Although I’ve made posts in the past about what’s helped me get through anxiety, I still find “any advice about what I can do for anxiety,” to be the question I am asked the most on and off stream. So I created a set of quick tips that I have learned. 

Having chronic, diagnosed depression and anxiety means sleep is often an elusive concept. It also means that’s it’s incredibly crucial I get my full rest, otherwise the exhaustion makes it a lot harder to tackle the following day’s intrusive thoughts.Here’s the list of best practices I have collected over the past ten years that have helped me cope. I hope something in the following list resonates and perhaps even helps.

We've reached the end of 2017 the Anxiety Relief series (for now). Anxiety sucks when I am trying to walk outside and enjoy a nice, summer day. Or when I am in the checkout lane trying to leave a store. But it’s more frustrating when I’m in a crowded subway or about to enter a job interview. On days when my brain chemistry is all out of whack, anxiety doesn’t care what I’m doing. It just sucks.

Image by: VIKTOR HANACEK for picjumbo

Alright, I’ve made a few posts (See Part One and Two ) about my Anti-Anxiety Kit at this point. It’s a summarized list of things (physical and emotional) I have used over the years to help cope with my symptoms as they happened. When I started running, I would lose breath after a 100 yards and fall to my knees, dizzy without oxygen. I got upset and cried because I just wanted to jog. Running was supposed to help me learn how to breathe and make my anxiety better, but instead, it felt like it broke me.

Cover Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

To manage, somewhere in the back of brain, I have been putting together an Anxiety Kit.  It’s a combination of things that I have used to help soothe the bad moments, to distract my mind from itself and avoid the grand finale—a panic attack. It’s a combination of coping mechanisms I have found in workbooks, heard from my therapist, or brought to me by friends. In hopes that it will help you too, I wrote them all down.