Mental Health
Here’s Why You Might Feel Anxious But Can Reverse It in 7 Steps.
I provide practical tips to lower anxiety effects, reduce risks, and reverse symptoms with healthy lifestyle habits based on experience.
Have you ever seen a person who never gets anxious? I haven’t seen one yet.
However, I met many people who look calm and composed despite their feelings, challenges, and setbacks in life. And some individuals can act calmly amidst difficult situations, and others remain unflappable with resilience and grit in stressful environments.
Nevertheless, some people live with the anxiety that leads to other mental health conditions if not treated timely.
Anxiety is a mental state showing physical symptoms. Therefore it is a psychosomatic concept, meaning it involves the body and mind. Thus, solutions require a holistic health approach.
Anxiety is natural, as it is embedded in our survival system. The brain is wired to create anxiety and show the effects when it perceives threats to protect us. It doesn’t matter whether threats are real or imaginary.
Anxiety is a common experience for all of us, and it is entirely normal to feel anxious at times. However, with the proper support and care, we can effectively manage anxiety’s effects and prevent the onset of related disorders.
By utilizing various strategies and seeking help when needed, we can find viable solutions to lower anxiety and improve our overall well-being
A viable approach, from my experience, is to identify anxiety as early as possible, accept the situation, understand symptoms, take proactive treatment approaches with support from professionals, reverse symptoms, and prevent it from manifesting proactively via healthy lifestyle habits.
It is never too late to treat anxiety. Awareness is the key.
Nevertheless, anxiety is a complex mental condition and widespread, touching on many health domains such as psychology, psychiatry, neurology, endocrinology, and others.
Anxiety impacts the lives of millions of people globally. For example, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, Generalized Anxiety Disorder affects 6.8 million, Panic Disorder affects 6 million, and specific phobias affect 19.3 million adults in the United States.
The purpose of this story is to introduce key points that make us anxious and provide practical tips to address them via healthy lifestyle choices. I structured the article under two main headings. First, I’d like to touch on what makes us anxious.
Here’s what makes us anxious.
Many different things in life can cause anxiety. Some are physical, and some are psychological. Specific causes might vary from person to person.
I categorize them under two headings: physical and psychological, as anxiety is a psychosomatic condition happening in the mind and body simultaneously.
However, first I’d like to touch on symptoms so that the points related to causes can make sense.
Common Symptoms
Understanding symptoms can be helpful, as awareness of them is the key to understanding root causes and finding viable solutions individually and with support from professionals.
Some psychological symptoms are excessive worry, creating absolute obligations unnecessarily, overblown safety concerns, avoiding social engagements, and phobias.
In addition to psychological symptoms, there are also physical symptoms of anxiety, such as sleep deprivation, irregular heartbeats, shaking, agitation, excessive perspiration, muscle aches, and nausea.
Psychological Reasons Making Us Anxious
Literature indicates many psychological causes of anxiety. Most of them are perceptions we create based on our mental filters. I summarize them under ten points.
1 — Lack of control
2 — Lack of information
3 — Conflict or disagreements with others
4 — Fear of failure or not meeting the expectations of others
5 — Uncertainty and worry about the future conditions
6 — Past traumas especially abuse or violence
7 — Social tension, rejection from others, or fear of being judged
8 — Economic conditions
9 — Concerns about health conditions
10 — Loss of loved ones or friends
Physical Reasons Making Us Anxious
When I checked the literature on the commonly mentioned physical causes of anxiety, I came across the following ten points.
1 — Metabolic and digestive disorders
2 — Other health conditions, such as cancer
3 — Accidents and physical traumas
4 — Being a victim of crime
5 — Excessive stress from work, school, or personal relationships
6— Overexercising, overeating, and oversleeping
8 — Problems with organs, such as heart conditions
9— Environmental and global issues
10 — Alcohol and drug abuse
Here’s how to lower anxiety effects, reduce risks, and reverse symptoms.
There are several ways to lower anxiety and manage symptoms of anxiety disorder. From my experience, some strategies include the following. I summarize them under seven headings. I excluded chronic situations that require medical support intervention from qualified healthcare professionals.
