How to reduce anxiety and worry so you focus on enjoying life:

Can’t stop worrying? Feeling tense, on edge, or mentally exhausted?

If persistent worry is taking over your thoughts, you’re not alone — and there are effective ways to reduce worry and general anxiety. Below, you’ll find more than 10 evidence-based strategies to help calm your mind, reduce anxiety symptoms, and regain a sense of control.

Almost everyone worries from time to time. We may compare ourselves to that seemingly unbothered, laid-back person (our brains are very good at doing that), but the reality is that most people experience worry and anxiety at different points in their lives. Periods of increased stress — such as financial pressure, relationship strain, work demands, health concerns, or major life transitions — naturally intensify anxious thinking. In recent years, ongoing global uncertainty has only added to the mental load many people carry.

For some, however, worry becomes frequent, persistent, and difficult to switch off, occurring daily or almost daily. Chronic worry can lead to sleep disruption, fatigue, muscle tension, irritability, and physical symptoms such as headaches, stomach issues, muscle pain, and lowered immunity. Over time, ongoing anxiety can interfere with your ability to relax, enjoy life, or mentally recover after a demanding day — and it may even contribute to low mood or secondary depression.

When worry becomes excessive and begins to affect daily functioning, it is often referred to as general anxiety. When persistent, hard-to-control worry is accompanied by ongoing physical symptoms, clinicians may diagnose Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). The good news is that general anxiety is highly treatable, and learning practical strategies can significantly reduce its impact.

Did you know that over 700 000 Canadians complain of symptoms consistent with General Anxiety Disorder? This number translates to approximately 2.5% of the population (Pelletier, L. et al., 2017). Many more than that complain about worry affecting their quality of life or health in some way.

Whether you may have general anxiety disorder or are just tired of worrying as much as you do, there are strategies that can reduce your worry. Here I will summarize ten strategies to help reduce the extent and frequency of worry. I will also suggest what to do when those strategies are not enough. This way, you can help your anxiety to ease back and start to enjoy life more.

Top 10 strategies to ease worry and general anxiety:

1) Remember mindful breathing: Yes, I know this can feel like a broken record- “just breathe”- but its essential to understand that the mind and body are connected. When we feel stressed, our breathing changes to stress breathing. Stress breathing is where our chest constricts, and our breathing becomes shallow. Stress breathing sends feedback to the brain that we need to brace for continued stress. When this becomes a pattern, it becomes difficult not to feel stressed.

The more we feel stressed, the more constricted our breathing becomes. The more constricted our breathing becomes, the more we feel stressed. The more frequent the stress, the more stress affects us on a biological level.

We can actually trick the brain into feeling more relaxed by consciously ensuring we are not stress breathing. When we do this often, it starts to make a significant difference in our stress level. Frequent mindful breathing helps to buffer the impact of stress on our body.

Don’t underestimate this vital strategy! Put up reminders to help you remember to check in with your breathing. Literally envision that when you breathe in- you take in a lighter feeling or energy, and when you breathe out- you slowly let go of felt tension. Do this often!

2) Return to the present moment: People who often report worrying also usually report that they are often focused on the future. Sometimes they are also often focused on the past. They say that they find it difficult to focus on the very moment they are in. Although staying focused on the present moment can be challenging, this practice comes with many rewards. Staying anchored on the present moment usually reduces the intensity of anxiety by making us feel less overwhelmed.

As with most things, we get better with practice. Put up reminders and start to practice staying focused only on the moment you are in. Think of ping pong- keep gently returning your focus to the present moment each time your mind wanders.

If it helps, use self-talk such as “just this moment.” Find ways to pay attention to the present moment through your senses- what can you see, hear, taste, smell or feel? Engaging in this process returns us to a state more like other animals, instead of being hooked by our human nature to think and focus on problems.

Animals are usually relatively relaxed unless they perceive immediate danger, and then they enter fight or flight. Because we can focus on abstract concepts such as that hypothetical future moment that may or may not even happen, humans can stay perpetually tense and in a fight or flight state. Refocusing on the present moment is a way to start to shift this tendency. Read more about mindfulness here.

3) Start setting boundaries on your worry: this means allowing yourself a specific time in the day where you are free to worry as much as you would like. Then, the rest of the day, you remind yourself that it’s not time to worry, and you will come back to it.

