10 Tips to Reduce and Manage Anxiety

Anxiety affects millions of people worldwide. In our fast-paced society, we often promote behaviors that actually increase anxiety. However, there are small steps you can take to help combat this condition. Here are ten concrete steps you can take toward managing your anxiety responses.

1. Practice Mindfulness

Study after study has shown how effective mindfulness can be against anxious thoughts. It helps you focus on the present moment instead of worrying about the future or past. Start with just a few minutes each day, using guided meditation apps or focusing on your breath. Allow your thoughts to pass through you and simply notice them. Focus on your bodily sensations. Over time, regular mindfulness practice can rewire your brain to respond more calmly to stress.

2. Stay Active

Exercise is one of the most effective natural remedies for anxiety. Physical activity releases endorphins, which are our natural mood elevators. Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise, such as yoga or jogging, most days of the week. An even better practice is to get outside into nature by hiking, walking in the park, or visiting nature preserves. Breathing fresh air and being part of the natural world will ease your mind.

3. Eat Healthy

A balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains can help stabilize your mood and energy levels. Avoid too much caffeine and sugar, which can make anxiety worse. Instead, choose foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon and walnuts, which have been shown to reduce anxiety.

4. Get Enough Sleep

Sleep is crucial for mental health. Establish a regular sleep schedule by going to bed and waking up at the same time every day. Create a calming bedtime routine, such as reading a book or taking a warm bath, to signal to your body that it’s time to wind down.

5. Limit Alcohol Intake

While it may be tempting to use alcohol to calm your nerves, it can actually increase anxiety over time. Alcohol can disrupt sleep and affect your mood. Reducing or eliminating alcohol from your life can significantly reduce your anxiety.

6. Practice Deep Breathing

Deep breathing exercises can quickly reduce anxiety by helping you focus on your breath and relax your body. One effective technique is the 4-7-8 method: inhale deeply for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, and exhale slowly for eight seconds.

7. Keep an Active Social Life

Spending time with friends and family can provide emotional support, reduce feelings of isolation, and improve your mood. Make an effort to maintain regular contact with loved ones, whether through in-person visits, phone calls, or video chats.

8. Break Up Your Goals

Anxiety can make even simple tasks seem overwhelming. To combat this, set realistic goals for yourself and break larger tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. This way you’ll feel more in control of your goals. Celebrate every accomplishment to build up your confidence.

9. Learn to Say No

Taking on too many responsibilities can increase anxiety and lead to burnout. Recognize your limits and learn to say no when you can. Prioritize your own tasks and focus on what truly matters by setting healthy boundaries.

10. Seek Professional Help

Some people are unable to manage their anxiety on their own. Whether your anxiety is more general or is linked to specific situations (for example, phobias, intrusive thoughts, or obsessions), you may need a consultation with a mental health professional. Your best treatment may include therapy, anti-anxiety medications, or a combination of the two. It’s also important to determine (or rule out) other co-occurring issues, such as trauma. In therapy, you’ll learn the root cause of your anxiety, how to cope with stressful situations, and how to build your resilience.
To find out more about how therapy can help you reduce your anxiety, please reach out to us.

Quotes to Help with Climate Distress

In 2019, I started writing a book about the complexities of how our mental health can be impacted by climate change, and things to do about that. Then March 2020 hit, and I stopped writing. Fast forward to 2022. I’m looking over the book and wanted to share the myriad of quotes that were inspirational and supportive for me. Maybe some of these quotes will also click with you:

“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.”

— Margaret Atwood

“If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not”

— James Baldwin

“Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.”

— Viktor Frankl

“Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well…Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out…It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now”

— Vaclav Halvel

“Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame, Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.”

— Black Elk

“Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“Sometimes your belief system is really your fears attached to rules.”

— Sharon L. Adler

“It’s never a question of skin pigmentation. It’s never a question of just culture or sexual orientation or civilization. It’s what kind of human being you’re going to choose to be from your mama’s womb to the tomb and what kind of legacy will you leave.”

— Cornel West

“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

— Viktor Frankl

“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Action is the antidote to despair.”

