Tips To Beat Anxiety & Stress

If, like me, you have been dealing with anxiety and depression for a number of years, you will know how unbelievably hard it can be to get professional help. What I was told was that unless you are on the brink of serious harm to yourself or others, getting help for a mental illness is like trying to win the lottery. 

I'm not writing this as an 'oh woe is me' post, I think it's very important that all anxiety sufferers share their techniques and tricks to help people who are looking to help themselves. The internet is an amazing place to look for self help and it is far easier than leafing through endless textbooks telling you that 'everything's going to be ok, you just have to believe and get over it'. 

The main way that I deal with anxiety and stress is through meditation, I'm not going to go into massive detail about it as I've already written one big post all about my meditation techniques and how they help. What I will say is that if you haven't tried this as an anxiety buster, definitely give it a shot, it helps you focus on your breathing and grounds you in the here and now. 

That leads me into my next point, take baby steps. I'm just as guilty as the next person of thinking too far ahead into the future and forgetting to live in the here and now. If you have a particularly stressful event coming up, try to take it one day at a time, always focusing on the big picture makes you lose sight of the smaller things. Things are easier to swallow in smaller bites than in one massive chunk. 

It's also important to take some time out for you. Whether that is exercise, reading, watching a movie or just chilling out and listening to some music. Try and remove yourself from the constant busyness of daily life and just take some time out, slow things down and do something you really enjoy. 

Finally, keep a journal. Write down how you felt that day before you got to bed, what happened that made you happy, what are you grateful for. Take a little time to really reflect on the day and what you really enjoyed. Try and find the positives as much as possible and eventually your brain will look for them naturally without even trying. 

So many bloggers and vloggers have brought awareness to anxiety these past few years and I'm so happy it is being talked about more and more. A mental illness has always been seen as either attention seeking or just being over dramatic and now a real serious conversation has broken out in both the media and the blogging community. Here's a little fact for you, mixed anxiety and depression is the most common mental disorder in Britain and 1 in 4 people will suffer with some sort of mental illness. Let's keep this conversation going and make mental illness taboos a thing of the past.