Natural ways to manage anxiety and stress (minus the toxic positivity)

Life can be one big balancing act. Juggling work, family commitments, house stuff and life admin can mean a fine line between keeping things running smoothly and completely losing all sense of what’s important. Then there’s everything else we have to fit in somehow – time for exercise, healthy meal planning, self-care, a social life, a love life. It’s all-consuming. Watching the news is stressful and depressing and spending hours on our phones doomscrolling can cause anxiety.

It’s little wonder things can feel overwhelmingly difficult.

Modern Life is Rubbish (a title from a Blur album in the 90s, if you’re wondering)

This overwhelm can lead to worry and fear that we can’t fulfil all of our commitments. We become anxious or worked up, and these feelings become our norm. This can then affect the way we live our lives and the lifestyle choices we make.

We may become less productive as our minds feel fuzzy and clouded by overwhelm, and we might withdraw from doing the things we enjoy due to mental exhaustion. We may then become more reliant on our ‘crutches’ such as caffeine, alcohol and cigarettes, and we may make poor food and physical activity choices.

Stress and anxiety are increasingly becoming a consequence of modern-day life, but that doesn’t mean we have to struggle or that we can’t make changes.

If anxiety or stress is severely affecting your quality of life, speaking to your GP can help. They can discuss the possibility of medications or talking therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with you, or recommend some next steps and referrals.

Managing stress and anxiety

If we’re able, there are things we can do ourselves to help naturally manage stress and anxiety:

·      Make positive, healthy food choices. Making the healthiest dietary choices available to us can empower us and make us feel more in control. After eating a healthy meal that we might have taken some time to prepare makes us feel virtuous, and it doesn’t add guilt to pre-existing feelings of stress and anxiety. As we know, feeling guilty only makes us feel worse, which can then send us further into a spiral of unhealthy choices.

·      Start the week with exercise. Exercise releases feel-good endorphins such as serotonin, which give us that post-exercise high. Starting the week on the right foot will prevent us from thinking “I didn’t exercise today, I might as well not exercise for the rest of the week, so I’ll start/try again next Monday”. Like healthy food choices, exercise is empowering, especially if it leads to positive body changes, which are confidence-boosting and can help relieve feelings of overwhelm.

·      Reduce your reliance on alcohol and caffeine. Although it has a stimulating effect, alcohol is actually a depressant. Having a few glasses at the weekend is keeping within the guidelines, but much more than that, and you could experience alcohol induced anxiety, brought on by the stress hormone cortisol that’s released when we drink excessively. Caffeine is a stimulant, and more than one or two cups can cause an increase in heart rate and disrupted sleep, both of which will make anxiety worse.

Self-care and toxic positivity

I fully understand that chronic, deep-set mental health struggles cannot be managed by simply having a bubble bath, reading a book or going for a walk. Those who talk about self-care in this way are well-meaning, after all, sometimes, a glass of wine in the bath with a face mask and a trashy mag is exactly what we need.

But there are times when this kind of self-care isn’t enough. In the same way as a migraine won’t go away by rubbing herbal balms into our foreheads (as nice as that feels), long-term poor mental health cannot be fixed by thinking more positively, writing a to-do list or indulging in a solo pamper session (whatever that means to you).

When times are so bad that you can’t even find the energy or mental capacity to brush your teeth, being told to simply stop overthinking isn’t helpful or fair.

This concept of thinking positively, even when things are feeling drastically bad, overwhelming, anxiety-inducing or a mix of all three, can be damaging. The consequences of this toxic positivity only serve to make the spiral worse.

So I’m by no means simplifying how to self-manage mild stress and anxiety. But if you’re able, making the healthiest choices available to you in terms of diet, movement and lifestyle really can make a difference.

If you don’t believe me, go outside right now and just run. Run for two minutes or run for half an hour, and then tell me how you feel. Your body might be screaming at you, but listen to what your mind is telling you. It’s probably telling you how good that felt. And that can’t be ignored. Who knows what the rest of the day might bring.

Until next time, Hannah