— Edward Abbey

“That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

“we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves. we have got to make this world user friendly. user friendly.”

— Assata Shakur

“I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don’t lose hope! Wear your pink ribbon with pride!…Hope? What about a cure?”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Sit, be still, and listen, because you’re drunk and we’re at the edge of the roof.”

— Rumi

“When any of us feels any kind of distressing emotion, there are defense mechanisms that come into play that help try to stabilize us so we don’t feel so much distress. Those defenses are things like denial, numbing, minimizing the problem or intellectualizing it in some way. These help us emotionally on one level, but they also mean we’re more disconnected from the reality, from feeling the energy to want to engage. So the very thing that protects us also prevents us from taking action.”

— Wendy Greenspun

“You can present the material, but you can’t make me care”

— Bill Watterson

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”

— Audre Lorde

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

— Albert Einstein

“The secret of change is to focus all our energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
”

— Dan Millman

“Recovery is the normal adaptational process that follows destruction just like grief is the normal adaptational process that follows loss.”

— Mark Ragins, M.D.

“I used to think that any solution would come from the paradigms that I know. Now I think that the only thing is to think of the unimaginable. For the new generation, the unimaginable is not as unimaginable.”

— Alfonso Cuarón

“Many people think that the point of life is to solve their problems and be happy. But happiness is usually a fleeting sensation, and you never get rid of problems. Your purpose in life may be to become more who you are and more engaged with the people and the life around you, to really live your life. That may sound obvious, yet many people spend their time avoiding life. They are afraid to let it flow through them, and so their vitality gets channeled into ambitions, addictions, and preoccupations that don’t give them anything worth having. A dark night, may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return to living. It pares life down to its essentials and helps you get a new start.”

— Thomas Moore

“Sometimes I think,
I need a spare heart to feel
all the things I feel.”

— Sanober Khan

“Sometimes you have to get angry to get things done.”

— Ang Lee

“Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall.”

— Cornel West

“For Warmth
I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands
to keep the loneliness warm—
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hand preventing
my soul from leaving me
in anger.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Anxiety was born in the same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.”

— Paulo Coelho

“The universe doesn’t allow perfection.”

— Stephen Hawking

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.”

— Jodi Picoult

“Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”

— Kahlil Gibran

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Climate change is a lot like death. We all understand it is inevitable, but few of us truly accept it.”

— Brian McDermott

“I really can’t say, I guess I laugh to keep from crying
So much going on, people killing, people dying.”

— A Tribe Called Quest

“Our choice is to be in love or to be in fear. But to choose to be in love means to have a mountain inside of you, means to have the heart of the world inside you, means you will feel another’s suffering inside your own body and you will weep. You will have no protection from the world’s pain because it will be your own.”

— China Galland

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.”

— Anne Lamott

“Some days, 24 hours is too much to stay put in, so I take the day hour by hour, moment by moment. I break the task, the challenge, the fear into small, bite-size pieces. I can handle a piece of fear, depression, anger, pain, sadness, loneliness, illness. I actually put my hands up to my face, one next to each eye, like blinders on a horse.”

— Regina Brett

“Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be of much help to others”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence? Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.”

— Angeles Arrien

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

— Vincent van Gogh

“Be generous with your strengths and skills—they are not your private property.”

— Joanna Macy

How to understand and cope with climate grief

Grief is normal.  It is a normal response to a loss. Experiencing grief, and the act of grieving, is a natural way to process losing something or someone.  It is important to do, important to feel, and important to understand.  You can move through these feelings and come out on the other side; changed by the experience, yes--but destroyed by it, no.

Grieving the crisis-level change in our climate—be it globally, nationally, locally, culturally, individually--is normal.  It is a normal response to an abnormal situation—the abnormal situation being the rapid change in weather and the consequences that follow.  Experiencing grief around the loss of species, communities, people, cultures, and ways of doing things is nothing new, for oppressed groups have lived, and continue to live, this experience. 