Sticking to worry time can be challenging at first. Stick with it! Keeping to this boundary will get easier with practice.

4) Write down the things you worry about: Keep paper and a pen handy or use an electronic notepad to Jot down the things you are worrying about. Writing worries down helps to get them out of your head, and you can then reassure yourself that you can come back to them later. Keep a pad of paper or notebook beside your bed to use when you are trying to sleep.

5) Consider relaxation training with a guided relaxation or relaxation app or with a therapist: A progressive muscle relaxation is recommended first. Some people prefer visualization-type-relaxations or hypnosis. Try different types of guided relaxation to see what you prefer. Remember that we get better at things with practice. Relaxation is no exception. If you find it difficult to relax, it will take practice.

6) Improve self-care: Complete a self-care inventory and identify the key areas you have for improvement. Start to incorporate one step each week. Improving self-care will lower stress and attend to your well-being. This usually helps to reduce stress and our tendency to worry.

7) Try thought defusion strategies: Use a visual metaphor to represent your worries. Examples include- a computer pop-up, a parade of racing horses, a treadmill, screaming kids, bubbles, a flock of birds etc. Each time a worry pops into your head, remember the visual metaphor. Focus on dissipating the visual image somehow (get creative). For instance, you can picture popping the bubbles or just watching the racing horses pass by.

8) Identify meaningful, targeted activities to occupy you when you worry or feel tense: The mind can only focus on so many things at once. If you find their activities that feel meaningful or enjoyable and focus on those, it will be challenging to stay focused on your worries. For example, make photo collages out of scrapbooks, do word or number puzzles, learn to knit or crochet, use an app to learn a new language etc.

9) Thought records: learn about unhelpful thinking styles such as catastrophizing and overgeneralizing. Start to label your thoughts as you notice them. Jot down your thoughts into a thought record and start to examine the actual evidence for your worry. For instance, “how many times have you worried about this, and how many times has it actually happened?” The process of writing thoughts records starts to translate into automatic changes in your thinking over time.

10) Identify your beliefs: Some people have beliefs that serve to maintain their worrying. For instance, do you believe that worrying will somehow help you prevent feared outcomes? Do you believe that not worrying would somehow make you a less caring person?

Start to explore and challenge these beliefs. For instance, does worrying actually change outcomes or does it just take away from your ability to enjoy life? Can you think of a caring person who is not necessarily someone who worries continuously and feels uneasy much of the time?

If you find it challenging to consistently implement the above strategies, consider:

Sometimes it can be challenging to implement the above strategies consistently on your own. If you find you are not following through or don’t know where to start, consider talking with a therapist. A therapist can help to tailor individual strategies to your specific needs. Sometimes having accountability and support can also make the difference between following through or not.

When the above strategies are not feeling like enough, consider IFS therapy. IFS or Internal Family Systems Therapy can help reduce worry by exploring and addressing the underlying cause of your worrying.

Did you know that most symptoms have a functional purpose for some part of the emotional or psychological system? Much of the time, this purpose is outside of direct conscious awareness and exists in our implicit memory.

This means that at some point in time, worrying or being on guard served a functional purpose and that part of our emotional system is stuck in an old context so that the same patterns repeat, even in a new context where things might be different.

Prior learning or patterns or programs often keep getting re-triggered despite conscious attempts to stop or limit it. IFS may help when other approaches have not. IFS can be done on your own (with a self-therapy resource) or with a skilled therapist.

Often patterns related to excessive worry can be traced back to prior experiences with feeling blindsided or helpless. Healing the impacts of these experiences can then shift the subsequent worry patterns or “programs” so that those patterns do not continue to repeat in the same way.

We find that people are often not aware that they are as affected by something from the past as they are because the experience (and its associated feelings) are compartmentalized, and they are focused on other seemingly unrelated concerns. They can remain unaware that the burdens from their prior experiences still continue to drive their symptoms on a systems level.

If you are wondering what is driving your symptoms or how to make counter-balancing strategies work for you, contact us for an appointment. Everyone feels anxious from time-to-time, but anxiety is not something you have to just live with on a daily or regular basis.

By Jennifer Barbera PhD, C. Psych

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