Everyone gets anxious every once in a while, it’s human nature – it’s even something that animals have as well. The problem mostly lies when anxiety becomes constant, such as chronic anxiety. Whenever this happens, it’s so important to seek support from a mental health care professional. Even when you’re seeing a professional, it can still be difficult to manage or even lower your anxiety. It’s critical to find ways to ease your anxiety, so you can attempt to live a more normal life. These are some tips to help you with your anxiety.

Take small steps

Is there something specific that makes you feel anxious? In cases like these, it’s best to try and take some slow and very small steps to battle this anxiety. For example, you’re very anxious in crowds. If this is something that makes you anxious, maybe slowly each week go somewhere crowded (such as the busiest time of the day at a supermarket) and stay there for a bit. Slowly and consistently exposing yourself to this anxiety will make it far easier to manage.

Never resort to using substances

For some who deal with anxiety and high stress, they’ll look into ways to make it subside or just try and drown it out. One common way people do this is by dependency on illegal substances or alcohol. You should never do this, as this will only increase your anxiety, and you may need to seek assistance within an IOP.  So don’t try to drown or subside your anxiety through methods such as these. Look into healthier ways to do it.

Get to know yourself better

Creating healthy habits for yourself starts by knowing yourself better. If you’re seeing a mental health professional, they’ll tend to ask you why you feel the way you do. They will also try to help you get to the root of your anxiety and how it potentially happened. Take some time to yourself and think about the root of the cause. This may not immediately make you feel better, but it will at least help you get to the bottom of why you feel the way you do. This will also give you the chance to think of ways to help calm you, such as healing herbs. But in general, we should all learn a little bit about ourselves, our ticks, our triggers, and what heals us.

Challenge your negative thoughts

Do negative thoughts tend to linger in your head? Sometimes, it’s these negative thoughts and this self-doubt that are causing us to remain anxious and not overcome our anxiety. This little voice is something everyone has, it seeks to break us down rather than build us up. When you hear this voice in your head, making you doubt yourself, question yourself, or even make yourself feel inadequate, it needs to be challenged. 

Challenging these thoughts is going to be the only way to get them to disappear. It’s hard, it’s incredibly difficult, but the more you challenge, question, and even argue about these thoughts, the faster they will go away.  Curing anxiety is far from simple, but thankfully there are ways to make anxiety more manageable.