How to deal with anxiety: Helpful tips for managing anxiety flare-ups

What Does Anxiety Feel Like?

Anxiety is a natural emotional and physical response to perceived threats characterized by feelings of fear, worry, and physical tension. The body goes into a heightened sense of awareness to prepare for potential danger. While occasional anxiety is normal, frequent or intense episodes may be a sign of an anxiety disorder. 

Those with anxiety disorders often experience an amplified stress response, exhibiting feelings of severe fear, panic, and tension in seemingly harmless situations. Common physical symptoms include rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, and shaking or sweating. Some anxiety disorders cause panic attacks, which can make people feel like they are in extreme danger or even dying despite being in everyday environments.

Anxiety disorders like social anxiety or panic disorder can make people fearful of just going about their daily lives, scared of going somewhere or doing something that suddenly triggers their symptoms. This avoidant behavior can be incredibly isolating. 

Fortunately, proper treatment can help people learn to cope with anxiety and live without fear of flare-ups.

What Triggers Anxiety? Identifying Triggers and Stressors

Triggers for anxiety vary widely depending on the person, their specific condition or disorder, and any related conditions. There might not always be an easily discernable trigger.

Often, anxiety arises from anticipating a negative event, even when no real threat exists. Though anxiety is built to be an instinct that keeps us safe, when anxiety bells are ringing and there is no true threat to one’s safety or well-being, it can become a problem. For example:

• Social anxiety: Fear of social interactions, such as attending parties or meeting new people.
• Agoraphobia: Fear of unfamiliar or “unsafe” environments.
• Generalized anxiety disorder Persistent worry without an obvious cause.

Understanding one’s triggers is essential for developing effective coping strategies.

How Can I Calm My Anxiety Quickly?

Relaxation techniques are helpful strategies for coping with anxiety, designed to counter tension and stress and promote calm. Engaging in deep breathing exercises, grounding techniques, and mindfulness practices can help you navigate an anxiety flare-up.

Deep breathing exercises are regulated techniques that focus on slow, deep, intentional breathing to help regulate the physical symptoms of anxiety. Examples include: 

• Breath awareness
• Alternate nostril breathing
• Box breathing

Grounding techniques are another helpful way to lessen symptoms like flashbacks and unwanted thoughts or memories. “Grounding” is a term used to describe techniques that bring a person to their present moment and keep them from getting consumed by their racing thoughts. Examples include: 

• Taking a bath
• Savoring food or drink
• The 54321 approach
• The 333 rule

Mindfulness practices promote nonjudgement and nonreactive awareness of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. You can engage in mindfulness both in the moment of an anxiety flare-up (stopping to assess your anxious thoughts before they completely take hold) and afterward at a calmer time. Reflection on a moment of high anxiety can help you sift through triggers, process anxiety-inducing events, and calmly confront your anxiety to lessen its impact in the future. Examples of mindfulness practices include: 

• Body scanning
• 5 senses exercise
• Mindful communication

How to Cope With Anxiety Attacks

If you are experiencing anxiety or panic attacks, it’s wise to consult with your medical provider as it may be an indication of an underlying issue. After ruling out physical causes, a primary care doctor is likely to refer someone experiencing anxiety attacks to a mental health professional, who can assist them in learning ways to cope with triggering situations. 

If it’s a certain thought or belief that is triggering your anxiety attacks, a therapist can help you find techniques that interrupt or lessen the impact of the distressing thoughts through evidence-based and personalized mental health interventions.

Anxiety attacks can be broadly described as anxious responses that gradually increase in intensity to a usually identifiable trigger. Anxiety attacks share many similar symptoms to panic attacks; however, the onset of the attack is usually the distinguishing factor between the two, as panic attacks are sudden and can often lack an identifiable trigger. 

Some symptoms of anxiety attacks can include an increased heart rate, sweating, shaking, shortness of breath, choking sensations, discomfort, chest pain, nausea, dizziness, feeling you are overheating or feeling chills, numbness, derealization, loss of control, and fear that you are dying.

What Helps With Constant Anxiety?

The most effective way to deal with anxiety is to learn to manage it with the help of a mental health professional. Whether you utilize therapy or medication (or a combination of the two), a mental health professional can help you work through your symptoms, uncover triggers, and process subconscious beliefs or past events that could be tied to your anxiety.

In terms of managing anxiety symptoms in the moment, one good tool for coping with anxiety is to use mindfulness to eliminate the perceived threat. To identify the threat, it may help to ask yourself, “What am I worried is going to happen?” followed by “If it does happen, what consequence would it have on my life?” 

Hopefully, your responses to those two questions will shed some light on areas of vulnerability that are triggering your anxiety. With that awareness, you and your therapist can then begin to take steps to process, reshape, and heal from those vulnerabilities. 

Oftentimes, the spike of fear and nervousness that clinical anxiety causes are outsized responses to certain everyday stimuli. These can be addressed with a psychotherapy approach called reality testing. 

Since anxious thoughts become “irrational” when the reaction is more extreme than the threat, reality testing allows one to make sure their thoughts are attuned to reality—accurate and balanced for making life decisions. By adjusting thoughts to match the reality of the situation, one is better able to identify a range of practical and realistic solutions. 

How Do I Cope With My Anxiety? Good Coping Skills for Anxiety

In addition to the aforementioned techniques like grounding, deep breathing, and mindfulness practices, other ways to cope with anxiety include:

• Reframing thoughts: Shift your perspective to view situations or problems from a new point of view
• Talking to a supportive individual: Share your feelings with someone who will listen without judgment and lessen your load.
• Physical activity: Physical exercise like cardiovascular workouts and muscle-building activities can reduce stress and boost your mood.
• Relaxation techniques: Techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation and meditation can promote mental and physical calm.
• Taking a break: Step away from the stressful situation and take time to reset.
• Healthy diet: Nourish your body with wholesome foods, limiting or avoiding processed options. 

Though each of these techniques can work well to decrease anxiety in the moment, the most effective way to treat anxiety is to see a mental health professional about your symptoms. They will be able to show you personalized tools to help you manage and lead you through the complexities of processing your triggers and symptoms.