Most of us are not ‘morning’ people, so when you add anxiety to the equation you can see why mornings are usually the most anxious time of the day for people with an anxiety disorder.
If you start your day off right, you’ll notice that your anxiety levels are much lower than usual for the rest of the day. A few simple things are all it takes to reduce anxiety naturally.
One of the first things to do when you get up in the morning is to undertake a light stretching session. Breathe deeply and gently stretch out your arms and legs. This increases circulation throughout your body and freshens up your mind.
It’s best to avoid checking your anxiety level at this stage, and try and stay focused on the movements you are doing.
Another simple exercise is to set your alarm clock about twenty to thirty minutes earlier than usual so that you can spend some time alone. You can release worries by taking some time alone to write down what is on your mind.
Writing your fears down in a worry diary is one of the quickest ways to release them. Creating this extra space for yourself in the morning allows you to feel more in control of the day rather than always running to catch up.
You can also organize your day the night before so you’re not waking up rushed. Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes each night to pack your bag, choose your outfit and handle other details that often preoccupy your time each morning.
Don’t be afraid to be selfish with your time. Regardless if live alone or have a big family to look after, you owe it to yourself to take control of your day and get every day off to a great start!
If you think about it, consider how you breathe when you’re tense or anxious about something. If you’re like most people, your breathing becomes really shallow and you may even “sink” into your body, rounding your shoulders and slouching slightly. This often sets you up for feelings of fatigue as you breathing is too shallow.
Making sure fresh oxygen is circulating throughout your body helps to keep you alert and clear headed. When you are feeling anxious, you might slow down your breathing and thereby reducing the amount of oxygen you need.
The right way to breathe is to allow your abdomen to expand when you inhale. This allows the air to flow deeply into the pit of the stomach. When you’re feeling anxious, you may take very small breaths that don’t even allow air to get into the lower abdomen.
I walk you through a set of breathing exercises in my book Panic Away so that you understand how to breathe properly no matter what you are feeling or experiencing but basically you are looking to achieve more regular breaths that move your stomach up rather than all of the movement taking place in your upper chest.
At first, the breathing exercise might seem awkward or uncomfortable, but practicing regularly will help you adapt a healthy habit. You’ll notice that it’s easier to feel calm and secure and all it really takes is about ten minutes of practice a few times per day.
Good breathing habits have a number of health benefits, so pay attention to your breathing pattern. You’ll be amazed at how a simple change can enhance your health and well-being!
By Barry McDonagh, who is an international panic disorder coach.He created the Panic Away program to help people around the world deal with their anxiety and avoid panic attacks – a subject that he is personally attuned to because he himself found that he was prone to these issues since he was young. His hatred of his powerless lead him down the path of finding natural ways to treat himself without having to depend on expensive medications.
Many people who experience the unusual sensations associated with panic disorder soon learn that the physical effects of the adrenaline boost experienced during a heightened state of anxiety can take their toll on their energy levels.
We’re all equipped to experience the ‘fight or flight’ response automatically when faced with some sort of danger. Unfortunately, people who experience anxiety and panic attacks on a regular basis get this rush of adrenaline far too often, leaving their bodies drained of energy.
Does this sound familiar?
When your body is constantly in a ‘crisis’ mode, it can be very difficult to have enough energy to do much else. You might feel emotionally and physically exhausted on a daily basis, or you might become very sensitive to people and situations.
Fortunately, there are ways you can get out of this malicious cycle. Identifying the bodily triggers of your anxiety or a panic attack is the first step. Next, you need to work on processing the bodily sensations so the fear around those sensations is removed.
In my book Panic Away, I share some specific strategies that can help you end the fear of fear and take control of your body. You learn how to process the anxiety so you’re harnessing the energy and won’t feel so exhausted each time you go through the cycle.
Reduce the Risk for Anxiety and Panic Attacks – Reducing Anxiety with Your Diet
You already know the health mantra, “you are what you eat” but eating healthy isn’t just for people that want to lose weight or increase energy.
