Daily Times

Anxiety isn’t something you can get rid of easily. In fact, it isn’t something you can get rid of at all. It comes and goes as it pleases and cannot be stopped. However, there are ways to distract your heart and mind when you’re having major or minor anxiety attack.

Humour

One of the best ways of distraction when dealing with anxiety is the use of humor. This can be humor of any kind; cracking lame jokes with your friends, watching a sitcom or just watching random funny videos online.

Acceptance

Don’t think of anxiety as something you need to eradicate. Think of it as something you need to make peace with, a feeling that is present in order to make you capable of working through simple and complicated tasks no matter what the circumstances.

As you begin to accept your anxiety as a part of you and not as a flaw in you, your brain will automatically start figuring out ways to not let it be an obstacle in accomplishing whatever you need to.

Try to avoid linking incidents of past trauma to present situations

We often get more worried about current circumstances when they start seeming familiar – that too not in the good way. When we start assuming that a specific situation will lead to the same unfortunate incidents as it did in the past, anxiety takes over our heart and mind.

The solution to this is to remind ourselves time and again, that every situation is unique to itself and doesn’t necessarily have to play out the way it did in the past.

Talk to children

Often, as we grow up, we create unnecessary problems in our head due to the unpleasant experiences we’ve been through. This sometimes causes us to view even the simplest of situations as complicated.

One way to look past all these inessential and made-up hurdles, is to talk to children about your problems and listen to their simple, effortless and senseless response, making even the most complicated of issues seem un-problematic and distracting your being from its anxiety.

Pay attention to breathing

Breathing is an effortless task that we subconsciously do all the time but sometimes it needs special attention. This happens when we become so wound up in certain tasks that even the most elementary tasks, such as breathing, start to get somewhat neglected.

Every now and then, take out time from your busy day and use this time to just breathe, in and out, deeply. This relaxes the conscious and subconscious mind, relieving anxiety and stress.

Published in Daily Times, July 29^th 2018.