Anxiety breaks us down. It shrinks us. It makes our life hell.
It causes us to lose sleep and to put up protective walls. It causes our stomachs to hurt and our bodies to ache.
It’s never about any one thing to get through either. If you’re prone to anxiety, then anxiety prones on no matter what’s happening.
I’m no stranger to anxiety, I used to get full blown panic attacks in my day.
I learned a critical thing back then: that while surrounding myself with support was essential, no matter how much of it I had, no one could live my best life for me. I had to figure out how to live it. This included not worrying about how to do it.
It’s easier said than done, I know. But living in anxiety is not easy either. And, nothing worthwhile comes easy, might I say cheap, like that.
I’m not cheap like that.
Changing your mind
The truth is, it is technically easy.
What makes it hard are those habits that get in the way. But it’s worth it to learn how to get them out of our way. This is a glorious part of our life’s journey. This is our character arc.
The best part of it is that while it’s (arguably) true that habits take time, changing your mind can be instantaneous. The moment you decide.
No matter how hard I try to get up early in the morning, I can’t. Unless I decide to. When I decide to wake up 5 minutes before my alarm, I do. It doesn’t take an average of 66 days to form this habit. Just my resolve.
Words matter because they land in our bodies, and our bodies listen to our words quite literally. Try and decide to land differently.
Our bodies - our actions - follow our mind. Which is why some habits take no time at all while others just won’t stick no matter how hard we try.
Do or do not. There is no try.
-Yoda
So, will you change your mind?
The way to change anything is to change your mind about it. Thinking the same thoughts and expecting different results is what they call magical thinking.
If you’re anxious, first change your mind on which road to take:
From Path 1: Keep powering through, or keep avoiding. These are two sides of the same pendulum.
When you keep powering through, everything becomes hyper-important, and you become super busy. Just remember: super busy doesn’t mean super important. Mostly, it means out of control, out of time. There exists a better life for you than this.
When you avoid things, you get paralyzed by fear, and the negative emotions sink deep into the tissues of your body, creating heart incoherence and inhibiting higher brain function.
Either way, this path hyper-sensitizes your nervous system and creates anxiety and exhaustion.
To Path 2: Slow down. Give most things time to work themselves out on their own because they tend to (work themselves out) when you don’t jump at everything with hyper-urgency. Then put your attention on what’s left for you to do.
The rest of the busyness will drop off (good riddance!), and you get your time back.
You pare your life down to your deepest values, and to the people and things that are most important to you.
Your nervous system repairs itself and you get your brain and energy back. How cool is that?
If you choose Path 2, keep reading. I want to share with you 7 ways to help your body release its addiction to speed and to sloooooooow down.
Slowing down does NOT mean to take a long time processing things or becoming unproductive and lazy. What it means is that:
You’re no longer chasing, reacting, or running away.
Your mind is no longer running all over the place, unable to focus, keeping you up at nights, wreaking havoc on your digestion, and stressing you out.
You get good at picking the right battles.
Time will give you the extra critical seconds that you need to save yourself from a lot of time wasted in the long run. Remember that it only takes those extra seconds to avoid an accident, or steer away from making a wrong decision, that can change the trajectory of your day, week, and sometimes your life.
Slowing down can offer you the clarity of hindsight before it becomes hindsight.
Major factors that aggravate anxiety:
The uncontrolled monkey mind
Too much screen time
Irregular routines
Diet
Transitions. Could be climate related (i.e. Summer to Fall) or life related (i.e. a big move)
On this note…
Here are 7 ways to slow down and rid yourself of anxiety
Meditate, not to calm, but to change your mind. Changing your mind can seem like it would cause even more anxiety, but there’s this thing called adding to subtract where “anxiety” is temporarily added by the thought of changing your mind to subtract it for good once you’ve changed it.
Meditation makes you more aware of your mischievous monkey mind. It redirects it and changes its persistent, negative self-talk to a calmer, more elevating one.
Your mindset is important because it informs what you see in the world and how you experience them.
Something inside you won’t let you change your mind about things. Meditation will help you change it by rewiring it.
Remember that your body follows your mind: when you feel stressed, your body tenses. When you’re relieved, your body relaxes. When you walk on a straight line taped to the floor, you do it with ease because there is no sense of danger. If you had to walk on a beam four times wider than that tape but now it’s 10 feet off the ground, your sense of danger would be heightened, and you’d feel afraid. Unless your mind is trained, this fear may cause you to get horrifyingly wobbly. The body follows the mind.
When perceived threats are continuously streaming in your thoughts, this chronic stress causes continuous fight-or-flight signaling from your body, blocking any true command you could have over yourself. This creates a special kind of distress where potential solutions feel scarier than the perceived threats. Anxiety.
Meditation increases command over your senses. It brings you back to rest-and-digest mode, your safe mode. It brings you back to infinite potentiality and gives you full access to your unique gifts and skillsets.Turn off your screens and live in the real world. It’s really grounding. At first, you may feel something you haven’t felt in a while: boredom. Embrace it. If you sit through the inner tantrums brought on by said boredom, you’ll start becoming more aware of yourself and getting back to a more elevated mind space.
