give you that extra incentive to do that thing you’re putting off.

As I’ve mentioned before, life is simply too short. Instead of living your life based on running away from anxiety and all these negative things that might arise, you should instead try (to the best of your ability) to run towards the things you do want, learning to cope with those negative emotions along the way.

Don’t treat yourself like a helpless victim

Ok so I know this might sound somewhat brutal, but for me, the best thing I ever did was realise that I do have control and that I can do things today that’ll help me cope better.

Now there’ll obviously always be days where you simply can’t muster the energy to get out of bed and confront the day ahead, days where you simply lack the motivation to do what needs to be done and that’s totally ok and normal. It’s really crucial that you’re always being kind to yourself, treating yourself like how you’d treat a close friend.

But it’s also important to realise that you are not helpless – you can do things to bring about change.

Don’t view yourself as a helpless victim. Don’t seek sympathy from others. Exercise, meditate, practise gratitude, do those things that you know from experience help. The only way you’ll find these things is by experimentation.

Whenever you begin to feel like your anxiety is getting worse than normal, I’d recommend immediately trying to take some kind of action. Whether that be going to the gym or going for a walk or meditating, make sure you do something to ensure you don’t spiral down into that state of helplessness.

You can’t help that your brain was designed the way it was. You can’t help that you experience more anxiety than the average individual. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t take steps to improve things. The way I see it, wisdom is recognising the difference between what you were born with and what’s in your control. Cowardice is using how you were born as an excuse to justify not even attempting to change and get better.

I know it’s hard and I know sometimes it feels like nothing you’re doing is helping. But you just need to give it time.

Treating friends or colleagues with anxiety

If you’re someone who’s reading this just to gain insight into the mechanics of anxiety and what it feels like, this section is particularly relevant to you. If you feel as if someone in your class or on your floor or in your workplace might be suffering and you don’t know what to do, that’s totally normal and totally fine. But if you can, don’t stand in silence like everyone else, pretending they don’t exist.

Someone with anxiety might initially come off as cold, judgemental and arrogant and it might be hard to persuade yourself to talk to a person like this. But I’d urge you to give everybody a chance before you form judgements. If it turns out the person wasn’t talking to you because they feel like they’re superior to you, then obviously that’s fine; leave them alone, don’t talk to them again. 

But there’s a real good chance that that person everyone is ignoring is a person too, a human with emotions and feelings and a family that loves them. The likelihood is they’re not trying to isolate themselves or seem inaccessible; they’re just struggling. So give them a chance. Just be kind to them, try talking to them. Make an effort to try and get to know them and I promise you, more often than not, they’ll really appreciate that.

Not only are you making them feel better but by showing compassion and kindness you’ll also be making yourself feel better too. There’s usually so much concealed beneath the surface of an individual and to get access to all that kindness and wisdom, you just have to be willing to give people a chance, to make an effort when nobody else is.

It’s also really important that you don’t treat them differently to how you’d treat anyone else. More often than not, they don’t want special attention or for you to treat them like a kid. If you treat someone like a celebrity, they’ll treat you like a fan. The way you get to know the authentic version of someone else is to treat them just like how you would with anyone else and this way it’s much more likely that they’ll lend you the same respect.

I think the scary thing is that you really don’t know what’s going on in anyone’s life. You could literally meet someone a few days after they’ve tried to end their own life and just never know. That’s why being kind is so important. No matter how someone is feeling, kindness is almost always guaranteed to help both the giver and the receiver.