How to stop being nervous: Depositphotos Does constant anxiety prevent you from enjoying life? Sometimes people do not distinguish between imaginary and real problems. It’s normal to worry about the health of your family before an important interview or exam, but constantly being nervous about little things is not. Psychologists Mikhail Labkovsky and Alexey Chudochkin will tell you how to cope with anxiety.
Eliminate the causes of problems
It is possible and necessary to cope with anxiety in situations where it manifests itself excessively. The first and most important step in eliminating anxiety is to analyze its causes.
Help your consciousness divide reasons for anxiety into real and far-fetched. For this:
- Take a pen and a piece of paper.
- Make a list of what's bothering you.
- Next to each problem, write down the reasons and analyze them.
Real stimuli have specific causes. Once you know them, start solving them immediately. You can get rid of imaginary problems by reminding yourself that there is no reason for them. This is what psychologist Mikhail Labkovsky advises to do. He claims that in this way you will make your life easier and preserve your nervous system.
Take care of your nervous system health
The causes of stress are both psychological and physiological factors. Proper nutrition will significantly improve the health of the nervous system, making it stable and resistant to stress. The benefits of a balanced diet are not an invention of nutritionists. Proper nutrition can make almost anyone healthier. Try to eat more varied foods, avoiding fast food, fatty and fried foods.
Make sure that your diet constantly includes foods such as:
- tomatoes;
- sea fish and other seafood;
- citrus fruits and bananas;
- berries (especially black ones);
- dairy products and beef;
- nuts and legumes.
Among the vitamins, the most important for the brain and nervous system are B vitamins. But it is better to take balanced vitamin-mineral complexes. If you have increased nervousness, you can drink calming teas with mint, lemon balm and special herbal mixtures in the evenings.
Don't pay attention to what isn't there
We often worry about problems that are unlikely to appear. People set themselves up for negativity. Think about the likelihood of this or that problem? If the chances are great, but you can’t influence the outcome, then you shouldn’t worry.
If you regularly return home to check whether the iron is turned off and the tap is closed, take photographs of them before leaving, as Mikhail Labkovsky advises.
Do you think you're about to lose your job? Ask your manager about this. A good employee will not be fired, and if so, then, having learned in advance about the upcoming problem, you can quickly find a new place.
Writer Dale Carnegie in his book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” recommends living today and doing today’s things.
Repeat the mantra “Calm down, Hippolytus, calm down”
When nervous about an upcoming big event, Carol Howe, a psychotherapist in Orlando, advises patients to inhale deeply through the nose and exhale through the mouth at least three times.
Then slowly say to yourself, “I am safe and I am loved.” For some, a simple phrase: “Everything will be fine” is more suitable. It would be naive to recommend that a person experiencing severe anxiety repeat to himself: “I am calm, I am completely calm.”
But if you imagine that these words are spoken by your favorite character from children's cartoons?
Say to yourself in Carlson’s voice: “Calm, only calm!” Or say, stroking your chest: “Calm down, Hippolyte, calm down.”
Learn humility and take a broader view of the situation
Some events cannot be changed or influenced. For example, a careless driver splashed water from a puddle or stepped on white sneakers on the bus. Even imagining this makes you nervous. It’s unpleasant, but the fact is that this cannot be changed, so there’s no need to worry.
Almost any problem seems insignificant when you look at it on the scale of life. Is a squabble in line or a driver cutting off on a turn important? Will you worry about this in a month, a year or five years? If not, then stop thinking about small things and concentrate on the main thing.
This attitude towards problems will relieve unnecessary anxiety. Psychotherapist Andrei Kurpatov advises observing your reactions and abandoning negative stereotypes in behavior.
Why are people worried?
Excitement is an emotion for which the limbic system of the brain is responsible. This part of the brain is virtually uncontrollable, but it plays a major role in human development and survival.
