The Truth About Reducing Your Anxiety

Everywhere you look there seem to be suggestions and recommendations on how to manage your anxiety. You’ll hear about different coping mechanisms such as breathing techniques, meditation, stress balls, and exercise, with promises that these things will help you alleviate your anxiety. But here’s the truth: these are simple coping mechanisms that are not going to give you any lasting relief from severe anxiety. So, in today’s episode, I’m going to explain why coping mechanisms don’t work and give you a more actionable way to approach your anxiety. 

 Alright, to be clear: management techniques and coping mechanisms can provide some marginal short-term relief and they certainly be a part of a comprehensive recovery plan, like the one that I teach. But what I see is that many anxiety sufferers are relying on these coping mechanisms as a way to manage their anxiety. I don’t blame them - in fact, I did the same thing. The problem is that this if often the only way they know to deal with their anxiety. They read books, watch YouTube Videos, and look at forums and all they see is recommendations for this technique or that technique to help with their symptoms. 

I’ve even had clients who, when they first meet me, explain how they’ve structured their day around these coping mechanisms. They wake up and do a deep breathing exercise, then do 15 minutes of yoga before having a healthy breakfast. They will then squeeze a stress ball or use fidget rings throughout the day. Then, at night, they’d do some aroma therapy and have some calming tea to try to help them relax. 

Now, again, I’m not saying these aren’t good things. These are all very good things and some of them I recommend to my clients as they work through the recovery process. But the reality is that these alone aren’t going to allow you to overcome your anxiety and get back to living a life that is completely free from anxiety. The reason is that these techniques are geared towards managing managing anxiety, not overcoming it. 

That brings me to one of the most common misconceptions about anxiety - that anxiety simply needs to be managed. And to be honest, when I had anxiety, I fell into this same trap. For the longest time all I could find was these management techniques and I started to believe that there was no cure to my anxiety, so I needed to try to find ways to manage it. So, I played with fidget rings at work, I did deep breathing when I felt really anxious, and I took all sorts of supplements. I tried pretty much everything that I could to help reduce my anxiety and make it more manageable. I even remember trying to breathe into a brown paper bag when having a panic attack, which seems a bit ridiculous now. Of course, none of these things provided any measurable relief.

The reason for that is because coping mechanisms and management techniques don’t address the actual problem. When you are suffering from severe anxiety and you have panic attacks, heart palpitations, and derealization, there is no amount of breathing techniques or the squeezing of stress balls that will allow you to get rid of it. Because when you have severe anxiety, you’re nervous system has been thrown into this state where it is overactive and sensitized. It is reacting as if you are being constantly threatened or in danger and your fight or flight response is engaging. This, in turn, floods your body with excess adrenaline and stress hormones and creates all the anxiety and strange sensations that you’re experiencing. 

So, the bottom line is that these coping strategies don’t address the root cause of your anxiety. Coping strategies don’t actually work to desensitize your nervous system and get it back to a place where it’s operating normally. 

The only learned was that I was living in fear of my anxiety. I was scared of all the anxious sensations, the panic attacks, and the derealization. All of these sensations felt harmful and dangerous and so I was terribly afraid of them. What that fear was doing was signaling that I was in danger - that anxiety was harmful and I needed to protect myself – and my body responded by engaging my fight or flight response. That, in turn, made my anxiety sensations worse. It’s this vicious trap where you experience anxiety, it makes you fearful, and that causes you to experience even more anxiety. So what I did was I developed a system that I called the “Fearless Approach.” The Fearless Approach is an actionable way to respond to anxiety each and every time it shows up. At the core of the Fearless Approach is Step #2, called Surrender to Anxiety. When you surrender to anxiety, you are allowing anxiety in without any fear or resistance. You are allowing anxiety to do whatever it wants. By surrendering to anxiety in this way, you send a crystal-clear message to your brain that "No threat is present” and that it doesn't need to go on the defensive.   

Surrendering to your anxiety works by allowing you to slow down and see anxiety for what it is - natural bodily sensations and nothing more. As this happens, you gradually lose your fear of it and you exit this anxiety trap. The intense sensations that previously felt dangerous or threatening, now just feel like plain sensations. 

Like anything that you are fearful of, it does take a bit of time to actually lose your fear of anxiety. But once you do, everything changes. It marks a monumental step in the recovery process and you're going to be well on your way to desensitizing your nervous system and fully recovering from anxiety. 

To get more information on the Fearless Approach and the recovery process, make sure you download the 5-Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks in the link below. That’s going to break down the recovery process and show you the exact path that I take my clients through to reach a full recovery.