3 Mental Exercises That Help You Cope With Anxiety

Anxiety is an opportunity thief, and you don't have to have an anxiety disorder to have a crisis. Suddenly, because of some trigger that awakens your nervousness and worry, you end up feeling afraid, your heart is racing, that feeling of cold in your stomach is here to stay and, to make matters worse, your mind never seems to slow down.

There are some mental exercises you can do to relieve all this tension. These are phrases that can be repeated to yourself at any time, as if it were a mantra, and over time you will realize that they are absolutely true and make perfect sense. Check out:

1 - “I do not control the time”

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You can interfere with the timing of things, speed up one process here, another there, but time itself is not under your control. What does that mean? That sometimes things will go wrong and it's not your fault.

Imagine that you are scheduling an event in advance. To make everything work, you hire a lot of professionals, think of the right place, compare prices, and so on. Everything goes as planned, but at time H it is possible for a car to drop a post on the street of your event and that the power will be interrupted. What a bad luck, right? Yeah, very unlucky, but the point is, it's not your fault. You don't have control of everything and you probably wouldn't be happy if you had.

Recognizing that there are things that cannot be controlled by us is an exercise that helps us cope with anxiety a lot.

2 - “I'm making progress”

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We are all too harsh about our own progress, and this can eventually cause anxiety to come in and find its doors open to enter. Before you think about what is going wrong or your biggest difficulties, how about trying an exercise that can make you feel good?

The idea here is to create a diary, but it can even be in your mobile notepad, with all the cool things you did last week or last day. It goes from a healthy meal to a cleaning in your room or the accomplishment of an outstanding task. Each of these activities matters to you, but it's easier not to value these small achievements than to celebrate them, unfortunately. Write down the cool things you did. You are progressing.

3 - “I will change my perspective”

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This change is one of the most important for your mental calm, you know? The idea is that in the face of a problem or in the middle of a bad day, you ask yourself three small questions:

  • What matters most?
  • Why does it matter?
  • How much is enough?

When you ask yourself this, you end up focusing on the things that really matter, which is a way to calm your anxiety.

These three exercises are simple and really effective. It costs you nothing to try to put them into practice.

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