How to Reduce Anxiety: 3 Tips [Plus Exercises!]
You can be sitting in a comfortable environment around people that you enjoy, yet the thoughts you’re having make it difficult to fully settle into or enjoy the moment. The environment on the outside might be a good one but inside all you can do is think about how you might have said the wrong thing or how you could have done something better or how someone who’s around might not like you. This is the experience of anxiety and it can really consume your mind and your day.
And trying to find ways to deal with anxiety? Well, that can be equally consuming. Before we know it, there is little room left for us to experience the joy and meaning of whatever it is that we generate joy and meaning from in our lives.
The purpose of this article is to help you maintain your ability to get joy and meaning from the things you enjoy in life by offering you strategies to create space and not lose yourself amongst anxious thoughts. All of us have anxious thoughts to some degree and rather than expecting them to go away, why not develop the resources to respond to them productively when they arise?
Some of the most compassionate tools I’ve found for relating to anxious thoughts are rooted in mindfulness. The three tips I share with you below, therefore, are rooted in the practice of mindfulness, i.e., the ability we each have to pay attention to our life experience with a sense of openness and curiosity.
Tip 01
Engage the Power of Non-Judgement
When noticing anxious thoughts, it helps tremendously to engage the power of one of the foundational qualities of mindfulness— non-judgement. When practicing non-judgement, your intention is really to open up to your experience whether it’s a comfortable or uncomfortable one. As you practice not judging your experience, you instead open up to, face, and give space to whatever is actually here. This can be quite a contrast to what we’re used to at first because our mind is typically drawn to want to fix or change something so as to alter the experience we're having. This is quite normal and is rooted in our human tendency to judge everything around us as good or bad… right or wrong. By engaging our quality of non-judgement (and labeling our judgmental thoughts and other mental tendencies as ‘judgment’ if we need to do that first), however, we can begin gently paying attention to what’s there, which in the case of anxiety often includes a racing heartbeat, racing thoughts, a knot in the stomach perhaps, and other bodily representations of the stress we’re experiencing.
How To Do It
You can practice this quality of non-judgement by simply observing things as they are, through a lens of openness and compassion rather than through the deep opinions, beliefs, and biases with which we’re probably accustomed to viewing the world. Another way that you can easily engage the power of non-judgement to reduce anxiety is a common mindfulness exercise that utilizes the three senses of sight, sound, and touch. When you're focused on things that you can see, hear, and touch, there is much less interpretation involved than might otherwise be present if you were discussing your future worries with a friend. So, when engaging your three senses, you simply name three things that you can see in your environment (e.g., someone walking by, my laptop next to me, a bird out the window), followed by three things you can hear (e.g., a car passing by, the sound of myself breathing, my heater on in the house), followed by three things you can feel (e.g., the floor under your feet, your arm resting against the table, a ring pressing against your finger).
Tip 02
Settle Your Mind by Focusing on Your Breath or Your Heart
Our attention has a powerful influence on our experience. When anxiety narrows our focus entirely onto threat, fear, or future uncertainty, it can begin to feel like those thoughts are the only reality present. So, if your attention seems to be absorbed by your anxious thoughts, it helps to remember that there are many other directions to which you can orient your attention. Just when our attention wants to be fixated on a possible future threat by thinking anxious thoughts, you can acknowledge that telescopic narrow focus and see if it feels okay to regain a more comprehensive awareness of what’s actually going on around you.
How To Do It
A great way to reorient your attention to something more calming and reassuring is to invite yourself to focus on your breath. Anxiety is a state of mind that is focused on the future, and that’s what makes any breath-focused exercise so effective at reducing anxiety— when you focus on your breath, you are very naturally bringing your attention back to the present. So, if you feel caught up in worries about the future, take a breath and let yourself focus on the feeling of that breath. Some people find it supportive to also gently bring attention toward the area of the heart, which can be a nice way of connecting more deeply to your center and noticing the experience of breathing in your body. Try them out; see what fits your mind and preferences best.
Tip 03
Anchor Yourself Into The Present
Bringing together the first two tips of embracing non-judgement and settle your mind by guiding your attention to your breath or your heart, the third tip is to really anchor yourself into the present moment. The way that we anchor ourselves into the present moment is by engaging our ability to observe and reconnect with what is actually happening right now.
How To Do It
One palpable way to do this is to really become aware of the movement of our breath alongside the sensations that exist within and throughout our body. We can become aware of the sensations that exist in our feet and toes, our belly, our chest, our hands and fingers, and everywhere in between. As we practice staying with our experience gently and without as much resistance, we may begin noticing small moments of space around our thoughts and feelings. Anxiety may still be present, but it no longer feels quite as all-consuming. Sometimes the shift is subtle at first — less like anxiety disappearing and more like realizing we are larger than the anxious thoughts moving through us.
Anxiety can feel incredibly consuming when we’re alone inside it. Often, the goal isn’t to force anxious thoughts to disappear, but to slowly build a different relationship with them — one grounded in awareness, compassion, presence, and support.
Much of my work centers around helping people do exactly that through mindfulness, self-compassion, nervous system awareness, and deeper inner connection. If this feels like something you’d like support exploring more deeply, you can learn more about my course, Happy from the Inside Out®, here.
Note: This article was originally written several years ago and has been lightly updated to reflect the evolution of my work, perspective, and offerings.
