Here Are 10 Powerful Ways to Fight Anxiety When It Hits Hardest
How we react to hardship is half the battle
It’s been a rough week in the Brock house. I’m in the middle of negotiating a new book deal, while editing my first novel, filing tax returns for five different companies, writing full-time, and mentoring five teenagers. And then: ten of my websites crashed and stayed down for three days straight.
Meanwhile, my wife is extra-busy with the “Christmas crunch” at her full-time hospitality job, plus she’s working late nights+weekends as she launches an app for families separated by Covid, all while mourning the loss of her own grandma who recently passed away.
Needless to say, it’s felt a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, we’ve been in stressful seasons like this before — book launches, film premieres, deadlines of all sorts. Here are ten powerful ways we fight anxiety when it hits hardest:
1. Starwalk
We live in a little village that used to be a sailing port for more than five hundred years. After seeing us head out on one of our nightly starwalks, our local historian-neighbor informed us that starwalking is a centuries-old tradition in town, as many sailors and ship captains couldn’t find their land-legs and didn’t sleep well without the gentle rock-and-swell of the sea.
Walking at night, specifically, does wonders for decreasing anxiety levels: The world is quiet. The air is fresh. You don’t run into chatty neighbors. Best of all — if you live near nature — you get a glimpse of the massive universe in which we get to temporarily dwell.
On clear nights before moonrise, that vast canvas of constellations and galaxies of unfathomable breadth and depth gives you an inexpressible gratitude for the utterly improbable miracle of existence. It puts all of your problems back into their proper perspective: that these, too, shall pass.
2. Sleep
If sleep isn’t one of your top three priorities in life, you’re doing it wrong.
Sleep is the foundation of bodily health and brain function. When the going gets tough and the anxiety starts building, the absolute best thing you can do is put ten or twelve hours on the clock, dive under the covers, and flush it out of your system. (Science backs this up: the glymphatic system is 10X more active when we sleep.)
Give yourself one to three hours to toss and turn and stress and worry — I recommend getting it all out of your head by writing it down on a Worry Card that you can retrieve in the morning — and then make sure you get a full 9+hours of restorative sleep.
If you’ve seen the Bradley Cooper movie Limitless, in which he takes a pill that allows him to access more of his brainpower, I’m delighted to tell you that pill already exists: it’s called sleep.
Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” Sleep is the grindstone. Nine hours of deep sleep will sharpen your brain-ax to fell any troublesome tree faster than a month of blunt-edged head-bashing.
3. Burn everything to the ground
Eliminate as much noise and distraction as possible. When my sites crashed and I took an honest look at my schedule for the upcoming season, I realized there was no way I’d get it all done by the deadlines each project required.
I needed to clear my cognitive load.
So I looked at my life and looked for repeating events and weekly commitments. I sent a single email that instantly freed up 36 evenings. My mental burden immediately got lighter.
Next up: temporarily killing the news, social media, surfing, and streaming. Re-allocating all of that wasted time to focused deep work is what turns everything around.
4. Cook & eat
I do most of the cooking in our home — my wife is my sous chef — and one of the best ways to crush anxiety is to cook yourself a gorgeous meal with people you love. We went grocery shopping today and bought five different bars of dark chocolate, some posh pots of yogurt, a few ciders we’d never seen before, and a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. We haven’t even eaten supper yet, but we feel better already!
5. Read in your pajamas by the fire
There is nothing more ancient and primal than sitting close to an open fire. The crackling of the logs, the warmth on your face, the hiss of the flame. It’s nature’s Ambien. We make a point to have a fire at least once per week, and to double down when stress levels soar. Sometimes you just need to let the flames burn away your burdens.
6. Bathe
A warm soak, steaming sauna, or hot shower is worth every penny in the fight against anxiety: it lowers your blood pressure, increases oxygen intake, releases endorphins, and decreases inflammation. When times get tough, turn that tap.
7. Pray or meditate
The father of Western monasticism — the monkish tradition that gave us universities and hospitals and protected much of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy — was an Italian fellow named Benedict of Nursia, who was famous for his phrase, “Ora et labora.” Pray and work. He believed that both things, in tandem, were essential for a flourishing life. We not only need to live on the existential plane, but our spirits also need to connect to the transcendent.
Martin Luther — the great reformer and the first person to meaningfully call out the corrupt Catholic church of his day — usually prayed for two hours each morning, but once wrote: “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.”
There’s something uniquely special about taking time to connect with the transcendent that pays dividends in everyday life. The admission of our ultimate frailty and utter inability to control every situation is counterintuitively quite freeing — it takes a huge weight off your shoulders to realize that you’re not responsible for keeping the planet spinning.
Taking a holy pause is just what we need in a moment of crisis. Like the Marines say: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
8. Ask for help
There is no faster way to slipstream toward your goals than to befriend someone who’s already been where you want to go.
Anxiety is often the result of simply not knowing what you need to do to get where you want to be. Your fight or flight response can easily be triggered by a lack of information. By recruiting or hiring people with experience — ideally experts — you can seriously deflate your worry bubble. The second my sites went down, I didn’t try to figure it out on my own; I emailed my web gal and called up tech support. Now, my sites are faster and more secure than before.
9. Do something ridiculous
Despite our temporarily crazy situation — three of my sites are still down and I have a report due at the end of the week — my wife and I decided to take today off. Right in the middle of the chaos. We drove an hour up the coast, had an outdoor lunch in the town square, did some Christmas shopping for family overseas, and visited an osteopath to get our bodies realigned.
It was just what we needed.
Rather than trying to slog through the battlefield with an aching body and a Christmas To-Do list and feeling like we haven’t seen each other in days, we put all the important things — relationships, health, mindset, etc — back in their rightful place of importance.
By refilling the important Life Tanks, rather than dreading the challenges of the next month or so, we’re both ready and actually excited to dive back into the fray. In fact, we’ve already scheduled another date day in three weeks to do it all over again.
10. Help someone else
Like starwalking, this one’s about perspective again: There is always someone in a worse place than you. Never forget that over 1,000,000,000 of our brothers and sisters live in slums and that number is rising by one million per day. Never forget that over 24,000,000 members of our global family are bound in slavery at this very moment. Never forget that 690,000,000 men, women, and children go to bed hungry every night, and that over one million children are raped for cash every day.
The truth is that our worst challenge or setback pales in comparison to the everyday reality of others. This, of course, doesn’t make our troubles any less real or painful, nor should it; it just helps us gain a huge sense of proportion that obliterates anxiety.
Today, my wife and I decided to build a little gift basket for an acquaintance who’s in dire financial straits because of the economy. Just the anticipation of giving her the gift lightened our spirits, and hopefully, it seriously lifts hers as well.
Article update: We delivered the basket to discover her partner had died during lockdown and she’d been unable to be there with him. We got to spend a few heartbreaking socially-distanced minutes with her, and the gift had a bigger impact than we could have imagined.
In Conclusion
This article, too, is being written in the midst of our personal mayhem. Not only is Medium a great creative outlet for me — which decreases anxiety — but hopefully this article proves deeply helpful for its readers.
There are plenty of other ways to fight anxiety, of course — deep-breathing, taking Vitamin D3 and B12, singing, dancing, listening to music, laughing — but those are ten practices that have worked extremely well for us this week, and I hope they work well for you… because life’s far too short for anxiety!