1 — Create a new mindset.
Anxiety starts in mind. Our thoughts and feelings affect our beliefs and values, impacting all aspects of life. Mindset refers to our thinking patterns and attitudes toward life.
Before taking any problem and attempting solutions first, we need to believe that we can do it and that it is within our capability. If we don’t, our minds will prevent success. It is evident in placebo studies.
By switching from a negative to a positive and from a fixed to a growth mindset, we can influence the process and significantly contribute to outcomes. We need to prime our minds to understand and solve our anxiety.
Related to this point, setting realistic goals and choosing relevant priorities can reduce stress caused by overcommitting and lower anxiety.
2 — Act mindfully.
Once we have a practical mindset, the step is to act mindfully to understand the root causes of anxiety, whether they are physical or psychological.
Practicing mindfulness can help you focus on the present moment. As well documented in the literature, our minds create anxiety when they live in the past and future. Thus, the optimal state for the mind is present.
Awareness, acceptance, empathy, and compassion are the key components of mindfulness. Making mindful living a life habit is a sustainable lifestyle.
Mindfulness practices urge us to live in the moment by observing and accepting thoughts and sensations without judgment. When our awareness increases, anxiety can start diminishing.
Another benefit of mindfulness practices is to strengthen the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) and shrink the amygdala (the alert system) that informs the body to act anxiously.
So acting mindfully can also make physical modifications in the brain as well as psychological changes.
3 — Leverage the power of exercise.
Exercising regularly reduces stress and anxiety. Thus regular exercise can contribute to overall physical and mental health. A healthy body and mind appear to be less prone to anxiety compared to unhealthy ones.
At the structural level, mindfulness practice affects the amygdala to shrink by strengthening the prefrontal cortex. However, we must understand that our cortex is much slower than the amygdala in responding to real or imaginary threats.
Therefore the neocortex needs support from the body. One of the most effective ways is to move the body. Exercise changes the hormones and neurotransmitters.
When the body feels a threat, it releases adrenaline to react quickly and respond to dangers. Anxious thoughts can also create this stress hormone. It is necessary, but too much of it can cause anxiety.
Movement is an effective way to lower adrenaline, as when we move, the body this hormone is used in the energy production process.
Literature indicates that aerobic exercises are the best for lowering adrenaline in the bloodstream. Therefore exercise is a helpful anxiety reduction strategy.
4 — Activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
This step is just the opposite of the previous one, as a different tool to lower anxiety. As exercise activates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), we must deactivate it and initiate the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
The easiest and quickest way to activate the PNS is by using our breath. When we start controlling our breath deliberately, we can notice the anxiety symptoms lowers as the parasympathetic nervous system puts the body in a relaxed mode.
There are many practical breathing exercises that you can check on the internet. Apart from breathing, which is the fastest, there are other tools and approaches to activate PNS.
Here are some examples:
Slowing down, taking a break at work, resting, taking a nap, having a warm bath with Epsom salts, listening to soothing music, focusing on a hobby, recreational reading, expressive writing, working in a flow state, chatting with friends, playing with kids or pets, self-talk, visualization, and meditation, as mentioned in the next section.
5— Perform meditation, visualization, and self-talk.
I’d like to highlight the importance of meditation and visualizations as they can both help during anxious times and also strengthen the thinking brain part (neocortex) while lowering the effects of the anxious parts responsible for alerts and emotions (limbic and reptilian).
The neocortex is a biological, chemical, and electrical entity. Therefore, it requires rest like other organs. If we deliberately don’t rest this part of the brain, the old brain will take over and continue generating worries and keep the neocortex even busier with anxious thoughts.
Unless we reset the neocortex with deliberate intervention like meditation visualization or self-talk, it will continue running at a massive speed frenetically, causing more stress and anxiety in the body.
So meditation, visualization, and self-talk can be an intervention to reset brain activities by slowing the speed of thoughts. During meditative practices, the input to the neocortex diminishes. Therefore, cognitive processes can slow down.