The limbic system works quite complexly. In a dangerous situation, the amygdala stimulates the hypothalamus region of the brain. It, in turn, signals the adrenal glands, which turn on the mechanism for producing stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol). This triggers the fight-or-flight survival response. It was she who saved our ancestors in life-threatening situations. It turns out that we are the descendants of people who were afraid, worried and anxious, and these emotions are embedded in us at the level of evolution.
Excitement is not anxiety, but a mild form of it. The body of a worried person is alert, and seems to be thinking: “Is there a danger or will it be okay?” If the defensive reaction of “resistance and/or flight” is triggered, then the person begins to have an anxiety disorder.
External factors that cause anxiety are events and circumstances. The internal causes of this condition can be the individual characteristics of a particular person: from the size of the brain to the characteristics of child-parent relationships, upbringing and development.
Relieve stress through physical activity
Physical activity eliminates anxiety: Freepick
To get rid of constant anxiety, you need to work hard on yourself. A visit to a psychologist and meditative techniques eliminate far-fetched fears. In addition, a person can calm down on his own.
When you are stressed, it is difficult to listen to the voice of reason. Therefore, first reduce nervous tension, and then reconsider your attitude towards irritants. Physical activity is suitable for this. Jogging or fitness, swimming or dancing - all this is both distracting and effectively eliminates anxiety. The fatigue that comes afterwards prevents you from returning to a state of anxiety.
Count
This applies to those cases when you need to undergo an unpleasant procedure and you feel that your heart rate and breathing rates are going through the roof.
Julia Colanello suggests this technique: do not close your eyes (this will make you immerse yourself in the sensations even more), but literally grab your gaze at some object from the environment and hold on to it.
Or give yourself the task of counting what comes into your field of vision: tiles on the wall, flowers on the window. Or ask yourself the question: who does the doctor look like, who does his voice resemble?
Switch your attention
How to quickly calm down when you're angry or nervous? You need to distract yourself by all means. Many people blame their problems on alcohol. This is only a temporary solution that can ultimately send a person to the bottom. Get down to business: clean the apartment, beat out the carpets, do the laundry. The more boring and difficult the work, the better.
A busy person has no time to think about boors, an unfair boss or gossips giggling behind their back. By shifting your attention, reduce or get rid of the feeling of anxiety. Practicing psychologist Alexey Chudochkin recommends switching to communication with other people to relieve anxiety.
Passive lifestyle
They did not expect? It turns out that lack of physical activity is directly related to anxiety!
The human body needs to get rid of accumulated tension and negativity. If this does not happen, unspent energy is directed “in the wrong direction” and fuels feelings of anxiety.
This requires breaks from work, warm-ups, and daily exercise is advisable. The body should be properly tired and the brain should be relaxed. The rest of the time, switching to some useful active activity will help you get rid of restless thoughts from your head.
Psychologists have established an interesting fact. For a person to get used to something, it takes no more than 2 months, or, more precisely, 66 days. A person will need such a period in order to form and bring to automaticity any action. For example, if you want to switch to proper nutrition, then you may need a little less - about 55 days. But you will have to get used to the sport longer - up to 75 days.
Breathe and meditate
Sometimes there is no time to work on psychological attitudes. Moreover, you can’t just go away to rest when you’re in a stressful situation. Breathing exercises help you calm down here and now.
Saturation of blood with oxygen relieves nervous tension:
- Inhale for four seconds, then hold your breath for two seconds and exhale smoothly.
- Repeat this exercise five times and your anxiety will disappear.
Try meditation as a daily practice. It teaches awareness and the ability to cut off all unnecessary thoughts, including disturbing thoughts.
Meditation as a way to combat anxiety: Freepick
Get rid of factors that cause nervousness
This method involves getting rid of habits that make a person nervous. Without bringing any benefit, they poison our lives, taking away a lot of strength and energy. Such habits include:
Smoking
Many people believe that smoking helps cope with stress. This is not true, since nicotine addiction makes a person more nervous, and a cigarette helps to cope with this condition for a short time.
