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7 Daily Health Tips for Managing Anxiety

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Chronic anxiety is often a question of seeing things in a healthier way. Challenges don’t have to be negative. Negative emotions don’t have to make you break down. Breaking down once or twice does not make you broken forever.

The mistake of thinking that our life experiences are objectively either very good or very bad is easy to make, but this thought is usually riddled with fallacies. We assign meaning to life’s challenges. We are the ones who make losing a job a “bad thing.” If this were objectively bad, it would be impossible for two people to live through the same challenge and respond in totally different ways. 

For a fun illustration of this, picture a Zen monk stuck in traffic. How would his face look? Now compare that to the image of John McEnroe stuck in traffic.

Continue reading for seven daily health tips that you can incorporate into your routine!

1. Learn The Difference Between Emotions, Feelings, and Thoughts

Emotions, feelings, and thoughts might be related, but psychology studies them as totally separate things. Not recognizing them for what they are can hurt your ability to manage your anxiety. 

Emotions are subconscious; feelings are conscious. Thoughts tend to be even more specific and well-defined. 

The first step to manage your anxiety using this strategy is to understand how thoughts and emotions relate to each other. Frustration is a common emotion that people misplace. If you find you are frustrated all the time, the productive thing to do is to question what you are frustrated about so that this emotion does not make you feel bad. 

Feeling bad all the time can cause problems if you do not confront the source of your emotions. Your inner experience can quickly manifest itself in real life in unhealthy ways. You might end up lashing out at friends and family over trivial disagreements due to deep-seated emotions you have not come to terms with yet.

2. Redefine Optimism and Pessimism

We all carry our own definition for words like optimist and pessimist. If “optimist” and “realist” sound mutually exclusive to you, that’s perfectly normal, but science does have to chime in with an objective definition here.  

When confronted with a difficult issue, optimists are inclined to feel that the problem is under control, not entirely their fault, local to just this specific case, and temporary. On the other hand, pessimists feel that the problem is out of their control, personal, universal to their whole life, and permanent. 

Becoming an optimist under this definition could help you become a better, healthier person.

3. Volunteer or Contribute to a Cause You Believe In

Altruism is an important skill that often falls into the wayside. 

If it comes from a good place, it can be extremely helpful for your wellbeing. Dr. Martin Seligman, the founder of modern positive psychology, says that if he could offer you one quick lifehack for making yourself feel better, it would be helping someone else. 

This still applies even if you are, admittedly, being generous for mixed reasons. 

4. Respond, Don’t React!

Identify your automatic thoughts. Most of the time, this kind of thinking is too quick to be useful. This speed once helped our ancestors survive fights with wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, but it is not the best way to live a modern day-to-day life. 

Daniel Kahneman, a legendary psychologist, proposes a way of looking at your own thinking that can be boiled down to two systems. You have the automatic, emotional system 1 and the slow, logical system 2. 

System 2 is a kind of thinking that costs us a lot more effort, so we often neglect it with our closest relationships, but being logical in your relationships rather than instinctive and emotional can go a long way!

Reacting without thinking can push loved ones away. If you develop the habit of feeling stressed and anxious whenever you see a certain person calling you, you are more likely to react to him/her in a way that leads to the exact dynamic you want to avoid. 

5. Get an Acupressure Mat

Acupressure mats use the same technique used in acupuncture to release blocked chi in your body. Chi, or qi, is a widely used concept in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). 

According to TCM, chi is supposed to flow freely throughout your body, but it can become stuck. There are special points throughout your body called acupressure points where an acupuncture expert pinch your chi and get it unstuck. Blocked chi is said to cause and be caused by illness, anxiety, and traumas. 

To use an acupressure mat appropriately, Healthline recommends:

• Place the mat on a soft surface if you are a beginner
• Try sitting on it first
• Start out with a layer separating yourself from the mat
• Lie down slowly
• Reposition yourself carefully
• Use it consistently

6. Take Up a Professional Hobby

If you decide to tackle your anxiety with volunteering, you could consider making this a foray into a new hobby. You will not only be combating your anxiety, but you’ll also be building something tangible with your time. 

Volunteering with Habitat for Humanity could teach you to love working with your hands. Volunteering with kids might teach you to love teaching. These kinds of hobbies tie you with a social circle and help you keep your emotions in check. 

Even if you don’t volunteer, a new hobby is often worth it. It does pay to find a hobby that requires you to get out of the house and get involved with new people.  

7. Use CBD to Help Alleviate Stress & Anxiety

As you might be aware if you are looking for daily health tips to relieve anxiety, your sleep and diet get severely affected when you are going through something with a challenging and uncertain outcome. CBD is beneficial because it helps to tackle anxiety from many angles.

CBD drops your cortisol, which is the stress hormone, but it does not stop the fight against anxiety there. Aside from helping to change the negative body chemistry that causes depression and other anxiety disorders, CBD also helps you regain balance in your eating and sleeping patterns.

When it comes to CBD, there are a variety of ways that you can incorporate it into your daily routine. Many choose to use CBD oil or gummy candies, but you can also take supplements, smoke hemp, or even drink CBD-infused power shots.

It’s important to remember that not all CBD products are created equally. At The Hemp Philosophy, all of our products go through multi-stage and third-party testing to ensure that you’re getting the best quality CBD.

We hope that these daily health tips inspire you to make a positive change in your life and improve your well-being. Do you have any daily health tips that help you? Leave a comment below!