I suffered from anxiety most of my life. Prone to overthinking, I focused on things outside my control like the opinions people had about me.
I constantly felt like I was treated poorly and deserved better. As a result, I over-worked myself and often felt like I didn’t deserve better. While personal development was clear on my roadmap, self-care was not at all.
Eventually, I felt I’d had enough. I was starting to feel the stress from my workload build up and I couldn’t take it anymore.
After a few Google searches, Stoicism, mindfulness and a few other techniques appeared as methods for managing stress.
In this post, I’ll share how I learned to manage my stress and anxiety.
Take Care of Your Body
Step 1: Treat your body like a temple.
Before we dive into the mind and spirit, we need to make sure our body is feeling 100%. Otherwise, our attempts at mindfulness will be in vein.
Here’s a quick checklist to make sure you’re taking care of your body.
Have a healthy diet
You are what you eat. You’ve definitely heard this one, and it’s true. Perhaps, not literally. You won’t become a beef burger after a trip to the local burger shack. But the grease in that burger may just end up clogging your arteries later.
General healthy eating involves avoiding processed foods. We should have a diet rich in vegetables and leafy greens. Red meat brings several health risks and should be limited to once or twice a week.
You may even find supplements help you get the nutrients that may be lacking from your diet. As a vegetarian, I personally take a fish oil supplement as well as a multi-vitamin that contains B12, iron and magnesium.
Of course, speak to your doctor or nutritionist before changing your diet or taking any new supplements.
Avoid excessive alcohol & caffeine
Alcohol and caffeine are real killers in this space. While alcohol may make you more relaxed when you’re under the influence, it has a whole suite of undesired consequences that build up over the long-term.
First, alcohol negatively affects your sleep – which we’ll discuss a bit later. It also harms your liver and other organs. If you’re an excessive drinker, you should start to think of alcohol as a poison. It’s fine in smaller quantities but causes long-term harm to the daily drinker.
Caffeine is another substance that can cause anxiety. In terms of drinks with the highest caffeine levels, the main culprit is coffee. Following coffee, you have energy drinks, soda, black tea and green tea.
Caffeine is fine in smaller quantities, but it’s all too easy to get hooked on several cups per day – especially if you enjoy coffee. In larger quantities caffeine can cause restlessness, nervousness and insomnia – all of which make you feel anxious in the long run.
Exercise
Besides improving your overall health and sense of well-being, exercise is also widely considered a stress reliever. Exercise makes you feel good because it reduces stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol and releases endorphins into the body.
Endorphins are great because they’re our body’s natural pain-killers and mood elevators. Exercise can even help improve sleep for many people. If you’re having trouble sleeping, here’s another great reason to exercise.
Studies show that aerobic exercises are one of the best ways to reduce stress. The below activities are some ideas of exercise that help reduce stress.
- Go for a jog or brisk walk
- Take a bike ride
- Do some HIIT (high-intensity interval training)
- Boxing
- Swimming
Get enough rest
Finally, we need to make sure we get enough sleep and rest more generally. As the examples above show, most of the things we need to consider in terms of our body affect sleep.
We should care about sleep because that’s when our body is able to fully recharge. That’s why if anything affects our sleep, we’re likely to wake up feeling grumpy and anxious.
Rest, more generally, is important because we need to be able to unwind. We can’t expect to be great at our jobs if we think about it 24/7. It’s important to disconnect at the end of a long, productive day.
You might be surprised how many great ideas come from the shower and other relaxing environments. That’s because our mind has disconnected from the tunnel vision and begun to think more creatively about the bigger picture.
That’s why rest is great for productivity. Make time to rejuvenate effectively everyday for the long-term health benefits.
Take Care of Your Mind
Practices like counting to 10 can help us develop cognitive distance, which is the basis of mindfulness and Stoicism.
When we allow our first impressions to take over our minds, we create a new “reality”. Our perception is not actually reality, it just feels like it. The Stoics called this concept katalepsis.
If we tell ourselves that something is true, it becomes true. Distancing ourselves from harmful automatic thoughts can help relieve mental suffering.
