How do I deal with anxiety?

How do I deal with anxiety?

Inflammation is a complex issue that largely occurs at a hidden cellular level, but the stress response is something we can control in everyday life. Ironically, this is the element most people pay the least attention to. They improve their lifestyle with diet and exercise while leading fast-paced, demanding lives that lie at the heart of the problem.

Psychologically, stress results whenever anxiety about the future or regrets about the past are invoked.

A vast range of everyday experiences, from giving birth to losing your job, from having depression in your family history to breaking the bank at Las Vegas, can be stressful. Experts refer to “eustress,” indicating that the stressor is a happy event—the Greek prefix eu means “good” or “well”—but it is stressful nonetheless. In a healing lifestyle we must address the stress that accumulates over time, and because most of this accumulation is invisible and occurs very slowly, there is really no difference between stress management and life management.

Stress experts indicate that increasing the unpredictability in your life and feeling that you are out of control makes acute stress much worse. It’s easy to see how losing your job turns a steady income and pride in doing a good job into the opposite, having no accomplishment to feel proud of and not knowing what the future will bring. But having a baby has the same dimensions. Infant health is unpredictable, and parents have no control over when their baby is suddenly going to need immediate attention. Some parents of newborns do much better at coping than others; see below for examples of how they do it.

The key is a range of coping mechanisms anyone can call upon.

• Get enough rest and sleep.
• Make time for yourself every day to be alone and quiet.
• Make sure you get outside to refresh your connection to nature.
• Maintain an active life—don’t be chained to the situation.
• Share duties and responsibilities.
• Ask for help before you feel overwhelmed.
• Pursue a regular routine—this helps offset unpredictable events.
• Find an activity that makes you feel in control.
• Find a confidant with whom you can share your feelings without judgment.
• Don’t martyr yourself by taking on more than you can handle. Fight the urge to feel victimized.
• Don’t isolate yourself —keep up your social activity.
• Seek out people in the same situation who can empathize with you and offer positive support.
• Resist self-judgment.
• Be easy on yourself, accepting the ups and downs of emotions as natural.
• Where there is the possibility of finding joy, pause to appreciate it.

The arrival of a baby is such a joyful event that the positive side that counters the stress is obvious and easily accessible. The same isn’t true if you are going through a divorce or suddenly lose your job. Even so, the important point is to be aware that you can cope by developing the coping behavior we’ve outlined. This is a conscious, self-aware project. Your built-in responses can’t accomplish it for you. If you find yourself in a crisis that induces acute stress, take the following steps: Start to journal about your path out of the crisis. In your journal write down the list of coping mechanisms we’ve just given. You might want to make each one a page heading on its own. Under each coping behavior, write down something you can do immediately to adopt that behavior. Follow up every day with your successes when a coping mechanism is beginning to work for you. None of these coping mechanisms is complicated; most are self-explanatory. But acute stress is such a powerful disruption that it throws our awareness off kilter. We wind up doing things we know deep down are self-defeating, such as being alone too much of the time, acting out the role of a victim, and letting fear and anxiety gain the upper hand by keeping our emotions bottled up.

We need to extend the discussion to the invisible kind of everyday stress that actually causes more harm than people realize, harm that can prove disastrous over a period of years without being detected. We’re referring to the hidden culprit, chronic stress.

Read more in the original book