Alcohol consumption
Like cigarettes, alcohol has a temporary effect. Even if it helps you stop worrying for one evening, the subsequent recovery of the nervous system will take at least a week.
Taking sedatives
Such medications can only be taken in short courses as prescribed by a doctor. If you take it constantly, the cumulative effect will be the same as from nicotine and alcohol.
Chronic lack of sleep
In an effort to improve themselves, many begin to skimp on sleep. At first it seems to them that they are very energetic and get enough sleep in 5-6 hours. But the effect of “lack of sleep” accumulates slowly and has a detrimental effect on health, so you need to sleep at least 7 hours every day.
Well, friends, we’ve sorted out all the basic steps that will help you stop worrying. Remember that they will only be useful if you remember them and apply them in practice. To consolidate the result, let's look at the harm that constant worry can cause.
Remember to rest
The nervous system takes on both physical and psychological stress. Over time, it fails, and the first symptoms are apathy and anxiety.
Therefore, if you suddenly began to react too emotionally to failures, you became afraid of ordinary life situations surrounding people, your performance decreased, take a rest:
- Take a day off, turn off your phone, and forget about all your obligations for a day or two.
- Take a bath, spend time with friends. Try not to discuss work and politics.
- If you lead a sedentary lifestyle, kayaking, playing paintball, or go-karting will help reduce your nervous tension.
Good sleep and proper nutrition are very important, which help maintain a state of harmony and mental balance.
Life is 10% circumstances and 90% how people react to them. Awareness of this significantly improves the quality of life. If a person is insulted, he has a choice - to worry or not. Remember this when some little thing unsettles you.
Original article: https://www.nur.kz/family/self-realization/1598041-kak-perestat-nervnichat-po-melocham/
How to stop worrying and start solving problems. What I learned from my psychotherapy
Preface
I have always had headaches, but three years ago the situation became simply unbearable. I had headaches five to six days a week, that is, almost always. I began to wake up late and with great difficulty. No matter how much I slept, I felt like a rumpled mattress filled with hay, and my head was buzzing like a bell that had been struck with an iron rod.
At some point I went to a neurologist and asked for help. No physiological reasons were found for my problems (just as two years earlier they had not found any reasons for the tachycardia, because of which I even called an ambulance). They gave me tests and asked me to take them. After that, the doctor said that I had an anxiety disorder and prescribed pills.
I should note here that in general modern medicine has learned to identify various kinds of disorders biochemically, but this is time-consuming, expensive and difficult. Even in a good clinic, such a diagnosis will most likely be made based on tests and conversations with you. So in theory, if you want to get pills, you can probably fake any kind of depression - with minimal acting skills.
I don’t consider pills to be a panacea (more on this below), but I took the course then, and I felt much better. The migraines went away, the headaches returned to their usual frequency. I began to get up early and cheerful. I took up a new job, improved my personal life, and even got married the next year.
But since I did not deal with the root cause, but only stopped its external manifestations, gradually over a year or two the general feeling of anxiety began to return.
I reacted nervously to criticism in reality and on the Internet, to calls from loved ones, to messages from my boss at an inopportune hour, experienced peaks of rage and anger, and castigated myself for living life ineffectively and not fulfilling my dreams. Since I had also turned 30, this was accompanied by an early midlife crisis with a noticeable existential overlay (“how long do I have left before I die? How many films will I have time to watch? How many books will I read? And why am I now playing video games and surfing on Facebook until two o'clock in the morning instead of getting down to business? What is real business?").
About a year ago the situation was almost back to square one. I began to feel disgusting physiologically. And I started having “dementor attacks.” JK Rowling, who experienced a long depression, very accurately conveyed this feeling in Harry Potter. You are riding the subway or walking down the street, when suddenly all the colors fade and it seems as if all the joy has left the world. You want to hide, but there is nowhere to run, and you are shaking.
