In my experience, I’ve deduced the most effective way to overcome anxiety is to develop constants. When you feel yourself receding into mental battle, choose something harmless you can do that gives you a goal-driven sense of purpose. It can be as simple as doing something kind for yourself or others. Further, craft a daily routine that gives you a sense of control and structure, stimulates your growth and simultaneously banishes from your mind the things that have no business being there. For example, I started working out twice a day.
Anxiety can make it feel like your life is beginning to mimic the endless loop in your head. Pick a hobby that you can prepare to revert to when you are bored (if you have anxiety, you know boredom is a sure gateway to overthinking), perhaps a more time-consuming project that will not only make you feel instantaneously productive, but also as if you are building to something bigger and more complete. Drawing, writing a story, and knitting are all good examples of things you can do. Whenever I get bored and anxious, I put music on and paint for a few hours—definitely does the trick.
Start counting to 5. It’s easy for an anxious person to wake up in the morning and look at a list of larger, harder or more time-consuming tasks and choose instead to spend hours with something mindless and at their fingertips. When you feel stuck, confused and wrapped in a knotted frenzy, count to 5 and get up. Complete your tasks at your pace and reward yourself with intermittent breaks, but never allow yourself to become distracted for more than twenty minutes at a time.
Embrace the central project of learning as much as you can about yourself and using that to grow. Use your habit of over-thinking to your advantage. While it can have many negative connotations and effects, being an over-thinker makes you acutely aware of yourself, others and the circumstances surrounding you. If applied, it can give you an enormous amount of empathy, inside or advanced knowledge, and enhanced perception. Think of it as a fast track to growth.
Finally, harness the ability to recognize when your thoughts are intrusive, spiraling, and illogical (when you should try your best to shut them down)—and when they are rational and should make it past your lips. This can be difficult, especially in the moment. I find the best remedy for this is to write out your thoughts when you are devolving into an episode and let them sit on the page for a night. Revisit them the next morning, when it will immediately become clear to you whether it was something worth stressing over.
When you are being encompassed by your thoughts and one intrusive enough convinces you that you’re ugly or incompetent, that your friends or significant other dislike you, or that the person you went to the store with is dead because they’ve been inside for longer than they told you they’d be and still haven’t returned, remember everything is okay. Remember that regardless of what goes down in your head, life continues to happen around you. Assure yourself that there is a high likeliness in the majority of these cases that you have no control over the things you’re concerned with (which is probably what’s driving you craziest) or that your brain is largely exacerbating your fears. Take solace in this fact, and breathe. (No one hates you as much as you think they do, I promise). Focus on the things you can change. The future is less intimidating, even to anxious people, when you realize that it’s when you’re growing yourself that you run into what’s destined for you.
Overall, I am still part of the way through my own journey with anxiety. I still have episodes where I am convinced by intrusive thoughts or begin to mull over times I’ve gone wrong and speculate over the potential negative outcomes of a situation. The onslaught of thoughts and feelings can ramp up and become hard to dismiss if I don’t stop myself, breathe, and remind myself of what is and is not under my control.
Remind yourself that you are doing your best. Allow yourself the time you need to focus on taming the beast inside, no matter how wild and ruthless—and remember that sometimes the best way to do this is to get out of your head.