4 Anxiety Tricks You’ll Wish You Learned Sooner

If you’re struggling with anxiety, you probably know how frustrating most advice about anxiety is…

Just breathe deeply
Be mindful of the present moment
Take a Xanax (or maybe some Valerian root if you’re a little more on the crunchy side)

Advice like this is frustrating because while they often seem to work at first, the anxiety never really goes away for good—and sometimes comes back even stronger!

The underlying problem is how you’re thinking about anxiety itself.

Most anxiety advice assumes anxiety is something bad that you need to regulate or cope with or generally get rid of. But the more you treat anxiety like an enemy, the more like an enemy it will feel. And the more it will return to haunt you.

Today I’m going to share four of my favorite anxiety tips that—even though they’re small and easy to implement—will completely change the way you think about anxiety and how you handle it.

1. Reframe anxiety as adrenaline.

When we feel anxious, it’s easy to think about our anxiety as a threat—something bad and dangerous—because it feels really bad.

But just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad.

And in the case of anxiety, even though it’s scary and uncomfortable, it’s actually a good thing. Here’s why:

Underneath the hood, what we experience as anxiety is just our sympathetic nervous system revving up.
The sympathetic nervous system (also known as the fight or flight response) is just your body’s threat detection system. When it perceives something that might be dangerous, it releases a little bit of adrenaline which then sets off a bunch of other body changes like increased respiratory rate and heart rate and muscle tension which are designed to help you fight or flee an enemy.
We breathe faster to bring in more oxygen, our heart beats faster to distribute that oxygen to the muscles in our extremities (muscles use oxygen as fuel), and our muscles tense up so they’re ready for action.
Even some of the stranger symptoms of anxiety make sense from this perspective: your fingers and toes can get tingly because blood is rushing to your extremities; and you feel knots or butterflies in your stomach and dizziness in your head, because your brain is prioritizing oxygen away from your head and torso and toward your extremities.

I spell all this out because it’s important to realize that all the discomfort we experience as part of anxiety isn’t a sign that something’s wrong; it’s actually a sign that something’s right—and your body is reacting exactly as it should.

Well, almost….

The only trouble is that sometimes our mind gets confused about what’s actually a threat or danger and what just looks like one. Anxiety is by dentition unhelpful fear; it’s when your brain mistakenly assumes something is dangerous when really it’s not…

Your coworker’s critical expression on their face
The memory of that traumatic event from childhood
Even your own anxiety!

All of these things feel dangerous even though they can’t actually hurt you.

But if you react to feeling anxious by trying to stop feeling anxious, your brain thinks that anxiety itself is dangerous, which is what generates anxiety about anxiety, which is at the root of all chronic anxiety.

If you really want to reduce your anxiety, you need to stop treating it like the enemy and trying to avoid or fix it; and instead, just let it be.

Easier said than done of course, and in the next few tips I’m going to share some practical ways to do just that. But the first step is to practice reframing anxiety as adrenaline and reminding yourself that even though it feels bad, anxiety itself isn’t bad or dangerous.

So the next time you feel anxious, instead of telling yourself, Oh my god, I’m so anxious! try to reframe that story away from anxiety and toward adrenaline: Okay, my brain’s releasing a little adrenaline because it’s a little confused and thinks I’m in danger. It’s just trying to help.

Ultimately, anxiety is an escalation problem: the more you try to get rid of it, the more intense it will become. But you can de-escalate and lower your anxiety for good by reminding yourself that under the hood, it’s just adrenaline, which is your body’s way of trying to help you and keep you safe.

2. Allow the worry, control the worrying.

When we feel anxious, it’s useful to make the distinction between initial anxiety and secondary anxiety

Initial anxiety is the first bit of anxiety or nervousness you feel in a situation. It’s usually relatively small and sudden.
Secondary anxiety is all the anxiety you start to feel as a result of being anxious about the initial anxiety—in other words, it’s anxiety about anxiety.

