3 Ways To Calm Anxiety and Panic Attacks

Jogging and Exercise

It all starts with exercise, and as much as most people have grown to hate that term there is no way around it. Exercise is a crucial component of a mentally healthy individual. Exercise - especially jogging, but all forms of exercise will do - provides several important tools necessary for controlling anxiety:

• It releases brain chemicals that provide relaxation and improve mood.
• It decreases the quantity of stress hormone in the body.
• It improves overall hormone balance.
• It tires muscles and makes for easier sleep.

If your goal is to control your anxiety, you simply have to start exercising. Studies have shown that there are ample benefits to exercising regularly with almost no consequences, and some studies have stated that exercise is as effective as some of the leading anti-anxiety medications.

Start jogging today, and that alone may be enough for you to see a significant difference.

Thought Journal

While anxiety has a lot of different physical symptoms, the mental symptoms are often what seem the hardest to control. It's possible to ignore aches, pains, and nausea, but it's very hard to ignore thoughts that won't leave your head or worries that you try to convince yourself are irrational.

There are several reasons for this, but one of the reasons is because the mind has a tendency to want you to remember and focus on the things that you try to forget. You brain doesn't like the idea that you try to push something out of your conscious, so you're actually more likely to focus on worries that you have when you try to get rid of them.

Since you clearly want these thoughts to go away, one solution to this is to write all of the thoughts down. Not just stressful thoughts - any recurring thought that you cannot get out of your head. This is especially useful at night, when often you'll find you're thinking about things that aren't stressful but you cannot seem to stop thinking about them and go to sleep. Write out all of those thoughts in a journal, and your brain will relax knowing that they're in a permanent place.

Positivity Journal

The previous journal was designed to get you to stop thinking about negative things. But anxiety also causes you to focus on the negatives. This is actually an anxiety symptom - when your neurotransmitter levels change from anxiety, your thoughts naturally become more negative. It's not clear why this is, but it also seems natural so people don't realize it's happening.

If you can think more positively, you'll find some relief from the effects of negative thinking on anxiety. That's why you may want to start a positivity journal.

A positivity journal is a logbook of only the positive things that occurred to you throughout the day, with a pre-set minimum. The items must be specific to the day, as detailed as possible, and not at all passive aggressive. You also have to always meet the minimum.

Examples of good entries:

1. The barista gave me my coffee for free today because I was nice to her.
2. My boss complimented me on the project I finished.
3. I received a phone call from an old friend just because she wanted to catch up.

Examples of the types of entries you should avoid:

1. I woke up.
2. My mom didn't call me which is good because I didn't want to hear from her.
3. I didn't screw anything up too badly.

You want to fill this with a minimum of 10 to 15 entries every day from the "good" examples, not the "bad" examples. They don't have to be new every day (if you get new compliments from your boss, you can add them to the list) but they do have to be specific and positive, and you need to do this every day without fail.

The goal of this isn't just to think about the positives, which is important. The goal is so that each and every day you start noticing things to put in your journal. Filling out 10 to 15 positive things every day is hard. But the more you pay attention during the day, the easier it is. You'll find that over time you start to notice things better, remember them more, and your ability to recognize all of the positive things that happen will improve as a result.