While meditation, visualization, and self-talk can rest the cognitive brain, they can also strengthen the areas responsible for focus, attention, task switching, working memory, and problem-solving.
So meditative practices serve as therapy and prevention for lowering anxiety. Therefore, since I started to meditate three times daily over three decades ago, my anxiety has substantially lowered.
Even though anxiety increases as we age, I feel less anxious as I got older.
6 — Try exposure to risks and fearful situations.
Literature indicates that a proven technique to lower anxiety and reverse symptoms gradually is exposure therapy individually or with help from professionals.
This method focuses on exposing the amygdala to perceived risks and fearful situations. The approach aims to train the alert system with our emotional experiences.
For example, people who are afraid of crowds are exposed to small gatherings briefly. Then the exposure is gradually increased to bigger crowds. Each time the person sees no risk or danger, the amygdala codes the experience as no threat to our survival.
Individuals can also do this by themselves safely. For example, when we perform public speaking multiple times in smaller and friendlier groups. after a while, our anxiety might disappear in front of larger audiences.
This happened to me as I started talking in front of five people, increasing to 50, 500, and 5000. After decades, I saw no difference between talking in front of 5 and 5000 people as my amygdala was rewired and created a new mental script.
7 — Use self or guided cognitive behavioral therapy.
Another therapeutic and preventative approach is the use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
This can be done by talking to a therapist or a counselor to work through anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
In addition to guided therapy, we can use CBT individually at our convenience. There are many books, free videos, and online resources teaching CBT to beginners. Once you learn, practicing can be like meditating, as another mindfulness tool.
Literature indicates that CBT is as effective as medication in treating anxiety if done correctly. It can even be better combined with medication in severe cases.
In addition, the effects of CBT remain permanent as it rewires the brain, but the effects of drugs usually are not, as they mainly address symptoms.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Anxiety starts in the brain as a mental activity but spreads through the body, creating a physical effect. The mental activity manifests as unpleasant feelings.
A combination of the primitive brain and neocortex might cause significant anxiety leading to mental disorders if not appropriately and timely addressed.
Even though anxiety is a chemical and electrical process in the brain, we feel it as an emotion in the body through hormonal changes.
The frequency and number of anxious thoughts and feelings might create significant stress for the body. Therefore, anxiety and stress are tightly related. An anxious mind can also be a stressed mind and a stressed body.
Anxiety can affect both our physical and mental health. Physical and cognitive decline seems to be the common factors for age-related anxiety. Anxiety might lead to depression and neurodegeneration.
Some of us might experience more anxiety as we age. However, an anxious brain is treatable. Neuroplasticity is a critical capability that we need to consider in handling anxiety in adult patients.
Anxiety has a broad spectrum starting from a slight stress implication to extremely distressful situations such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder affecting the proper functioning of our faculties.
Identifying symptoms as early as possible is critical to addressing the root causes and developing effective treatment methods.
Early identification can also prevent them from occurring in the long run. Reversing the symptoms is ideal for patients' health.
Some people try alcohol, drugs, or cigarette smoking to lower anxiety. Unfortunately, they make the situation worse at later stages.
However, there are better and more sustainable ways, as I covered in this article. Here is a summary of takeaway points.
1 — Keep a positive and optimistic mindset.
2 — Act mindfully with gratitude, self-love, empathy, and compassion.
3 — Move the body and exercise regularly.
4 — Activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
5 — Meditate or use other mindfulness techniques.
6 — Expose yourself to minor risks and fearful situations gradually.
7 — Seek support from professionals and use self-therapy.
Uncontrolled anxiety can increase stress in the body and brain. Thus, it might lead to other mental health conditions disrupting our hormones, neurotransmitters, and genes.
Therefore, we need to deal with anxiety proactively and diligently to maintain the body’s homeostasis. We cannot discard all symptoms initially, but we can reduce the effects significantly through gradual improvement.
You deserve to live with a confident and calm mind giving you a joyful, productive, and satisfying life with your loved ones.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
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