Perhaps it is those of us in privileged positions who are finally waking up to the disaster and the pain so many have already felt, via the experience of climate grief. I see how my privilege extends to having the luxury of time and space to examine what hurts some of us and how to process it. For me, climate grief isn’t just about how to cope with change, loss, and the big feelings.  It’s also about how to use this moment in time to honor and respect the pain and suffering of all people on this planet, past and present--and ultimately, how to make a ‘new normal’ out of the climate crisis that benefits all humans. Because not everybody had it good prior to our weather patterns going rogue. And if our climate becomes dismantled, how about also dismantling lots of harmful systems as well? But I’ll save these ramblings for a different blog post.  Back to narrowing into climate grief…

Climate-related grief can show up in lots of ways for people. For some, it is sadness, which is the common emotion many associate with grief and loss. And yes—you may be feeling sadness about a lived experience, like the afternoon rain and thunderstorms that don’t happen as often anymore, or the smoke-filled summer days that your child experiences so much more than you did as a kid.  It is sad.  It’s a loss of familiarity, a loss of balance, and a loss of control.

Climate-related grief can also take many other forms, in ways that do not include sadness.

Here are some emotions and behaviors people can experience as our climate continues to drastically change:

• Depression and Anxiety: This includes feeling overwhelmed, helpless, hopeless, chronically worried, tired, guilty, and/or unable to stop thinking about information, picture, videos, or lived experiences related to the climate crisis. These symptoms may also lead to pre-trauma or feeling traumatized.

• Denial: Avoiding thinking or talking about it, ignoring the problem, discrediting science or reality, head-in-the-sand type response. This is often one of the early phases of climate grief and can go on for a long time (how long ago did An Inconvenient Truth come out?)

• Anger: impulsive actions, righteous indignation, justifying actions, blaming or demonizing others, feeling irritated all the time. With unacknowledged grief, emotions can come out sideways and not be directly aimed at the actual issue. For example, road rage. Is it really the driver in front of you that is bringing up all this anger? Probably not.

• Defending: Putting a positive spin on everything, defending privilege, unrealistic thinking, token efforts, “toxic positivity”.

• Self-Esteem and Lifestyle: Sleep disturbances, feeling victimized, self-criticism, feeling isolated from others.

• Numbing/Addictions: When something feels unbearable or hopeless, often self-medicating comes to the rescue. Numbing activities such as substance use, binge-watching, over or under-eating, scrolling, shopping, etc…can be ways to cope or self-regulate due to deep grief, fear, or trauma someone is experiencing. Although helpful in the short-term, long-term it isn’t a sustainable solution.

So, what to do?  Here are some ideas.

• When you read the above information, what clicked with you? What do you relate to, or what have you experienced? Part of this grief process is understanding the concept of fluidity. Grief is non-linear; you might feel you are in a phase of grief; however, it is normal to bounce around within the bulleted points. For example, one moment you might be angry at big business, another moment you might feel guilty you haven’t done enough to fight climate change, another moment you might feel sad about the flooding affecting people somewhere.

• Trust this process. Grief is natural, normal, and important. While elements of the climate crisis may feel impossible to bear, feelings do ‘move’ and shift. That said, it is often very helpful to process your feelings with a person or group who gets it.

• Can you remember a time in the past when you experienced a loss and came out the other side? Remembering your strength and ability to navigate grief can help boost your confidence to turn towards pain, rather than away from it.

• Acknowledging and becoming more aware of the connection between climate grief and daily stressors is unique to the individual. For example, if you are working in the environmental field, you may be constantly swimming in bad news and be dealing with a specific set of grief (and burnout) issues. For others, you may get hits of climate grief as you read an article and have different kinds of grief challenges. For some, you may be directly experiencing a weather-related disaster, and this brings yet another possible kind of grief issue. And for many, there is no time or mental space to address these climate grief nuances, because living day-to-day is the most pressing need.

• Know your limits. For many people I work with, climate-related issues exacerbate other mental health challenges or daily stress they already are dealing with. Figuring out ways to navigate the existential as well as the here-and-now often involves consciously setting limits around how much thinking or ruminating on the topic of climate is helpful.

• Ask for help. As talked about earlier, feeling connected to another person or group who understands and empathizes with your feelings is important. As cliché as it sounds, there is no shame in asking for help, and you are not alone. It is courageous to seek out help and, ultimately, speaks to the love you have for something greater than yourself—Mother Earth.