Your diet has an effect on your central nervous system. Certain types of foods and beverages can increase your heart rate, make you sweat and even make you feel lethargic. If you’re not getting the right types of nutrients, your body may not be able to cope with stress and certain bodily functions can even break down.
Most people eat a very acidic diet, a diet that can exaggerate anxiety and trigger a number of health problems. In order to bring your body back into balance, you need to maintain an alkaline balance in the food you eat.
I explain this in more detail in my book Panic Away. Basically, foods that contain a significant amount of salt, sugar, hydrogenated oils and unhealthy fats can lower your body’s resistance to stress and disease. Eating foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables help raise your resistance.
For optimum balance, you need to aim for an 80 percentalkaline diet. Load up on fruits and raw vegetables and healthy sources of protein so that these foods become a staple of your diet.
You’ll soon find that your body becomes stronger and you have more energy. This means lower levels of fatigue and stress throughout the week, which in turn means a lower risk of anxiety.
If you feel you are not prepared to make major changes to your diet, then you should as very least eliminate caffeine and alcohol from your diet. Doing that alone can significantly reduce feelings of general anxiety.
Lastly drink plenty of fresh water daily. I have found that not only does regular intake of water ward off any subtle feelings of anxiety, but it is also incredibly useful for building stamina and avoiding fatigue.
Give this some real consideration. Simply increasing the amount of fresh water you drink is a very easy step to incorporate into your daily routine. Most of us fall short of consuming the recommended amount.
You should regularly take stock of your dietary habits and make some significant changes. Try it for just a few weeks and notice the difference you feel.
By Barry McDonagh, who is an international panic disorder coach.He created the Panic Away program to help people around the world deal with their anxiety and avoid panic attacks – a subject that he is personally attuned to because he himself found that he was prone to these issues since he was young. His hatred of his powerless lead him down the path of finding natural ways to treat himself without having to depend on expensive medications.
Eliminate All Plaque Buildup in Your Arteries – Does Meat Cause Heart Attacks? Surprise, Surprise…
Studies researching the connection between meat consumption and cardiovascular healthhave been quite contradictory, which has baffled researchers.
But a new study from the Journal of Hypertension may finally explain this.
Yes, meat can cause stroke and heart attack. But what you do after eating meat may completely reverse the damage.
You see, one of the reasons why human beings have a limited lifespan and why elderly people have greater levels of cardiovascular diseaseis because our blood vessels naturally age along with the rest of our bodies.
This means that the tissue that constitutes our blood vessels becomes damaged and compromises our bodies’ ability to circulate blood.
Researchers have been trying for some time to figure out what foods accelerate this natural aging so that they can recommend against eating them.
The easiest way to do this is to examine the substances that seem to increase naturally in our bodies as we age and to test their effects on blood vessel tissue.
Researchers can then work out whether these substances are related to any of the foods we eat.
This is exactly what the authors of the new study did. They noticed that previous studies had found that people with high levels of trimethylamine N-oxide (or TMAO) in their blood were twice as likely as those with low levels were to suffer heart attacks, experience strokes, or die prematurely.
They related this finding to age by measuring the TMAO levels in 101 older and 22 young adults, finding that TMAO levels increased as people aged and that blood vessel functioning became significantly worse over time, with far greater blood vessel tissue damage.
They confirmed these results in a study on mice. When they fed TMAO to young mice, their blood vessels looked like those of mice more than twice their age.
In just a few months of adding TMAO to their diets, they aged the blood vessels of 12-month-old mice to resemble those seen in 27-month-old mice. In human years, that is a blood vessel increase from 35 to 79 years old.
So, what is TMAO?
TMAO is a substance produced by your liver from trimethylamine, and trimethylamine is a substance that is produced as a by-product when your gut bacteria process the amino acids L-carnitine and choline, the proteins found in abundance especially in animal products like meat, eggs, and cream.