In general, when I burst into tears several times for no apparent reason in public places, I sought psychotherapeutic help (this was the third time in my life, and this time I did not break down, although there were urges in the process). After some time, I was prescribed antidepressants again (I stopped taking them about a month ago), and I began a long journey into the depths of myself to understand what the hell was going on.
This journey is far from over, and I frankly am not sure it can be completed at all. It's only been a year, but I feel noticeably better. I quit my job and started my own business, I'm reading and writing a lot again, I've learned to meditate, I've resumed regular exercise, I'm keeping a journal for the first time in my life, and - most importantly - I've learned to ward off dementors with varying degrees of success.
In the process of this work, I observed a lot of myself, my thoughts and feelings. Plus, over the past few years I’ve poured over a fair amount of books on related topics.
This essay is a kind of psychotherapeutic exercise for me. The sum of everything I have understood so far. If this amount is also useful to someone else, I will be only happy.
However, I must warn you.
Joseph Campbell in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” rightly compares the hero’s journey (a universal plot: from everyday life through obstacles to acquiring treasure/knowledge and back) with psychotherapy.
That is why Bilbo Baggins could not explain to his neighbors what he understood on the way to the Dragon. This is why most conclusions from psychotherapy sound as banal as possible. You've probably seen all these bestsellers in bookstores about how to start a new life on Monday. They are full of advice that, if you just lazily leaf through the book, looks like terrible nonsense like “become aware of your thoughts” or “live in the here and now.” In this sense, all my realizations are, of course, also banalities.
And yes, the last one. I will not retell to you my psychotherapy chronologically. This is a rather pointless activity, since for the first three months, for example, I persistently told in sessions that in general everything was fine with me.
I will just try to show the puzzle (or that fragment of it) that I managed to assemble during this time. Whether it will work out or not, I don’t know.
Chapter 1: Problem Solving
It is worth admitting right away: for the most part, we, that is, people, do not like problems, but we cannot live without them. We love the background level of challenge, like a computer game on low difficulty. When problems are solved either on their own or somehow very easily. When problems need to be solved in a long and tedious way, of course, no one likes this.
Is it possible to live without problems? It seems to me that no it is impossible. If you imagine that you can return an adult to a state code-named “mother’s womb” - warm, comfortable and fed (somewhat reminiscent of all-inclusive hotels in Turkey), then sooner or later the person will come up with problems for himself.
For example, it will become boring. Or you might want to think about the meaning of life or the nature of creativity.
Actually, this is what ancient Greek philosophers did, for example, under the shade of vines and olive trees, while slaves solved more prosaic problems for them.
So if you are planning to make a million dollars in order to reach a state where there will be no more problems, I have bad news for you, there will always be problems. It is impossible to imagine an adult with a working brain without problems - real or imagined.
If you think about it, it’s easy to see that all problems are divided into two types:
- Short
- Long
I consider “quick” problems to be those that can be solved within a few minutes or hours. This could be anything from “staying at work until the morning and writing the quarterly report” to “walking in and buying an iPhone.” Long ones - as the name implies, those that even with a titanic effort cannot be solved in a short period of time. For example, you cannot write a novel or lose weight in 15 kg per day. I tried, but it's impossible.
Short problems may or may not be solved.
If they are not addressed, they will accumulate somewhere in the closet of your head and buzz unpleasantly like flies on the veranda in the summer. There is some possibility, since we live in a big world full of entropy, that the problem will exhaust itself or will simply be solved (essentially waiting for a “miracle”) without us, but, I repeat, you should not rely on this.
And since every day we are faced with 5-10-15 problems that can usually be solved in a few minutes (maximum hour), postponing them leads to the fact that our anxiety continues to grow. Plus, they still need to be kept in mind, and if you don’t keep a diary or to-do lists, you can simply start to boil (it has been scientifically proven that a person can usually hold no more than 5-7 objects in RAM, this is called Miller’s law).
If, however, the problem has outplayed you and it is no longer possible to dodge it, there are still two options for the development of events.
