Tips for coping with anxiety

Look at your fears with mild, gentle and kind attention.

Accept that the fear is there, without identifying yourself with your fear. You are not the fear. You have the fear.

By dealing with yourself and your fears in a gentle way, you can relax more and your fears can also soften more easily.

Anxieties drive you to have compulsive thoughts and to compulsive actions. These are like an addiction. So stop them as soon as possible, whenever and wherever you can. Distract yourself, over and over again.

The more you give in to them, the worse fears, compulsive thoughts and actions will dominate your life. If you don't stop them they eventually take over your life completely.

As with any addiction, they affect only yourself at first but soon affect your immediate environment as well. Do something about it. Seek help if you can't manage on your own!

With anxiety, focus your attention on your body rather than your thoughts

When we are afraid of something, our first inclination is to avoid it. For example, you are afraid of dogs, you encounter one outside and you walk in a different direction. Or you're afraid of driving on highways and you only drive on smaller roads.

In itself, this is a solution to your fear or phobia. By not exposing yourself to it, you don't have to be afraid of it either, and that saves a lot of stress and hassle!

Of course, it also has a disadvantage, because you have to make detours for a dog all the time, or it takes much longer to get somewhere via shortcuts than via the highway, etc.

But another big disadvantage of avoidance is that your fear secretly gets bigger and bigger anyway! Every time you avoid something, you confirm the fear in your head. Your brain then thinks: we are avoiding that dog, you see, it must be a really horrible monster ... otherwise we wouldn't avoid it!

So a kind of circular reasoning develops in your head, which only makes your fear bigger and bigger. And - especially if something has become a habit - then your brain starts looking for an explanation for your behavior. And if you avoid something, it must be because it's very scary!

The only way to overcome fear is, force yourself to go back in that direction in small steps anyway, so that your brain can experience, oh wait a minute, this is actually not so bad!

Are you suffering from anxiety and you can't get out of it by yourself? A therapist or psychologist can help you.