Healthy Ways To Deal With Anxiety: Natural Ways To Cope
Top Points
- Anxiety is characterized by feelings of persistent and intense worry.
- If you are coping with anxiety, the feelings of worry may seem out of proportion to the stressors that trigger them.
- Meditation, therapy, and lifestyle changes can help you cope with anxiety.
- Ketamine therapy is an evidence-based treatment for anxiety that’s shown effectiveness in numerous studies.
When you have anxiety, stress and worry can feel out of control and unmanageable. However, there are many natural methods of coping with anxiety, and trying a combination of these strategies may help you find the healing you deserve.
What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a formal medical diagnosis that describes the way in which your body naturally responds to stress. Anxiety is a process your body uses to protect itself from factors it perceives as threats. However, while occasional anxiety is a regular physical response, long-term anxiety can feel out of control.
Anxiety can prevent you from functioning — it can feel debilitating and lead to other mental health struggles, such as depression.
Fortunately, there are ways to cope with your anxiety at home. Let’s explore this more today. We will go into more specific triggers and symptoms for anxiety, as well as at-home treatment options to help you manage your stress.
What Are Some Symptoms of Anxiety?
It is normal to worry if you are in a stressful situation — occasional worry is bound to come up in life with all its ups and downs. However, when your worry becomes more persistent and intrusive, to the point where it interferes with your normal functioning and degrades your quality of life, you are likely experiencing anxiety.
Anxiety usually presents as persistent and intense worry. This might mean that you often feel nervous, sometimes even helpless. You might feel impending panic or danger and may obsessively think about what worries you or ruminate on negative thoughts.
With anxiety, the feeling of worry is larger than the actual stressor itself — when it comes to the ratio of panic to the threat level, your sense of panic and worry may be far out of proportion.
Your body will often respond with physical symptoms like an elevated heart rate, shortness of breath, chest pains, and trembling — which can induce panic attacks, especially in those with panic disorder who also experience anxiety.
Difficulty Concentrating
When you worry and fixate on your worry due to anxiety, it is only natural that it becomes hard for you to focus on what’s in front of you. As such, anxiety can lead to trouble concentrating and focusing on the present moment.
This could look like an inability to follow conversations or focus on tasks, events, or even your surroundings.
Irritability
You might react with a fight or flight mechanism as a natural response to anxiety or a perceived threat. This can mean that you retreat from what you perceive to be a stressor, meaning you isolate or avoid situations to prevent or stop your stress exposure.
However, this could also mean that you go into “fight” mode — you become irritable, combative, and reactive as an immediate response to protect yourself from the upsetting situation.
Unpleasant Thoughts
Anxiety can bring many unpleasant, negative thoughts. These thoughts are often intrusive, persistent, and degrading in the sense that they lower your self-confidence and lead you to spiral into negative self-thinking. You might often feel a sense of upcoming doom, which in turn causes panic.
Trouble Sleeping
If you feel worried, upset, and like you are in danger, your body might have difficulty shutting down at night to rest. You might feel so upset or focused on what worries you that you feel you cannot rest or do not deserve to rest until your panic resolves.
As such, it can be hard to fall asleep at night or even stay asleep once you do fall asleep. Your body might naturally wake you up to try to alert and protect you from danger.
What Causes Anxiety?
There are a number of different factors that can lead to anxiety, that include both mental or physical conditions, medication side effects, and stressful life situations.
Whatever the source is, whether it’s school, work, relationships, finances, or media, stress can easily cause anxiety. Additionally, certain medications can produce anxiety as a side effect, as can certain medical conditions. You might also be prone to anxiety if it runs in your family.
Your personality might leave you more prone to anxiety as well, especially if you lack self-confidence, tend towards perfectionism, are shy, or have low self-esteem.
Other mental health conditions, including depression, ADHD, and PTSD, can also make you more susceptible to experiencing anxiety.
What Are Some Natural Ways To Cope With Anxiety?
Luckily, there are many different natural ways that you can cope with anxiety. These natural coping strategies are easy to try at home and, because they are natural, do not have the unpleasant side effects that many medications can have.
Lifestyle Changes
Stay active as much as you can — develop a routine so that you have a plan to look forward to when it comes to physical activity. Exercise stimulates your body to produce endorphins and other feel-good hormones that can help you cope with stress and worry.
In addition, ensure that your diet is well-balanced. A well-balanced diet incorporates many fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, seeds, and nuts.
Make sure to drink plenty of water and minimize your intake of caffeine or alcohol, both of which can exacerbate symptoms of anxiety.
Meditation and Deep Breathing Exercises
Mindfulness meditation is a great technique to ground yourself in the present and focus on your current thoughts in a calming and manageable way. Deep breathing techniques are another way to self-soothe and help you relax. Both these methods can help bring you back to the here and now, working to break you out of a negative thought spiral.
Make Sleep a Priority
Sleep is critical to maintaining physical health and mental health. Without enough sleep for your mind and body to recharge at night, you may experience physical and mental fatigue throughout the day. Exhaustion can make it much harder to cope with anxious thoughts or tendencies and can even worsen them.
Aim for seven to nine hours of sleep each night for your overall wellness, although the number varies from person to person, and some people require more sleep to feel recharged.
Talk It Out
Speaking to loved ones, consulting a healthcare provider for medical advice, or joining anxiety support groups can help you cope with your mental illness. Talking about your struggles with those who are here to support you and understand you can help you feel less alone in the journey.
Ketamine for Anxiety
At-home ketamine therapy is another great way to manage your feelings of anxiety from the comfort of your own home. Ketamine was first approved by the FDA for use as an anesthetic, but in recent decades it’s shown great promise in treating depression and anxiety.
Nue Life ketamine therapy is administered through a simple oral lozenge that you can take at home with virtual or in-person supervision to ensure a comfortable experience. For those who have seen no improvements from antidepressants, ketamine therapy might be what they’ve been looking for.
Nue Life focuses on whole-person care, offering personalized ketamine treatment and after-treatment care in the form of integration group sessions and one-on-one health coaching sessions during which clients can further address their sleep hygiene and other lifestyle factors that might be impacting their anxiety.
The Bottom Line
Anxiety occurs when you experience persistent and intense worry. Symptoms include difficulty concentrating, irritability, unpleasant thoughts, trouble sleeping, and a general sense of doom or panic.
While anxiety can be scary, it is your body’s natural response to stress and is completely normal. However, when anxiety becomes persistent, it can seem hopeless and unmanageable and can be hard to cope with day-to-day life events.
If anxiety interferes with your quality of life, it may be time to seek ways to address your worries. Try lifestyle changes such as exercise, a well-balanced diet, hydration, more sleep, meditation, and deep breathing.
If you feel you have tried natural, at-home methods to cope with your anxiety, yet it still feels unmanageable, it may be time to seek additional help. Talk to a healthcare professional or mental health professional to develop more formal coping strategies.
Treatment at Nue Life
Nue Life believes in holistic treatment, which means that what happens before and after your ketamine experience is equally as important as the experience itself. We want to ensure you have meaningful takeaways from your experiences and help you establish positive new neural pathways for better well-being.
That’s why we provide one-on-one health coaching and integration group sessions with each of our programs. We’re here to help map out the mind and body connections in your brain and help you discover the insights that lead to true healing.
Sources:
Anxiety » What Is Anxiety? Signs, Causes, Symptoms | Anxiety.org
Anxiety disorders – Symptoms and causes | Mayo Clinic
What causes anxiety? | MHA Screening
Ketamine: A Promising Novel Therapy for Anxiety and PTSD
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