Overcoming anxiety: Simple strategies to build resilience

If you want to live your life with less anxiety and more confidence and calm then there’s one big shift to make in the way that you view anxiety: start seeing anxiety as a learned behaviour.

What is anxiety?

There are lots of ways to define it. But, in terms of what’s happening in your head, it’s usually a response to uncertainty, like whether you’ll get the job you just interviewed for, how someone will react to something you want to say or whether an experience will be bad or good.

No one likes this uncomfortable feeling of not having control. And anxiety is the habit of focusing on a fear-inducing, negative future outcome in response to this. We do this because it has become a habit. One that can actually be more reassuring (because anxiety feels familiar and has a degree of certainty) than just accepting that we don’t know what’s coming next (uncertainty).

Did you know you don’t have to do this?

On some level (though I appreciate it doesn’t always feel that way), this is a choice. But if it doesn’t feel like a choice - if it feels overwhelming and paralysing and like it’s shutting you down and keeping you stuck - what can you do?

Building resilience to combat anxiety

Anxiety is something that you’ll feel less of with more resilience. The work I do with clients is often about learning how to deal differently with anxiety - because anxiety is seriously disruptive to the consistency of resilience and also to using resilience to expand into the best version of ourselves.

So, here are my tips on how you can stop anxiety from taking over, and leave more space for confidence and calm.

Use your body

There’s one secret weapon most of us forget we have access to when it comes to anxiety; the nervous system. We tend to think of anxiety as something that exists only in the mind, and it’s true that this is where it can terrorise us the most. This is why it makes sense not to try and defeat it with your mind - it’s hard to think your way out of a state of mind you thought your way into.

When you can use your body to send signals to your nervous system that it is safe, you’ll feel the anxiety start to fade, simply because the chemicals in your body that are associated with it - cortisol and adrenaline - start to fade, too. Don’t laugh but dance is something that really helps with this - it has some kind of magic for almost every client I work with. Whether it’s just moving to a sad song or rolling out a cheer routine, it floods the body with feel-good chemicals and seems to remind us of our autonomy and power.

Practice acceptance

First of all, acceptance doesn’t mean giving up on yourself. It’s just acknowledging the facts of a situation. Often, our anxiety is spiking because we’re trying to resist a truth and, crucially, what that means for us. But, as long as we’re doing that, we’re not able to actually deal with the thing that’s causing the anxiety.

This is also often about simply accepting that life is uncertain. We never know what is coming next. It’s more uncomfortable to accept that than to choose the familiarity of anxiety. Even a negative predictable outcome can feel more reassuring if that’s what we are used to doing. But if you do that you’re closing yourself off from the fact that, yes uncertainty can mean the worst possible scenario, but it can mean the best possible scenario, too. Acceptance brings peace - and is the starting point for action.

Do something differently

Because anxiety is habitual, it tends to get even stronger when we just do the same things we’ve always done. So, for example, you get an email with something in it that you find threatening and up goes your heart rate. The anxious thoughts begin. Everything else in your day gets pushed to one side. Depending on where you are, maybe you reach for a numbing tool like alcohol, a way of consuming food or falling down a TikTok black hole. And so the cycle continues. 

But can you do one thing differently? Because if you can, you’ll break this cycle and open up the possibility of creating a new habitual response to feeling anxious. 

Challenge the anxiety gremlin

Anxiety lies. And you don’t have to look too deeply at it to see that it’s lying. But it wins because we listen to it habitually and don’t challenge its narratives. Here are a few classic anxiety narratives and ways you can challenge them:

• What if it doesn’t work out? What if it does?
• Nothing ever goes well for me. Find one (or more) examples in your life where this was not the case.
• I can’t do it. You won’t know unless you try.
• I’m scared/uncomfortable/unsure. So do it scared, etc.

And if you don’t believe that your anxiety gremlin is wrong, then think about this: Have you noticed that anxiety never predicts good things for you? And yet good things still happen. The next time you start making anxious predictions about a negative future remember that - and remember that you’re not psychic. 

I work a lot on anxiety with my clients because being more resilient - and the way we build that up - gives you a lot of new tools and strategies to get out of the anxiety habit. And please trust me when I say anxiety is a habit, which means that it’s something you can change. I’ve not had a client yet who hasn’t achieved positive changes with anxiety by seeing it differently like this - and approaching it in a new way.