In other words, the more animal products you eat, the higher the levels of TMAO are in your blood, and the more blood vessel damage you suffer.
But this finding may not be as straightforward as it seems.
When the scientists fed old mice a substance called dimethyl butanol, which occurs in olive and grapeseed oils, red wine, and balsamic vinegar, they managed to reverse much of the blood vessel damage.
This probably shows why red meat is unhealthful for many people but barely affects those who, for example, eat the Mediterranean diet, with its central ingredient of olive oil.
Therefore, so long as you eat a relatively healthful diet and pile on the olive oil and other foods high in dimethyl butanol, a reasonable amount of animal protein may not do much damage to your heart.
Scientists from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center set out to investigate this dilemma.
And in a new study, published in the journal Circulation, they reveal that one letter makes all the difference.
The scientists tested two different measures of HDL cholesterol.
They obtained the data they analyzed from four large studies: the Dallas Heart Study, the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, and the Prevention of REnal and Vascular ENdstage Disease Intervention Trial.
Altogether, they used the data of 15,784 subjects who they tracked between 8 and 12 years to determine the subjects’ health outcomes.
The two different ways of testing HDL cholesterol yielded different results.
The most common way to test HDL is to measure the amount of HDL in our blood. This measurement is called HDL-C.
Another test is called HDL-P. This counts the number of HDL particles that circulate through our blood.
Because each particle contains different amounts of HDL cholesterol, these tests often result in different HDL concentrations.
For example, if you have twice as many HDL particles as I have, but each of my HDL particles contains twice as much HDL cholesterol as yours do, your HDL-P is higher, but our HDL-C scores are the same.
This study showed that HDL-P scores were more important for heart health than the commonly used HDL-C scores were.
Compared with the people with the lowest HDL-P scores, those with the highest scores were 37 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack and 34 percent less likely to suffer a stroke.
Eliminate All Plaque Buildup in Your Arteries – How Bad Cholesterol Can Be Heart-Healthy
To date, research into omega-3 fatty acids and heart disease has been a bit confusing. In general, studies seem to show that these fats can reduce our risk of heart disease, but they simultaneously appear to show that omega-3 fats raise LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, usually called bad cholesterol.
LDL cholesterol is called bad cholesterol because it is the type that clogs our arteries and causes atherosclerosis.
So how can more LDL be good?
The answer lies in a new study published in the latest Journal of the American Heart Association.
In response to this paradox, researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and Harvard Medical School hypothesized that the answer lies in the type of LDL cholesterol that is increased by omega-3 fats.
They collected the data of 26,034 people from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Women’s Health Study. This included their eating habits, their consumption of fish and other sources of omega-3, their medication use, their physical activity levels, their smoking status, and a whole range of other information.
Most importantly, it included the results of nuclear magnetic resonance scans on the participant’s blood that could characterize the components of their blood in detail.
They divided omega-3 intake into total omega-3, fish, and the omega-3 subtypes called eicosapentaenoic, docosahexaenoic, and alpha-linolenic acids.
Alpha-linolenic acids appear in plants like flaxseed, walnuts, and chia. The other two are obtained from fish and, if you are vegetarian, from edible algae.
Those who consumed the most fish and total omega-3 had significantly lower triglycerides (fats in the blood) and higher large VLDL (very-low-density lipoprotein) particles.
Those who consumed the most eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids in the form of fish had the highest total and LDL cholesterol, but their cholesterol particles were larger than those who consumed the least of these fatty acids.
Total omega-3 intake as well as docosahexaenoic acid and alpha-linolenic acid also increased the participant’s HDL cholesterol (high-density lipoprotein; so-called “good cholesterol”) and the size of their HDL particles.
These are important findings since they again confirm that it is not our cholesterol levels, but rather the exact character of our cholesterol particles, that matter when it comes to the origins of heart disease.
