Treating Anxiety without Medication

As a therapist, I often have clients say to me “I just want to feel less reliant on my medication and be able to manage anxiety on my own.” One of the most uncomfortable truths about living with anxiety is that anxiety can often feel like it’s taking over our lives. If you’ve ever experienced anxiety, you know it can feel like you’ve lost some control over your life.  Anxiety can sometimes take control of our thoughts, actions, and our bodies.  This exhausting process makes us feel desperate to want to take back some of that control. Often times when we decide to reach out for help, we get prescriptions. Sometimes we begin to feel reliant on our medications and less confident in our own ability to manage and control anxiety. Here’s the good news: We can treat anxiety without the use of medication. 

Anxiety Symptoms

Anxiety is exhausting and can show up for each of us in a variety of ways. Anxiety can take control of our thoughts, plaguing our minds with thoughts of “what if” or “I can’t.”  It can also show up in our bodies, increasing our heart rate, creating shallow rapid breathing, making our hands tingle, messing with our digestion, or just giving us the overall feeling of being “on edge.” Not only is anxiety telling our minds and bodies to act a certain way, but it also begins controlling our behaviors. Anxiety might start telling us to avoid things we used to love, it may tell us to leave a situation sooner than we would like, or it might cause us to say no to exciting opportunities. All of these symptoms can feel exhausting and anxiety begins to feel like it’s at the driver’s seat of our lives. 

How can I overcome anxiety naturally?

Sometimes we don’t need to take a pill to overcome anxiety. Sometimes certain lifestyle changes can make all the difference. Here are some of my favorite natural strategies for reducing anxiousness.

MINDFULNESS: 

One of the best ways to help reduce our anxiety symptoms is to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is the idea of staying in the present moment non-judgmentally. Some ways to engage in a mindfulness practice is to meditate every day, practice yoga, or even find a mindfulness app that suits your needs. Mindfulness can actually help prevent anxiety and it gives us a useful tool to help us get through anxiety.  

JOURNALING:

Another helpful anxiety-fighting tool is journaling. By journaling about our anxious thoughts, we may be able to sort through some of the anxious “clutter.” We may be able to realize some of our anxious worries are highly unlikely or that there are ways to problem solve the “worst-case scenario.” By journaling about these things, we may feel a sense of relief getting some of these anxious thoughts out of our heads and onto paper. 

CHALLENGES:

When anxiety tells us to avoid something, we often do. When we give into the anxious urge to avoid or run away, we are actually re-affirming to ourselves that we should be anxious. In the long run, avoiding and running away from things we feel anxious about, actually increases anxiety. We can actively fight these urges by challenging ourselves to do something that makes us feel anxious. Perhaps going to dinner alone makes you anxious, or maybe talking to a new person makes you nervous. By making a point to set weekly or daily challenges for ourselves, we can actually get used to doing the things that make us anxious so that they are no longer scary. I recommend doing this in a gradual manner. For example, let’s say you feel really anxious in social settings. Set your first challenge as talking to as many cashiers as you can in a week. Your second challenge may be going small gathering with your friends. Maybe your third challenge is going to going to a busy restaurant with a friend.

What relieves anxiety immediately? 

When we experience anxiety, it activates our fight or flight system. This is why our bodies often react in a very physical way to anxiety; it is gearing up to fight or flight. Anxiety is tricking our brains into thinking that there is a real threat that we need to prepare for. In order to challenge this system, we need to use our own body chemistry to activate another system, the soothing system.  Here are some easy ways to activate this system and help relieve anxiety: 

BREATHWORK: 

The first way to activate our soothing system is by using our breath. By breathing out longer than we are breathing in, we can automatically kick in our soothing system. Here’s how you can do it: start by taking a deep breath in through your nose. As you do so, count the number of seconds you breathe in for. Next, breathe out deeply through your mouth. Count your out-breath so that it doubles your in-breath. For example, if you breathe in for 2 seconds, breathe out for 4. Repeat this strategy till you begin to feel calmer. 

TEMPERATURE:

We can actually use coldness to help relieve some of our anxiety. By using cold water, we can trick our brains into activating the “dive response.” When human beings dive into cold water, our bodies need to conserve our oxygen. To do so, it makes the heartrate slow thus activating the soothing system needed to help relieve anxiety. Here’s how you can trick your brain to activate the “dive response.” Dunk your head into cold water or put an ice pack up to your eyes and upper cheeks, while doing so hold your breath. You can repeat a few times if necessary. CAUTION: do not try this strategy if you have a heart condition. 

INTENSE EXERCISE:

By engaging in intense exercise for about 20 minutes, we can expend our bodies stored up physical energy. After engaging in a difficult workout, our bodies enter a “cool down” mode, which activates the soothing system and will bring our heart rate and breathing down. I recommend doing 20 minutes of whatever workout you enjoy whether that’s running, a HIIT workout, boxing, or something else. 

Can anxiety be cured? 

Think about anxiety like chronic headaches. If we had chronic headaches, we might seek ways to reduce the headaches or their severity - like taking certain supplements, drinking more water, or changing our diet. If we do these things, it might greatly reduce the amount of headaches we get, but it does not mean, we will never get a headache again. This time when a headache arises, we may even have some tricks we use to get rid of the headache quick. By making these changes, our headaches become manageable so that it does not impact our day to day lives. This same concept applies to anxiety. We can make changes to reduce how often anxiety occurs. We can also learn skills to deal with anxiety when it comes up; but the fact of the matter is that anxiety may come up again and when it does, we can learn to be confident in our ability to manage the uncomfortable symptoms. 

Best Treatment for Anxiety

 Even with making lifestyle changes, you may still feel that you might need extra support from a professional. There are many well-known effective treatments for anxiety that do not require medication. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Mindfulness-based therapies, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) are all shown to be effective in treating anxiety.

Does Anxiety Need Medication 

Although I’ve talked a lot about how to treat anxiety without the use of medication, medication can still be highly beneficial for some individuals. While some people can work with their anxiety without aid of medication, others find it helpful and essential to their treatment. I always say, do what works best for you.

When to Seek Professional Help

When anxiety is beginning to cause major distress in your areas of functioning, it might be time to seek professional help. If you are noticing severe disturbances in your occupational, social, or other areas of your life I encourage you to reach out to a professional. Additionally, if you are thinking about forgoing your medication and treating your anxiety without your medication please consult your psychiatrist or prescribing healthcare professional. 

If you are in the Mesa area and struggling with anxiety, contact us today to schedule a free consultation. We also provide support for women struggling with trauma, motherhood, and relationships. 

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