Below are some of the best ways to take care of your mind and mental health.
Meditate
Most people have their own unique meditation routines. It all depends on what you personally prefer. Regardless who you talk to, meditation tends to come down to three key points.
- Clear your mind
- Focus your mind on your breathing
- Be aware when a thought appears. Don’t judge yourself for having the thought, just return to focusing on your breath.
Body scan meditation is mindfulness aimed specifically at identifying the body’s sensations. In this way, we can identify release and points of tension.
Learn more about meditation in our Beginner’s Guide to Meditation.
Journal
Journaling is another way to become more mindful. Sometimes, the problem causing our anxiety is that we’re just “stuck inside our own head”.
Writing down our fears and anxieties on paper allows us to review our thoughts more objectively. Common results include finding solutions faster or even understanding that the worst case scenario is really not so bad.
Have you ever caught up with a friend who was really worried about something? After listening to their problems, you may tell them that their situation doesn’t sound so bad.
Journaling does the same thing as hearing a friend talk through their problem – but for our own problem. This mindfulness practice gives us the ability to treat ourselves as a rational, third party.
It’s easy to treat someone else’s problems objectively. But when we keep something in our own head, it’s harder to fully process our emotions around it.
Reflect
Reflection is a key practice that helps us realise our purpose, potential areas of improvement and other valuable insights.
Why do I wake up each morning? What am I doing in life that matters? What should I do more of? Who haven’t I spoken to lately (and should maybe reach out to)? How do I feel about myself? How do I feel about the ways I spend my time? Am I living in line with my core values?
It’s important to reflect everyday. The Stoics had daily morning and evening routines for reflection.
Reflection is how we learn to understand ourselves. Without simply copying others’ dreams and desires, reflection helps us realise and live the best life for ourselves.
We owe it to ourselves to spend a few minutes reflecting on these ideas everyday.
Take Care of Your Spirit
Our spirit is our emotional and spiritual self. When we take care of our spirit, we feel “centred” – at peace with ourselves and our environment. We can find this balance with a few simple mindfulness practices.
Focus on what you can control
We shouldn’t need to fixate on most thoughts that enter our mind. In fact, most of the time, we fixate on things that are completely useless.
That’s why the Stoics recommended we draw a distinction between what we can control vs what we cannot control. This ancient wisdom comes from the Stoic Dichotomy of Control.
There’s no point in being upset that it’s raining during our holiday. The rain isn’t going to ruin our day, but our negative judgment of the weather probably will.
The only impact we will ever have in life is with the things we can control. We must learn to embrace all else as fate. Amor fati.
If there’s nothing we can do about something, we need to be able to let it go.
Do your best
At the end of the day, there’s really only so much we can do. Our experiences on on Earth will always be limited, so we’ll never be perfect – and we shouldn’t strive to be! Nor should we compare ourselves to other people.
On a daily basis, all we can do is our best and we should be proud of ourselves for that! We can always be kind to ourselves and others.
And that practice brings me to possibly the most important lesson in this post…
Love yourself!
We spend so much time looking up to celebrities, envying the rich and dreaming about the lives of the powerful. But that is a very limited view of what a “good life” should be. Especially since we’re leading one right now! Every life is beautiful and a perfect example of what it means to be human.
The only person you will ever be is yourself. That’s why it’s best to appreciate who you are. Be grateful for who you are. Treat yourself like you’d treat your best friend. Live life to the fullest. Enjoy every moment. Carpe Diem.
Calming Anxiety in a Nutshell
In a nutshell, you might say anxiety comes down to the body-mind-spirit connection. We should place equal emphasis on each corner of the triangle to ensure we live a calm and peaceful life. We learn to live this calmer life by following the mental and physical health practices above.
Regardless of our stress levels, we should always fill our lives with a healthy diet, exercise, rest, meditation, journaling and reflection. We should always focus on what we can control, do our best and – most important of all – love ourselves.
Calm your anxiety with mindfulness and Mind & Practice today.