To be more precise, it is small cholesterol particles that cause atherosclerosis, not large ones, and since omega-3 fats promote large particles at the expense of small ones, it is a good prevention tool against atherosclerosis.
This post is from the Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy Program. It was created by Scott Davis. Because he once suffered from high cholesterol, so much so that he even had a severe heart attack. This is what essentially led him to finding healthier alternatives to conventional medication. Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy is a unique online program that provides you with all the information you need to regain control of your cholesterol levels and health, as a whole.
Anxiety Self-Help – Can a Panic Attack Make You Lose Control?
During a panic attack, some people are prone to believe they’re going to lose control. This feared loss of control can be physical (e.g., that all your vital organs will completely lose the run of themselves and descend into chaos) or emotional/mental (e.g., that you’ll lose your grip on reality).
Those who hate social embarrassment tend to suffer from this fear the most. The feared loss of control could range from screaming in public to picking up a knife and killing the nearest and dearest person to you (not that we all don’t think of this from time to time!).
Put your mind at rest! As scary as those thoughts may be, you’re not going to commit any of these acts. Relax. The reason you experience the thoughts is because your body feels out of control. Your mind thinks that if your body is out of control, it’s next on the list.
You’re not going to lose it. In fact, I’m sure that with all the panic attacks and heightened anxiety you’ve experienced in public places, nobody even noticed that you looked uncomfortable. We are, by nature, social animals, and we dread to be seen in some kind of embarrassing situation.
The idea of jumping from your chair in a business meeting and screaming for an ambulance may go through your mind, but it’s unlikely to happen. Most people find a way to politely excuse themselves.
In the end, even if we do embarrass ourselves socially, does it really matter? We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. So what if we cause a scene and great embarrassment? Life is too short to keep up with appearances all the time. In fact, the more honest you are with your fears, the less pressure you subject yourself to.
Anxiety Self-Help – Can a Panic Attack Make You Go Crazy?
It’s understandable to fear you may be going crazy when you suffer from an anxiety disorder. There’s so little real public awareness of mental disease, so people often jump to extreme conclusions. These conclusions are usually based on misinformation and an overactive imagination.
The most commonly known mental health issue is schizophrenia—the word itself strikes terror within the average person. Schizophrenia is a major disorder characterized by severe symptoms such as disjointed thoughts and speech, babbling, delusions or strange beliefs (for example, sufferers often claim they’re receiving messages from an inner voice), and hallucinations.
Furthermore, schizophrenia appears to have a largely inherited genetic component, so those with schizophrenic family members have a higher predisposition than those who do not.
Schizophrenia generally begins very gradually, not suddenly (such as during a panic attack). Additionally, because it runs in families, only a certain proportion of people can become schizophrenic; in other people, no amount of stress will cause the disorder.
A third important point is that people who become schizophrenic have usually shown some mild symptoms (unusual thoughts, flowery speech, etc.) for most of their lives.
Thus, if this hasn’t been noticed yet in you, then chances are you won’t become schizophrenic. This is especially true if you’re over twenty-five, since schizophrenia generally first appears in the late teens to early twenties.
By Barry McDonagh, who is an international panic disorder coach.He created the Panic Away program to help people around the world deal with their anxiety and avoid panic attacks – a subject that he is personally attuned to because he himself found that he was prone to these issues since he was young. His hatred of his powerless lead him down the path of finding natural ways to treat himself without having to depend on expensive medications.
Anxiety almost always comes with a level of disturbing thoughts. You might be driving with your children and then get a flash thought of losing control and driving into an oncoming car. Another example is looking down from a bridge and suddenly getting terrified by the idea that you might lose all control of your senses and jump.
If you experience such thoughts, I want to reassure you that, regardless of how extreme, don’t worry about them. They’re the result of an active imagination coupled with anxiety and, often, something or someone about which you care deeply. These thoughts persist because you react so strongly to them. If you didn’t have a strong reaction, the thoughts would never bother you.