If you struggle with severe or chronic anxiety of any type—from social anxiety and panic attacks to sleep anxiety or performance anxiety—the key thing to notice is that most of your anxiety is secondary anxiety. It’s the result of being anxious about being anxious.

Of course, there’s no direct way to control or reduce your anxiety: there’s no anxiety knob you can adjust or relaxation button you can press to directly change your anxiety levels.

But you can indirectly affect your anxiety. And the most powerful way to do so is through the stories you tell yourself, especially the stories you tell yourself about your anxiety.

That first bit of initial anxiety came because something triggered you and you told yourself story about it:

A memory of being criticized popped into your mind, and you worried that your boss was going to similarly criticize the idea you’re about to share.
Or you notice your heart beating faster and worried that you were going to have a heart attack.

The initial worry about the trigger is what causes the initial anxiety. And for the most part, that initial worry isn’t something you can control—it just pops into mind, like a mental reflex. All of which means there’s not much you can do about those initial triggers, worries, and the initial anxieties they produce.

However, you can get much better at not escalating the situation into larger levels of anxiety. And besides reframing anxiety as adrenaline like we talked about in the first trick, another great way is to stop worrying about your initial worry or anxiety.

Remember that you can’t control whether or not a worry pops into your mind, but you can always control whether you continue worrying. One is a reflex, the other is a choice.

And when you make the choice to continue worrying about an initial worry that pops into mind, your anxiety is almost guaranteed to snowball into a much bigger, more painful, and longer-lasting bout of anxiety.

Of course, just realizing that you should do less worrying about triggering situations is one thing. But on its own, that insight isn’t going to help you very much. Because the act of noticing an initial worry and then refraining from worrying more—that’s a skill. And like any skill, you need to practice if you want to get good at it.

Insight is necessary but not sufficient for change.

All the good ideas in the world won’t help you at all without the corresponding skills to behave differently.

So, how do you build the skill of controlling or letting go of your habit if worrying?

There’s a highly-effective but counterintuitive exercise I love called Scheduled Worry that involves making time every day to write your worries down on purpose and on paper. And while worrying more on purpose might seem like a strange way to get better at worrying less, the key is that by worrying on purpose, you’re teaching your brain that worry and anxiety aren’t dangerous. So that in the future, when those initial worries and anxiety show up, you’ll be less afraid of them and less likely to resort to more worrying in response.

Remember: the more you avoid your worries and anxiety, the more your brain will get anxious about anxiety; but if you do the opposite—deliberate approach your worries like in Scheduled Worry—your brain will learn the opposite lesson: that however uncomfortable, anxiety is safe. And when your brain really starts to believe that, chronic anxiety will be a thing of the past.

If you’re interested in learning more about Scheduled Worry, I’ve put together a free Scheduled Worry Quick Start Guide →

3. Nose breathing

Nose breathing probably sounds like a funny trick for anxiety, but hear me out…

Like we discussed earlier, underneath the hood, anxiety is just the emotional manifestation of adrenaline and your body being in fight or flight mode. And while it’s normal to kick into fight or flight for brief episodes, you should kick out of fight or flight mode and allow your parasympathetic nervous system—the so-called rest and digest system—to take over and be in control most of the time.

The trouble is many people stay stuck in low grade activation of the fight or flight system, and this often shows up as what’s called generalized or free-floating anxiety where you’ve got this small but constant low grade stress and anxiety humming in the background.

And one of the most under appreciated causes of this free-floating anxiety is bad breathing habits.

See, your breath is one of the primary inputs into your nervous system. When your breathing is low and slow, it signals rest and digest and activates your parasympathetic nervous system. But when your breathing is high and fast—shallow breathing primarily through your mouth—it signals fight or flight and activates your sympathetic nervous system. So, if you’ve gotten into the habit of breathing primarily through your mouth, you could be unintentionally keeping yourself stuck in fight or flight mode and all the free-floating anxiety that comes with it.

Luckily, you can change your breathing habits from high and fast to low and slow. And one of the simplest and most effective ways to do it is to practice breathing exclusively through your nose.

