4 Effective Tools to Train Yourself Out of Anxiety for Good
You’ve read countless articles on stress relief that tell you things like “breathe deeply” and “meditate.” While deep breathing and meditation have been proven to relieve anxiety, the moment you come out of meditation, you’re back in the real world and another bout of anxiety is just around the corner.
If you looked hard enough, you could find a million ways to relieve anxiety. However, those methods will only relieve anxiety in the moment. If you want to get rid of anxiety for good, you need the following tools.
1. Start a daily CBD routine
Anxiety is a response to various environmental and social factors including in your social and work life. However, after enough responses, your nervous system is trained to respond out of habit. Soon, any situation that even slightly resembles your trigger will cause anxiety.
If you’re going to eliminate stress and anxiety for good, you need to retrain your nervous system. To retrain your nervous system, you need to find ways to stay calm in the face of your triggers. This can be accomplished with cannabidiol (CBD).
CBD is a non-psychoactive hemp extract with a variety of therapeutic properties. People have been using CBD products for decades and now that industrial hemp is legal, CBD derived from hemp is also legal (as long as it contains less than 0.3% THC).
In a perfect world, you could just wake up and decide not to be affected by your stress triggers. Unfortunately, mental strength is only half the battle. Triggers can cause stress in the physical body even when the mind is calm. The only way to bypass these automatic triggers is to calm the nervous system to prevent the stress response in the first place.
By exposing yourself to stress triggers while your nervous system is relaxed and unable to react full force, you’ll eventually train your body out of reacting and eventually those triggers will dissolve.
Starting a daily regimen including CBD Gummies can help you get rid of anxiety for good by keeping your nervous system in a relaxed state for extended periods of time. With CBD relaxing your nervous system, when you’re confronted by triggers, you’ll become less reactive over time.
2. Get regular float tank therapy sessions
Float tank therapy is the world’s best kept secret for relieving stress and anxiety. A float tank, also called a ‘sensory deprivation’ tank, is essentially a small, 1-person hot tub set at body temperature, enclosed either by 4 walls and a door or as a stand-alone, futuristic-looking pod. When the door is closed, it’s dark and silent. You’re basically in a state of sensory deprivation. Although, it’s not complete sensory deprivation, it comes pretty close.
A float tank isn’t just a tub full of water in a dark room—it’s shallow water that contains thousands of pounds of dissolved epsom salt. The dissolved salt makes you float on top of the water and relieves all the pressure from your nervous system and your spine.
Many people use the float tank for pain relief because when you’re floating, your entire body can relax. It’s even better than resting on a comfortable mattress because with a mattress, your body is still working hard to support your weight.
When you’re weightless, your nervous system gets a true rest. When your nervous system is allowed to rest, stress and anxiety responses fade.
If you haven’t floated, find a local wellness center that offers a free or discounted first session to test it out. If stress is a normal way of life, you’ll feel refreshed at the end of your session in a way that you haven’t felt before. Floating regularly has cumulative effects, too.
3. Actively work to improve your sleep
Quality, deep sleep is another way to influence your nervous system and train your body out of stress responses at the root. Studies have shown that getting enough deep, quality, REM sleep is critical for maintaining a healthy mind and body. It’s not about the quantity of sleep, it’s about the quality. It doesn’t matter if you’re sleeping 12 hours per night; if you’re not getting quality sleep, you’re sleep deprived.
Sleep deprivation causes stress and anxiety that only increases over time. Lack of sleep is another way the body develops a habit of stress responses. When you’re sleep deprived, you’re going to get stressed out quickly and easily over small things. Improving the quality of your sleep is an easy shortcut to squashing anxiety and stress.
How to improve the quality of your sleep
There are many ways to improve your sleep. One already mentioned above is by taking CBD. Since CBD is non-psychoactive, you can take CBD during the day or at night. People who take CBD before bed report getting better sleep than they’ve had in a long while.
Other ways to improve your sleep quality include:
- Sleeping alone. It’s hard not to share a bed with your partner or your animals, but if you’re having trouble sleeping, this is the first place to start. Sleep deprivation is commonly caused by multiple interruptions throughout the night. If your partner or your pet is constantly waking you up—even if you go back to sleep—you’re probably sleep deprived.
- Putting your devices away at least three hours before bedtime. There are debates over whether its blue light or yellow light that causes sleep disturbances. There are studies that support both types of light having a negative impact on sleep and blue light has been clinically shown to suppress melatonin production.
Either way, staring at a screen with artificial light until you fall asleep is going to negatively impact your sleep. Spend the last three hours of your night doing something other than responding to social media notifications and browsing the internet. You’ll get better sleep if you make this a hab - Don’t sleep with your phone and turn it off. If your phone is within your reach while you’re sleeping, it should be turned off. Giving yourself the opportunity to grab your phone all night long when you hear a notification is just asking for sleep deprivation. Turn your phone off at night. Until sleeping through the night becomes a habit, don’t keep your phone within reach.
- Invest your money in creating a comfortable sleeping area. Do you hate your mattress because it’s lumpy, too soft, too hard, or uneven? Save up for a new mattress or put it on a credit card. Test all the pillows you can find at mattress stores to find the one that’s right for your head and neck. Get the sheets and blankets that make you feel good.
If your mattress isn’t comfortable, the rest of your efforts will be thwarted. - Wear earplugs and/or a blindfold. You’d be surprised at how much easier it is to sleep while blindfolded. In addition to a sleep mask, get some ear plugs to block out any sound that may disturb you, like barking dogs or roommates rummaging around in the kitchen.
4. Train yourself not to respond immediately to internet criticism
Anyone who has been on the internet for more than a day knows there are people out there ready to criticize everyone. On social media, this happens all day long and if you’re the one being criticized, it’s hard not to get stressed out.
If internet communications stress you out, you’re not alone. Social media is a major source of stress for millions of people worldwide. If walking away from social media isn’t an option, the next best thing you can do is train yourself out of responding immediately to criticism.
When you’re presented with a critical comment, whether it’s a person who simply disagrees with you or it’s a genuine troll, pause for a moment and re-read their comment to find out what they’re trying to say. Your mind may have misinterpreted their comment. On the other hand, they might be trying to instigate a fight.
Regardless, these types of comments can skyrocket your stress immediately. However, it’s not the comment that causes your stress to explode—it’s your internal reaction to the comment that causes you to become stressed. If you want to eliminate that stress response, you need to stop responding on autopilot and take the time to construct a thoughtful, factual reply.
If you can train yourself out of typing emotionally-charged responses to provocation on the internet, your stress levels will drop drastically.
Don’t give up!
Anxiety is real and has devastating effects that can last a lifetime. You don’t have to let anxiety control your life, but be prepared for some challenges in your pursuit to overcome them.
No matter how tough things get, don’t give up trying to resolve your anxiety at the root. It took years to develop a high level of anxiety, and it will take a while to rebuild different patterns in your nervous system.
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