It’s essential to put something in place not to default to scrolling out of nervous habit.
When you do go to your screen, use it to serve you at the highest levels.
- Use your writing app to journal and take notes if a paper notepad doesn’t work for you.
- Use your calendar to schedule what’s important. And ditch your to-do list; it’s a continuous source of anxiety.
- Call an Uber.
- Make dinner reservations.
- Stay in communication with your friends and family through texts and calls, not FB and IG.
- Read or listen to stories digitally if paper books don’t work for you.
And absolutely stay off social media and t.v. news, and turn off those notifications.Stick to a routine to transmute your energy. This is critical if you’re prone to anxiety. Routines give structure. Do you know that structure provides a deep sense of security for children? It does the same for us too. With structure, you get to reserve your energy for the activities where creativity really matters, instead of “what do I do now?”
Beware, however, that the more prone to anxiety you are, the more you’ll fight the routine. Use your calendar and follow it.
- Get up and go to bed at the same time.
- Eat at the same time.
- Meditate at the same time.
- Write at the same time.
- If you work at home, work at the same time.
ESPECIALLY stick to your non-negotiables when you find yourself in transitory moments in your life. 2024 was a big transitional year for me on many levels: I moved my parents, myself, and my business. The more I stuck with my non-negotiables, the more in command I felt. The more I dropped them, the more under the command of circumstances I felt.
Flexibility is important, yes, but don’t let it confuse you out of equanimity and into anxiety.Indulge in abhyanga. This has a luxurious soothing effect on your entire psyche. It boosts your immune system. It relieves stress. It’s a deep practice in self love. It takes a good 30 minutes to do, so make time for this exciting date with yourself, perhaps as a part of your bedtime ritual. You can also start your day with this if you get up early enough.
Abhyanga is a warm oil self-massage. It takes a few minutes to warm up the oil, about 5-7 minutes to apply it from head to toe, 15-20 minutes to let the oil sink into your skin, pull the toxins out, moisturize your skin, and soothe your nervous system, and another 3-10 minutes to shower or bathe.
Don’t underestimate the POWER of this deeply healing, nervous system soothing, luxury spa time. I do this with a beeswax or soy candle scented with essential oils, spa music, dim lighting, bubble bath, and plush towels.Eat cooked foods. I’m talking about if you’re prone to anxiety, this is super helpful (if you’re not at all an anxious person, this may not apply to you). When choosing what to eat, think cooked, warming foods. Instead of raw salads, have cooked veggies drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. Anxiety responds better to slower cooked foods than flash cooked, and flash cooked over raw. Cook with butter, ghee, or coconut oil. Enjoy avocados, salmon, seeds, and soups. Stay away from the pick-up-and-go foods like “nutrition” or “energy” bars or anything else that come in tidy packages.
Start noticing how you feel after you eat: grounded or unglued. Take note, and you’ll start understanding what makes you feel better. Your kitchen will become your medicine cabinet.Avoid white breads, cereals, and granola. They leave your body cold and dry inside and will aggravate anxiety. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but anxiety comes with a side of easily-feeling-cold.
Opt instead for oatmeal or sourdough bread with butter. Butter is a calmative and soothes feelings of anxiety and unsettledness. The Waldorf schools offer home-made bread with grass-fed butter to their early childhood kids because of it’s calming, grounding effect, and because it’s a source of healthy fat which growing brains need in steady supply. Also it has nutritive value (vitamins A,E,K). If you can’t get past the bad, outdated marketing on butter, ghee (clarified butter) is an even better option, which is becoming increasingly available at your local grocery stores; if you can’t find it there, you can get it online.Move your body. It will help increase circulation, warm and tone your body, release toxins and nervous energy, and regulate mood. As with food, notice what kinds of workouts, at what time of day, and at what level of intensity, works to calm your anxiety. It’s not the same for everybody.
These 7 practices will soothe, repair, and strengthen your nervous system, and thereby your mental health, beyond your expectations. You’ll feel grounded, alive, and clear. Your level of discernment will skyrocket, and so will your energy. Things won’t bother you as much.
You may argue that you’re too busy to fit all these practices in. This is a tantrum; work through it rather than believing in it.
Remember that busy doesn’t mean important. It means out of control, out of time. Important people (you) have (command over) time.
Important people - you - don’t run around saying I’m so busy!
Important people - you- are available for what’s truly important to you.
So be careful about the story you throw around about how busy you are.
Slowing down will help you see how important you are. And when you see how important you are, these habits will become easier to keep.
As you recognize your important self again, trust that what melts away in your life are your non-essentials. For someone else they may be essentials; they are not yours.
Soon you’ll look back and wonder how and why you juggled so hard to keep it all going. And then, as quickly as it came, you’ll stop wondering about it. Because it matters not. What matters is, you are free from anxiety.
Just do it. Let me know how it goes.
Love, Savitree
You've inspired me to try a new self-care ritual, with some oil/music/candle, which I've never actually one. Any suggestions for reputable body oil?
Another wise post. Thank you! This is exactly what I needed to read today.