Of course, if you have any medical issues, definitely consult with your doctor before trying anything like this. But here’s a quick experiment you can try right now:

Pull out your phone.
Set a timer for 1 minute.
Then close your mouth and only breathe through your nose.
Don’t try to breathe deeply or slowly or anything out of the ordinary. Just breathe normally through your nose only.

If this feels unusual or even slightly uncomfortable, it could mean you’re in the habit of mouth breathing.

Now, if you want to continue experimenting with nose breathing, here’s a little protocol I recommend:

Pick one activity you do consistently most days. It might be commuting to or from work, going for a walk after dinner, watching TV before bed, or anything really.
For a week, practice exclusively nose breathing during that activity. So if you picked going for an after dinner walk, each time you go for your walk, try and do it only nose breathing.
After a week or two, add another activity.
Once you add two or three of these to your days consistently, you will start shifting your breathing patterns overall and training your body to do more nose breathing on its own.
Keep this up for a few weeks, and you’ll find that your overall level of stress and anxiety decreasing.

Now, I’m not claiming this will eliminate your anxiety altogether. But even if it helped you feel 10% less anxious—or helped eliminate that low-grade background anxiety—that’s actually a pretty meaningful effect in the grand scheme of things, right?

So, I know it sounds a little goofy, but if you struggle with chronic anxiety, it’s worth at least experimenting with a little nose breathing.

4. Flip your coping skills into exercises

When we feel anxious, nothing is more natural than seeking relief from that anxiety—and fast!

Unfortunately, the tools we reach for in moments like this—coping skills—often make our anxiety worse in the long run, even if they give us a little relief in the moment:

When you feel anxious and quickly pop a Xanax, you get some temporary relief, but you’ve taught your brain that anxiety is dangerous, which means you’ll be even more sensitive to anxiety in the future.
When you feel nervous and immediately do a breathing exercise to calm down, the brief feeling of calm comes with a high price: again, you’ve taught your brain that feeling anxious is bad, which makes you more vulnerable to it in the future.
Or when you get anxious ahead of a big decision and schedule an “emergency” session with your therapist, the comfort of reassurance feels nice in the moment, but comes at the long-term cost of training your brain to believe that you can’t handle being anxious—which makes you less confident and more anxious in the long-term.

This is why so many people I work with tell me the same story: I’ve tried everything but I’m still anxious!

From mindfulness to medication and everything in between, the very tools we think will help end up making anxiety worse in the end.

But the problem isn’t with the tools themselves: therapy can be very helpful for reducing long-term anxiety, as can breathwork, mindfulness meditation, even medication and drugs when used well.

But that’s the rub… You have to use these tools well if you want to see a real long-term change in your anxiety levels. And whether we use a tool well or poorly comes down two one critical distinction: Coping vs Exercise

Coping is when you use a tool like deep breathing or therapy to try and avoid or eliminate your anxiety. The core motivation is to avoid the feeling of anxiety. Unfortunately, this leads to worse anxiety long-term because it teaches your brain to fear anxiety itself leading to anxiety about anxiety, which—as we discussed earlier—is at the root of all forms of chronic anxiety.

An exercise is when you use a tool like deep breathing or therapy to build strength and resilience that allows you to navigate anxiety in a healthy and productive way in the future. If you focus on building better breathing habits with a daily breathwork exercise, for example, over time this will down-regulate your nervous system and help you feel less anxious. Similarly, if you have a daily mindfulness practice aimed at strengthening your attentional control, you’ll be better able to resist anxiety-producing worrying in the future.

If you really want to be less anxious long term, take your favorite tool and commit to using it as an exercise, not a coping skill.

For example, suppose you choose mindfulness:

When you feel a surge of anxiety, don’t use mindfulness as a way to cope with the anxiety and try to feel better (The AVA Method is a better in-the-moment technique for managing anxiety).
Instead, schedule a daily mindfulness practice each morning so that you’re building and strengthening the mental muscle of attentional control.
That will then allow you to avoid excess worrying and catastrophizing in moments of anxiety and lower your long-term anxiety for good.