1a. Give it to someone else
1b. Decide for yourself
Delegating tasks (to a subordinate, wife, husband, child, friend, stranger passerby) is what is taught in all courses for successful managers. But this is also something that any child can do. He cried, whined, became capricious, turned to threats, stamped his foot, and your problem was solved, or rather, it was solved for you, and you didn’t just wait for a miracle, you deliberately produced it.
The “take and do” option is also divided into two subtypes.
1b-1. Just take it and do it
1b-2. Dramatically take it and do it
In the latter case, we are talking about an action that the performer interprets as a feat (went to the store in the rain, stayed in the office until midnight, etc.) and which, in his opinion, others should interpret as a “sacrifice.”
Just doing it is an example of a healthy adult approach to problems, but I argue that, despite Nike advertising, it is very rare.
In most cases, if manipulation or coercion cannot be used to blame the problem on another person, the majority chooses either to wait for a miracle, or to decide for oneself, but to decide hysterically, sacrificially, as if Danko was tearing out his heart and illuminating the path for humanity with this Excel report sheet.
It is curious that all major religions in human history operate with the categories of miracle and sacrifice (and “Direct Line with Vladimir Putin” is based on this). Apparently, these are basic human reactions to difficulties that we all learn as children.
Solving long-term problems is a somewhat more complex matter, for which most of us are not prepared by school, family, army and church.
Starting from kindergarten and school, children are taught to be in a team and perform assigned tasks individually or in groups. People learn to accept rewards for following the rules in such communities and to accept punishments for breaking the rules.
This prepares you for adult paid work, which is not essentially a collective solution to a long problem. Say, if a person opens a chain of coffee shops or launches a travel magazine, he will indeed solve these long tasks collectively, recruiting the necessary managers and employees.
But every single barista or correspondent he takes will not fully participate in solving the investor’s problem. He will participate in the decision of earning his money, possibly developing a career, maintaining his reputation, gaining skills, etc.
The awareness that he is participating in a large task extended over time will only be among top managers (and even good ones), but most people who go to offices have not seen the beginning of this task, nor will they see the end. For them, this is the same endless staircase as school.
As an aside, let’s also note the obvious fact that most people in office environments are not inclined to even minimally solve the short tasks that fall to them; they try to get away from them, hush them up, or transfer them to other people. My experience shows that if 10–15 percent of people in a team actually work, this is already a very good indicator.
The most difficult type of problems are long problems that you will inevitably have to solve yourself. For example, train for a marathon or write a book. Yes, you can, of course, attract trainers and literary coaches, but you cannot delegate this kind of task to another person to have it done for you. He won’t physically move your hand with a handle or move your sneakers on the asphalt.
It is the independent solution of long tasks that requires the greatest responsibility and concentration of the human spirit. For people who have learned to do this, perhaps nothing is impossible. I'm just striving for this.
To be continued
Ilya Klishin on FB
What harm does worry bring?
Unnecessary experiences prevent a person from controlling his own behavior and negatively affect his health. Let us note the most important negative consequences of anxiety:
- Decreased intellectual abilities
. The brain is the center of the nervous system, and it is where stress bears the brunt. Constant nervousness impairs memory and the ability to concentrate on tasks at hand. - Difficulty with self-control
. A person who cannot restrain emotions creates a negative impression in professional activities and personal communication. - "Broken Focus"
. Nervousness weakens concentration. As a result, we focus on the little things and lose sight of the really important things. - Chronic fatigue
. Constant worry is more tiring than complex intellectual work. A person who constantly worries about little things loses the ability to work effectively. - Bad habits
. Nervous people are constantly looking for ways to distract themselves from unnecessary thoughts, resorting to the help of tobacco and alcohol. Sometimes it comes to more dangerous means. - Real diseases
. Constant stress can result in serious health problems. It has a particularly strong effect on all kinds of inflammatory processes in the body.
