In The Fight with a Common Enemy we talked a bit about GAD and how it impacts our day to day life. What I hadn’t gone into is ways to manage and fight this disorder. The purpose of this article is to go in depth on ways to fight and win against GAD. We will discuss different ways to help manage them, their benefits, and the practicality in each of their uses and efficacy. We will also go into some common barriers that may impact our motivation to want to use some of these skills.
There are many ways to help cope and manage GAD, many of which we already know, however there are always barriers that stop us from committing to these skills. Whether that be the stigma of going to a therapist, the fear of judgment by taking medications, or being overwhelmed by the skills themselves, many of us find it difficult to get started. This is all completely normal, when I first started learning about some of the skills, I had thought my therapist was out of her mind. How on earth was I going to do all of this, or even begin? It all felt like so much change and to top it off, I wasn’t very self-disciplined.
Having to change so much just to feel better was overwhelming in itself, knowing I didn’t have the discipline to make myself commit to these changes was much worse. People never really tell you how truly difficult it is to change, people assume you can just change if you want to but that just isn’t true. That isn’t to say there is no hope though! I and many others have gotten through this, and we’re here to help you as well. You’ve got this and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. With that being said, lets get into treatments to help manage your GAD!
Daily Schedule
Having a daily schedule can be a major change in anyone’s lifestyle, it requires a lot of dedication and discipline to stick to and maintain a personal schedule. Personally a personal schedule was the hardest part of all these skills I had to learn and implement.
Although intimidating, you’ll find that a schedule can make one feel organized and can even be a motivator for the day. Have you ever checked off something you’ve been putting off for a while? Do you remember how great it felt? Even if it’s something as simple as doing the laundry or doing homework, it’s always a positive feeling to complete the task. A schedule helps to organize your day, in doing so it can help you prepare for what’s to happen in your day. Knowing what you’re going to do for the day can help lower your anxiety since you don’t have to worry about what’s to come.
Starting a schedule can be hard at first, it was for me, but with time you’ll be able to plan your day like a champ. One piece of advice: don’t start off big. Changing your habits alone is difficult, let alone changing what you do in a day. My advice is to start off small, and when I say small I mean small. I don’t mean starting off one whole habit daily then expanding from there, I mean starting with a small simple task and working into a habit. This process will take a while, and that’s okay, change isn’t suppose to happen in one day, or even a year. The point is, any progress is good progress and you should feel accomplished.
When I first started my schedule, I started off with things as small as ‘set aside 3 minutes for writing’, or ‘walk around for 5 minutes’. I had to start off extremely small because I knew if i started any bigger I would begin my “Oh I’m sure I can do that tomorrow” faze, and what I had made a goal quickly became forgotten, and later I would be disappointed in myself, which left me feeling worse than when I started.
It may take a while to get used to, as stated before, change is not something that happens right away. Just remember that if you keep it up and keep building, one day you’ll have a great structure to go off and you’ll feel so proud of yourself.
Healthy Lifestyle
Having a healthy lifestyle can be one of the hardest things to change. No one really wants to give up foods they love or set a bedtime or even take a daily walk. This can be one of the more intense changes to help manage your anxiety, however certain changes may actually make one feel better and not everything about your lifestyle has to change! Me personally, I still eat sweets, it’s not something I’d want to give up, so instead I made some compromises. Instead of giving up sweets, I instead take longer walks, do yoga, and eat more greens.
We don’t have to take healthy lifestyle to the extreme, in fact, sometimes it can be stressful and even anxiety enduring. Changing every last thing in our lifestyle is unrealistic in itself, there is no need to make those kinds of extreme choices.
There are many benefits to opening up to healthy habits. For example, being active can increase endorphins and help stabilize your mood, along with building your self-image and worth. Being active doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a intensive exercise regimen, being active can be a simple as taking a walk or doing stretches.
Another thing to consider is diet change. This is probably one of the harder things to change when it comes to healthy living. When my physician told me I should cut back on caffeine products and eat less junk I was appalled. I knew my eating habits weren’t necessarily a healthy aspect of my life, but was it really such a big deal, I loved eating junk and I loved energy drinks, aren’t I suppose to do things I love? Isn’t that the point?
Well yes, but no. Although eating junk can make you feel good in the moment, it can have negative consequences on your long term living. Eating sugary foods can have some serious negative effects such as inflammation throughout the body, which in turn can affect your mood leading to feelings of both anxiety and depression. Eating unhealthy can also lead to weight gain, or sometimes weight loss if you have an eating disorder, which in turn can lead to poor body image and low self worth.
Sleep is also an important part of managing your anxiety. Sleep gives the body time to rest and improves cognitive function. Have you ever woke up and felt like you’ve been hit by a train? Well, me too. I had an atrocious sleep schedule, if I even slept at all. I would constantly pull all-nighters and stay up way too late. I often felt horrible in the morning and found it difficult to do any tasks. I was also very irritable towards those around me and overall was in a sour mood.
When you get a proper amount of sleep you can wake up feeling great, and best of all, you will have the energy to do things you want to do! Adjusting to this habit can be difficult, no one really wants to have a bedtime. My advice is to be realistic and adjust to a schedule that fits with you.
