How to manage your anxiety.

Anxiety is a fight-or-flight response to danger. It is a defense mechanism that is functioned to protect us. Only when it bleeds into your everyday life and starts affecting your life, career, and relationships does it turn into a very real and serious problem that has to be dealt with.

We have all been anxious at some point in our life. Some people struggle a lot more with anxiety, as they can have an anxiety disorder. other people can manage it with ease and are not bothered by it.

I personally struggle with social anxiety disorder, and it is making my life a living hell. It closed so many doors on my face and made me regret not taking them. Most of all, it is really difficult for me to meet new people and be friends with them. That was my life up until I took part in managing a start-up company, which has helped me substantially in my fight against anxiety.

Here are 10 tips that I learned to manage my anxiety:

1- Risk taking chances when they present themselves

This goes back to the high risk, high reward idea, and that idea is correct. There must have been many moments throughout your life where you were presented with a risky opportunity and then turned it down, even though you know that there might lay great success in it.

If you don’t try and fail, you will not grow. Once you succeed you will have a much deeper appreciation for success and all the hardship that you went through.

2- You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable

This is one of the most important pieces of advice that I can give you after being uncomfortable for way too long in my life. Meeting strangers and becoming friends, and speaking in front of a large group of people, which was literally a nightmare for me, are all things that made me extremely uncomfortable and want to run away, but I persevered because I knew it was better for me in the future.

I also knew that what I was feeling and thinking at that moment was not real, I didn’t want to run away or hide, as this was just the anxiety speaking, turning a normal and calm situation into a do or die situation, triggering my fight-or-flight response over something banal.

3- Time management is your best friend

Time management is imperative to everything you do in your life. How you manage your day is how you manage your life. If you spent an extra hour sleeping, well, that is one hour off something else that could be more beneficial. You need to find the perfect coalition between work and rest.

And remember, time flows only in one direction and you have a limited amount of it, so make the most of your given time and don’t waste too much of it.

4- Find the courage to speak up first

I see this a lot on Reddit and other social media platforms, “Introverts are like NPC’s (non-player characters), you have to initiate the conversation to talk to them”. First, introverts are not socially anxious people, but socially anxious are introverts.

Second, that is unfortunately somewhat true. Introverts like to keep things to themselves, and we don’t want to intervene in other people’s business. We are basically a fly on a wall, a side character in a movie. We just like to observe and go on with our lives.

That’s perfectly fine, but if you want to be noticed and appreciated as an individual and you’re an introvert, you should go out and just try your best to do some small talk with people, ask someone what the time is, it does not really matter, just go out and interact, because that is going to help you get over the fear of other people and give you a lot of needed confident.

5- Go to the gym

I have to admit; that I was apprehensive at first when told about going to the gym. I thought to myself “Is it really that good for you?”, and the answer is absolute yes. Going to the gym will change your life not only physically, but even more mentally.

It will teach you discipline, and humbleness, and will teach you about time management, as well as give you a daily routine to follow and adhere to.

It will also give you a huge confidence boost and will make you reach higher lifting goals, because if you don’t believe that you can do that 100KG bench press, then you will never do it.

Though admittedly it is excruciating at first, your body will be in constant pain for the first two weeks, and will gradually get used to the physical stress induced by lifting those heavyweights.

In my case, it wasn’t the physical toll that made me apprehensive about going to the gym at first, yet again, it was the social aspect of it all. For a socially inept person like me, going to a completely new environment filled with strangers watching me work out was an enormous challenge for me to endure, but I came out the other side stronger, both physically and mentally.

6- Stop ruminating

Generally speaking, my anxiety triggered and was strongest when I was fully aware of the situation and the thought of every possible bad outcome would come rushing through my mind. I would lose focus on the current moment and would seem distant and inattentive.

If you could stop overthinking, put all your attention on the current moment and live in it, your anxiety will decrease. The best way to do that is to focus on other people and not on yourself. This way you take the pressure off of yourself and place it on others. Focus on someone’s hair, clothing brand, or shoes, and the anxiety will subside.

There have been a few times during a project when I had to speak in front of a camera for promotional videos. I had never been more nervous than the first time I had to do it because all I had to say was a few lines, and I kept messing them up and delayed the shoot. The way I got over it is by just powering through it and focusing on nothing else at the moment other than saying my lines.

7- Open up

I used to close myself off and sequester myself from everyone, sometimes for days at a time with zero interactions with my friends, not even talking to them on social media, just a complete blackout.

My involvement in projects has increased my contacts list, opened the door to many relationships I never thought I would have, and forced me to socialize. I always felt like I was bearing a heavyweight on my shoulders because I was scared of how they would react. After all, mental illness is a taboo subject in our society, and people will look down on you if they hear you have some sort of mental problem.

This is why I kept to myself, but as the years went by I grew a need and a desire to be appreciated and validated, because being alone as calming and quiet as it is at first, eventually you will feel the need to reach out and communicate with friends because the primal need to be loved and fit in is sometimes too strong.

Talking to my best friend, whom I’ve known since kindergarten, about my mental and emotional problems, has helped immensely because he now lifts that heavy weight on my shoulders with me, and I no longer have to carry it alone.

8- Be kind to yourself

You are your own best friend. Don’t be too hard on yourself if things don’t go your way. Imagine if you talked to your friends the same way you talk to yourself when you were mad, then you would not have any friends.

9- Be present

Anxiety lives in the future. It can’t hurt you in the present. It’s the fear something will happen. Try your best to live in the present moment.

10- play the reverse UNO card

Anxiety kicks in by thinking to yourself that something bad will happen. It makes you believe that the outcome of a certain situation is going to be bad or embarrassing. It’s that negative perception of being embarrassed that makes you avoidant of situations that make you anxious.

If you can turn that negative perception into a positive one, and start asking yourself “what if it all turns out great?”. Your anxiety will begin to go away, and it will have much less of an impact on your life.