For more information on how I can be of support, feel free to contact me at:

info@amandarebel.com

2 Simple Ways to be Present in the Midst of Climate Stress and Anxiety

Antarctica had some of its hottest days on record this past February, and my first response was a gut-level sickening dread. I’ve felt this way before, and my mind quickly supports my body by creating worst case scenarios. I then spin out fast—or shut down fast.

I’ve gotten tired of living in the extremes, as have my clients, so I’ve been working on how to fill in the middle ground of this all-or-nothing reaction. Part of the answer lies in staying in the present moment as much as possible when the big surges of dread, fear, sadness, anger and anxiety happen.

I’ve come to realize that dread (and other feelings) can be a signal that one has entered the territory of being aware that one is feeling—feeling vulnerable, scared, lost, and/or out of control. There could be a deeper truth one senses but does not want to face—or can’t yet face. And when all these fearful parts are vying for an answer, a solution, a fix in order to minimize feeling the feelings—it can be hard to not immediately follow their lead.

Here are two things that have helped myself, and others, manage the reactions that climate-news whiplashes bring. It starts with getting more savvy at staying in the here-and-now. Although these two tips may not directly address climate-change, they can help us cope with the combination of daily life challenges mixed with climate-related anxiety and stress challenges.

1. Cut back on multi-tasking. Getting busy can initially be a helpful and healthy way to take action, to feel engaged in something positive. Choosing distraction on purpose, as a way to self-regulate big emotional up’s and down’s can also be helpful. That said, chronic multi-tasking is not helpful. We get confused, drained, and strained.

   Our lives seem to be filled with multi-taking, or short attention span activities. Our nervous system can get used to this type of stimulation, and after a while, it may seem like being scattered and flitting from thing to thing, past to future is normal operations.

   And yet you can choose to narrow down. Even in a harried moment of writing an email, while hearing people talk, while feeling heavy and off because of a fight you had last night, while having your phone blow up with texts, while needing to make a dentist appointment, while still shaking off the article you read about Australia burning, while remembering a meeting you aren’t prepped for, while internally yelling at yourself to do more, and do better, to keep it together— you can choose to focus on just one of these streams. Hear the chatter of the people, decide if you want to invest in headphones or earplugs, then move on—focus on writing the email, notice each letter you type. Take some breaths. Then attend to the next thing. And the next.

   You can also make the decision to carve out some amount of time to practice doing just one thing—and commit to immersing yourself in that one thing. Even washing a mug and focusing on the sensations of water on skin, hands moving, soap bubbling, is a practice you could probably incorporate once a day, for as short as 30 seconds.

2. Experiment with giving yourself time, even ignoring conventional time. Part of the work of coping with new unknowns via climate-change is the process of becoming more flexible, spontaneous, tradition-deviant, courageous, collaborative and strong. These qualities are important to hone because they are skills that will help us continue to adapt, to increase our comfort-ability with being uncomfortable, and will encourage our minds and bodies to problem-solve in more non-linear, creative ways. And can help us stay in the now.

   One way you can embrace fluidity, lack of control, paradoxes, loss, adjustments is to engage in play, wonder and dreaming—which requires us to slow down. Float on a raft in a lake, lie in a hammock, look at the stars, build a thing, lose track of time. Get absorbed in something fully that feeds you, inspires you. This is different than losing yourself in a fantasy—this is basically taking a break from future-ing or past-ing in order to be able to jump back into the overwhelming, scary stuff.

   You may have to work on giving yourself permission to lose track of time—for the phrase, “waste of time” can be cunning and deep. Notice if you create some open time for yourself, then feel guilty for not attending to other things. It may take some time and validation from yourself, and someone else, to fully immerse yourself in losing track of time.

If you are experiencing anxiety because of climate change, climate therapy could help. Reach out to me through my contact form to start your healing journey.

Sharing Our Climate Crisis Stories

Knowing you are not alone in your experience can be a helpful reminder when facing what feels hard, scary or overwhelming. This post is an excerpt from a book I am currently working on. In sharing my story, maybe you can feel a little less alone in yours.