Thescary thoughts are like a small five-year-old looking for attention and targeting something you care about to get a reaction from you. They occur to people who would never dream of doing what they think about. It’s just the very fact of having the thoughts that shocks people and leads them to believe they’re bad in some way.
The truth is that these thoughts are the by-product of an overactive imagination mixed with a good dollop of anxiety. It’s the anxious reaction to the thoughts that keeps them going around and around, as if you’re tense inside and the thoughts speed up.
I’ve outlined this process in Stage 2, but here’s a quick reminder.
Visually, it’s like this. Thoughts float up in front of us all the time during our waking day. Normally, we ignore most thoughts and continue what we’re doing. Other times, we really get stuck into the thought and examine it in detail, such as “what I have to do today” thoughts.
When anxious thoughts enter, people generally whack them away and try to run from them. This never works, because the energy put into hitting away the thought instead powers it to rebound with even more force and intensity.
For the moment, your best way to deal with this is to accept the chain of thoughts as they happen. When “terrible idea X” enters your mind. you simply go:
There you are again! I’m getting totally bored by all this scare-mongering. It’s not relevant to me or my life—but sure, go ahead and tell the awful idea again if it makes you feel better.
Talk to the thoughts as if they’re visitors that have no relationship to your real self and you’re simply being polite by letting them run. Don’t force them away—that creates the rebound effect—but don’t feel you have to pay too much attention either.
The goal is to move your attention to what you want to focus on without reacting to the scary thought. That way, your energy goes into what you want and not into what you don’t want.
You know who you are and that these thoughts don’t represent you, so don’t worry—the very fact that you get so upset by the thoughts shows how different you are from the ideas that torment you.
Another way to view the thoughts is as if they were school bullies trying to upset you by saying awful things about, for example, people close to you. If you get scared, the bully continues to taunt even more. If you laugh and say, “Sure, whatever,” then walk away, the bully loses interest.
Acceptance is key. Getting upset by the thoughts only fuels the inner tension further because you add more worry and stress to the problem. If you say to yourself that this is a period you’re moving through and that it will work out fine, you’ll move into that acceptance more easily.
“Switching off” the anxious thoughts is best achieved by saying, “Oh, very scary! Are you done yet?” Then continuously bring yourself back to the moment or task at hand without getting annoyed for having these thoughts. What you really need to adopt is an attitude that all is well. And it is. These fears are just a nuisance, but they’ll pass.
Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts – Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts
Intrusive thoughts can come and go all day long at the most random moments of the day and take their toll on your stress levels. You might have difficulty concentrating, and react with a jolt every time you think a worrying intrusive thought. Just remember that you are not losing your mind and the thoughts will stop when your anxiety level reduces.
I’ve identified several strategies for overcoming intrusive thoughts in my book Panic Away.
To help remove intrusive thoughts you need to learn how to disarm them by not reacting.
Look at it this way.
When you think some of these thoughts you might feel a bodily reaction like a jolt of fear. What you need to learn is to short circuit the emotional reaction to the thoughts.
Begin by accepting that the thoughts are not the real you, they are the product of an over active imagination mixed with anxiety.
When they arrive, imagine them like clouds passing overhead. Watch them float by but do not react to them emotionally. Remain detached from the thought. These thoughts are not you and do not represent the real you.
Say to yourself, “I am observing this thought, I’m not going to get upset, anxious or even worry about it. It will pass…”
The more often you do this, the less reactive you will become to the thoughts. These thoughts are powered by your reaction to them, the more you react the more they reappear.
If you learn to not react, the intrusive thoughts will simply fade away because you are no longer reacting emotionally to them.
By Barry McDonagh, who is an international panic disorder coach.He created the Panic Away program to help people around the world deal with their anxiety and avoid panic attacks – a subject that he is personally attuned to because he himself found that he was prone to these issues since he was young. His hatred of his powerless lead him down the path of finding natural ways to treat himself without having to depend on expensive medications.