Stress Management
As stated before, stress can be a huge factor in contributing to anxiety. A lot of the times I will worry about stressful events and in turn, I get extremely anxious. Luckily there are many ways to help manage your stress.
Unfortunately, stress cannot be eliminated. Stress is a normal and even important aspect of someone’s day to day life, even if it doesn’t seem that way. Stress in proper amounts motivate those to complete tasks and goals, whether that be a small goal like cleaning, or a big goal like passing a class for school. The problem with stress is that we are sometimes unable to manage it properly and in a lot of cases the stress can be overwhelming even in small amounts. Luckily there are many ways to manage stress in a healthy way.
Identifying stressors can be a key factor in being able to cope with and manage your stress. Being able to identify your stressors will allow you to prepare for stress in a healthy way and understand events that cause the stress. Preparing for stressful events can help one experience less stress during the event and sometimes even avoid it all together.
Sometimes identifying stressors can be difficult. Major stressors like starting a new job, moving to a new environment, and starting school are all easily identifiable stressors, while other stressors such as procrastination, being a perfectionist, lack of boundaries, and past experiences can be harder to identify. Keeping a stress journal can help one to organize their stressors along with help them identify stressors in their life. Having a stress journal can also help to track stress and organize thoughts about those specific events so that you are able to better identify ways to combat stress.
In short, being able to cope with stress will be a helpful way to manage your anxiety.
Practicing Mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness can be a great tool to help you manage your GAD. Being mindful allows one to empathize with those around them and better understand the actions of others. Mindfulness can also allow someone to be more in touch with themselves and help to be more compassionate towards themself and others. It can also help to build a higher quality in life.
Being mindful means you don’t have to be hard on yourself or on others. A huge problem is that we’re all to harsh on ourselves. We are our harshest critics after all. I use to find myself criticizing every little thing I did. Suddenly I would clean wrong, work wrong, and live wrong. It made me doubt myself frequently, lowering my own self-esteem and self worth. This alone caused me great anxiety and I would constantly worry that every little thing I did was all wrong. This all made me not want to go out and socialize, after all, who would want someone who couldn’t do anything right.
One question I personally ask myself before I’m upset with myself is “Would you forgive someone else for what I just did?” It’s interesting when you think about it, most people actually hold themselves to a way higher standard than to those around us, because of our own self awareness we find it easier to pick out our own flaws, while when we look at others we empathize with them and hold them to a different level of critic.
Mindfulness can help put yourself on equal ground with everyone around you.
Journaling
Having a journal can help with your GAD by allowing you to track how you’re feeling, how you felt, and how you think you’re going to feel about a situation. Journaling can be a great outlet and a healthy way to express how you feel. A journal isn’t something that you have to grade or share, so you have the freedom to write exactly how you feel with little worry of hurting others or yourself. It can be a great way to self-express and can provide good insight to how you’re feeling and allows you to explore your thought patterns.
Keeping track of thought and emotional patterns helps you plan what to do when you feel those specific emotions. If you start to notice patterns, it gives you an opportunity to plan ahead and recognize a possible trigger. Understanding your thoughts is a useful tool when it comes to anxiety, when you understand something it’s often easier to find a solution or at the very least plan accordingly.
Journaling itself can help you to identify causes for anxiety and help reduce it through discovering one’s self and their patterns and in turn allows one to analyze and manage their emotions and anxiety.
Therapy
You guessed it! Therapy can be a great service to help with your anxiety. Therapy is a process in which a mental health professional comes together with an individual or group to provider services to help address emotional, behavioral, and psychological ailments. Therapist teach skills that can help to combat and challenge these emotions or behaviors allowing one to understand and gain insight into their thought process in a structured way.
Therapist provide a safe space to allow one to freely express themselves and how they’re feeling. They can offer validation and challenge negative thinking and emotions, helping one to gain knowledge of the main problem instead of just the symptom.
Therapist can offer effective coping and grounding skills to help combat symptoms, as well as help with emotional regulation, mindfulness, and stress.
Some common coping skills that are taught are:
- Deep breathing
- Meditation
- Journaling
- Positive self-talk
- Exercise
Of course there are many more coping skills than just these! There are a plethora of skills to choose from, meaning there’s always a skill to use for any given situation! Therapy can help to identify skills to use and the appropriate times to use them. They can also help you to create a treatment plan to follow so that you have a structured and effective way to recovery.
Medication
Medication is a topic that can be a bit controversial. Some people believe medication is a useful tool to treat mental illness, while others think medication is a horrible answer to the issue at hand. Of course, both are right in their respective way. However, to clear one common misunderstanding up, medication is not a cure for mental health. This can be a difficult pill to swallow, but medication for mental health is not a cure all, medications for mental health are to give a booster. Although you can start to feel better with medication, it is important to also do the necessary maintenance with yourself and deal with the root of the problems directly as well as take the medication.
Medication is a useful tool to get people started in their mental health journey as well as maintain the progress and regulate your emotional well-being, but without the work, the medication is only a temporary solution. Work is needed to make a medication work to its full capacity.
So in short, medication can be helpful, but you’ll still want to do the necessary work to keep that progress going as well as to feel better overall.