The fall of 2018 in California was so dry and rainless. Our summer had been full of wildfires and smoky days, so a rainless fall had put me on edge.  Everywhere I looked, I saw tinder-sticks, and imagined any little patch of anything could start a colossal fire.  And as the winds came, those colossal fires did, in fact, resume. By late fall, the Bay Area seemed to have grown accustomed to hazardous air, and when the smoke from the Camp Fire reached its apex in early November, the air my daughter and I breathed was deemed the “worst in the world.”[1]

My toddler and I were home sick with some combo of a smoke-cold the day I was forced to look deeper at my fears.  Her coughing had become a continuous background sound, painfully reminding me that her pre-existing asthma was being exacerbated by the fine particles settling into her little lungs.  The old Berkeley duplex we lived in was ill equipped for these new climate hazards, and I’d been anxiously trying to seal the cracks and holes I had once found charming. But the air kept floating in, of course, mocking my attempts to create safety, and draining my daughter of her health and energy.  I kept hoping the air would clear.  It didn’t.   

As the afternoon wore on, the sky became dark too early.  More smoke was coming in. Things were getting worse, not better. I texted a fellow mom friend, and we decided to meet in Tahoe that night with our kids. Flee to the mountains, I thought.  Is this what it has come to?

I immediately started doubting my decision, per my usual self-distrust pattern.  I wondered if I was over-reacting.  I began comparing myself to the mainstream—schools were still open, people were going to work, operating as if nothing too abnormal was going on.  As a case manager, I considered the 90 clients on my caseload and how they had it way worse than me.  Who am I to have the luxury to leave? But no one knew when the fires would be contained or when the winds would carry the smoke out of the Bay.  And the asthma inhaler and humidifier weren’t cutting it.  

It was after 7:00 pm when we left; I hoped it was late enough to avoid getting stuck in the notoriously slow-moving traffic along I-80, where the air was even more nightmarish.  As I ran in and out of the house, franticly packing the car while attempting to not breathe, my thoughts rapidly raced, “The N-95 mask doesn’t fit her,” “Our car air filter hasn’t been changed in a while,” “Am I going to make her sicker?” 

My daughter’s cough worsened as I sped through the worst of it.  As she slept and coughed, the too-big, useless mask slipped off her face.  There was nothing I could do. Visibility was scary and unpredictable, like a fog that got blackout-drunk and starting raging against anything in its way. I found myself narrowing my thinking, keeping my focus on what was in front of me.  It got to the point where adrenaline took over, and I didn’t have room anymore to notice my fear. I just drove really, really fast. 

My daughter and I found relief—when we reached the mountains, her cough became semi-normal.  I felt ashamed for how much I had taken breathe-able air for granted.  Although relieved, I was still on guard—worried about my daughter, about the people in California being affected, and what the air would be like when we went home. Although I had made the right decision to leave and was privileged enough to do so—I still felt a nagging unease that this challenge wasn’t close to being over.  

That day was my wake-up call.  Granted, the climate-related crisis I experienced was tame compared to what others endured in California that day—and what others in the U.S. and around the world have experienced or are currently dealing with.  All the same, it was an event that shook me up, and left me with a lingering sense that I needed to do more. And that I also needed to get my confidence up around decision making.   

After that time, I started noticing the information needed regarding how to deal with climate-related stress was sorely lacking.  There was a lot of reading I could do about the predictions and the tragedies—and not much in the way of how to cope with it all. 

Yes, we know the glaciers are melting—and that things may get a lot worse before they get better.  That everything may change as a result of our changing climate.  And how are we doing with this news? What are we thinking, feeling, believing? Who do we want to be in the face of climate crisis and change, what actions do we want to take?  

Well, it is time to start figuring that out.

If you are experiencing anxiety because of climate change, counseling for climate crisis can help. Reach out to me through my contact form to start your healing journey.

 J.K. Dineen and Gwendolyn Wu, "Northern California air quality rated the worst in the world, conditions 'hazardous,'" San Francisco Chronicle, November 16, 2016, https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/Smoke-still-plagues-Bay-Area-skies-a-week-after-13394932.php.