Managing Anxiety Like a Pro
As COVID-19 reaches my community, I watched my friends’ reactions and realized they were demonstrating some behaviors I’d learned to monitor in myself. So I thought it would be useful to put together a little advice on managing stress from someone who suffers from anxiety on the daily. The next few months will challenge us all. Financially, emotionally. We have a right to feel anxious, but my hope is these words will help someone recognize what is happening in their head. If we’re mindful, we can reduce the chance that our anxiety itself overwhelms us and leaves us unable to address our very real health, material and social problems.
Do please note, I’m a “pro” only in the first-person sense that this is my life. I am not an expert in psychology or therapy. If you experience extreme symptoms, please call a helpline or other professional.
Learn To Recognize The Symptoms
You might think of anxiety as synonymous with fear, but moment by moment, my experience never feels like any specific fear. I frequently reference this comic by Jeffrey Rowland to explain what it’s like living inside my brain. It’s not like seeing a spider or hearing things in the wake of watching a horror movie. During an anxious episode, you might not even be conscious of the source of the anxiety itself but nonetheless experience a sense of vague dread or uneasiness that limits your ability to direct your thoughts. And that’s the key. Worrying is fine; disordered thoughts are not. I’m usually perfectly rational while anxious, and I only catch myself when I realize my looping worries aren’t being resolved in the process of examining them.
Anxiety can also tell on itself with physical symptoms, which might be more easy to identify. Fatigue, muscle tension, headaches, or that feeling of “ope I’m coming down with something.” Pacing is big, and I don’t mean just the back and forth of a cartoon character. Anxiety causes all kinds of nervous physical activity. It can mean bouncing around your house, putting one thing away, coming back to put something else away, then getting the first thing back out because you needed it after all. Anxiety can mean organizing something like a stack of books and obsessing over the order you plan to read them while lacking the mental capacity to actually read even one. I see this undirected physical activity as equivalent to what’s happening in the anxious mind: every individual action might be sensible, but the whole collection of actions leads nowhere.
The emotional symptoms are the bigger challenge for me. You may have moments that feel like too much coffee — especially in the early days of this pandemic reaching your city. This is the phase where it’s vital for communities to close restaurants and bars, before the spread, because we feel too good and will make bad decisions as a consequence. As the days tick by, you might yearn to go out and find perfectly-rational-seeming excuses for why it’s fine in your particular case. It’s tough on the spirit when we recognize that a good feeling is motivated by disorder, but we have to monitor our impulses. While we’re homebound, the burst of energy might inspire you to tackle some big projects, but don’t set your expectations in this mood. It will pass. Don’t feel committed to reading the complete works of Proust this week or finally starting that podcast. Take on manageable challenges. Otherwise the inevitable crash and burnout will make even the smallest task more difficult.
You may also have days where you can’t do anything, can’t even enjoy your favorite things. For the anxious, this is not the apathy of depression so much as an inability to concentrate or make choices. Don’t judge yourself on these days either. This too will pass. Order a pizza. Watch a dumb or cheerful TV show. You’re not a failure; your mind is just requesting time to recoup lost energy.
Learning to recognize the side-effects of anxiety is important for coming to terms with your thoughts being disordered, because you may not know otherwise.
It took a day when I couldn’t leave for the grocery store to realize I’d been suffering my whole life. (But I also have a history of slow self-realization.) Especially in this pandemic, there are plenty of justifications for our worst fears, and we’re right to worry about the road ahead. But we mustn’t let anxiety itself get in the way of what’s necessary. Luckily, some of the behaviors that reduce anxiety will work even if we’re in denial.
Learn What To Do
The major tactics I use day-to-day, in beautiful opposition to one another, are routine and disruption. I developed these habits to cope with my anxiety disorder, but they might help anyone in our unusual time.
The purpose of a routine is to break the day into manageable moments. Routines don’t have to be spelled out on a daily planner by the minute, but a timer can help. For example, if there’s work you want or need to complete, I do recommend you do it in chunks. Don’t let your thoughts pool in the same waters for too long. Don’t let hours slip by without caring for yourself. Having a routine that divides the day builds little successes into every hour. You might not know how to respond to that work email after staring at your screen three hours, but once the dishes from lunch are done, you’ll have the capacity to try again.
Make time in your day to meditate, to do yoga, or to create silence. Spend time away from your phone, TV, laptop, or books. If you’re able to go on walks safely, exercise, or do other physical activities, be sure to leave the earbuds out at least part of the time. Give your thoughts a chance to slow their pace and reorganize. Drink a whole glass of water. Set a timer for five minutes and sit. Anything that gives yourself space. I find most “relaxing” music to be irritating personally (seems it’s a musician thing), but if it helps you more than silence, then go for it. The important part is to make time that’s free from anything which demands attention.
Routines are especially important for monitoring unhelpful behaviors like surfing social media, texting, or reading the news. Spending our time reacting feeds anxiety. If we’re reading about the pandemic or politics, we may give ourselves a false sense of purpose and progress that will deflate like a sugar high the moment we close that app.
I find it’s important for my routine to create rituals to mark the times of day. As a teacher, I learned that allowing my month and a half of summer to grow into a shapeless blur was far from relaxing — and in fact gave me extreme anxiety when the work meetings began again. My most important daily routine is washing the dishes before bed, because not only does it make my morning a better experience but it primes my mind to be ready to sleep soon. On days when I’m working from home, I break up the morning by cleaning a whole room. Other possible routinized variation might mean taking time to prep and cook a full meal, physical activity, catching up on a specific chore, chatting with a friend, an afternoon snack, regular water breaks, or even rewarding yourself with entertainment. The point is to interrupt our behavior before our thoughts turn negative and spiral. Over time, daily routines create healthier mental patterns.
Disruption works only when you can identify repetitive negative thoughts. A common experience is lying awake at night. If anxiety strikes you in bed, get out of bed. I really can’t stress that enough: it’s important not to normalize lying there awake and stressed. Otherwise bedtime will become a source of anxiety. Do something for 10–20 minutes then try again. When I say do something here, I mean meditate. Stretch. Drink a glass of water. Do a simple chore. Play a peaceful, low-stakes game away from bed. Talk to yourself in the mirror. (Seriously. Feeling like a goof is part of the healing process.) Don’t count on doing anything too involved. The goal is to relax and, well, lengthen our thought cycles the same way stretching works on muscles.
Disruptions like cruising online retailers or social media can feed a spiral. These activities have no natural end - that Twitter feed keeps going and going — and so they have a potential to constrict our thoughts in narrower lanes. It’s important to choose a distraction that will leave you feeling calmer than when you began it.
Learn Yourself
Anxiety is a natural reaction to a bad situation. For those of us suffering from an anxiety disorder, our problem is that our brains react this way constantly to literally nothing. For the current global situation, the problem is none of us can end it, so the effects ongoing anxiety might be felt by anyone.
So we have to learn to be mindful of our reactions. Remind yourself that this feeling is not forever. This feeling will pass. This nightmare we’re living will pass too. You don’t have to be strong. Don’t expect your stress to magically fade. But we will get through this.
If you find yourself spiraling out of control and into a serious anxiety attack or panic attack, call for help. The later involves more serious physical symptoms (difficulty breathing, heart racing, nausea, dizziness), and the former can leave you feeling totally unlike yourself in a way I have trouble explaining. If you’re experiencing either of these for the first time, please don’t insist on handling it yourself. Whether it’s a friend or family member to talk you down or a suicide hotline, there’s help available.
I hope these words were helpful. Take care of yourself. :)
P.S. Drink water.
Photo by niklas_hamann on Unsplash
