5 Ways To Overcome Anxiety

Are you ready to overcome anxiety and take back control of your life?

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an estimated 40 million adults in the U.S. have some kind of anxiety disorder.

If you feel like you're alone in your struggle, rest assured that you're not. I know how debilitating anxiety can be. For many years of my life, I suffered in silence.

Eventually, I hit my emotional threshold and started educating myself on ways that I could overcome my anxiety.

Are you ready to live an anxious-free life? Keep reading for 5 strategies that will help you overcome anxiety once and for all.

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This is my anxiety story.

When I was in high school, my anxiety was so crippling that I would skip school. I felt anxious being around anyone, to the point that I couldn't even speak. It was so bad that I would rather fail my classes than stand up in front of a group of students and do a presentation.

I was anxious about anything and everything. After a lot of inner work, I was able to overcome my anxiety, with no medication. Through trial and error, I found 5 strategies that work best for me.

Don't get me wrong… I still get anxious now and then. However, I am better able to stop anxiety dead in its tracks. The reason why a lot of people struggle to overcome anxiety is that they don't heal the root cause of their anxiety.

Instead, they focus on their physical symptoms without addressing the psychological issue. When I used to feel anxious, I would look for ways to escape or avoid negative emotions. In short, I didn't want to feel.

Instead, I numbed my pain through video games. Researchers have found that using video games as a coping mechanism for anxiety predicts symptoms of gaming disorder. I received short-term relief from my anxiety when I played video games. However, it created a myriad of problems in my life, long-term.

It wasn't until I learned how to effectively feel and cope with painful emotions that I was able to heal my anxiety from the inside out. I want to help you do the same. Let's dive into 5 ways that I am able to overcome anxiety.

1. Meditation and breathwork

Anxiety is only experienced when your mind is focused on the future. The fear of what could happen keeps you removed from the present moment. It doesn't feel like it, but anxiety is designed to protect you from a danger that may occur in the future.

If you have experienced pain or trauma in your past, it's natural to worry that you may experience it again, which will cause you to feel fear in the present and imagine the worst-case scenarios.

Most often, the things that we fear never come to fruition, even though we spend countless hours feeling anxious about them. Meditation takes you away from the future and brings you back to the present moment.

The purpose of meditation isn't to try and stop your thoughts altogether. Rather, it's to become an observer of them. Every time that you notice your mind getting the best of you, bring yourself back to your breath.

The goal of meditation is to train your mind to refocus and calm itself. Give yourself the gift of silence and inward reflection each day, even if it's just 10 minutes.

I like to use guided meditation apps to meditate. Two of my favorites are Calm and Headspace. Your mind is a muscle. The more that you meditate, the less anxiety you will have.

Breathwork is an active form of meditation for releasing anxiety. Think of your mind as if it were a kite and your breath was like the wind. Taking deep diaphragmatic breathing (wind) helps to calm the mind which brings you back to the here and now.

When you engage in deep and rhythmic breathing, you activate the vagus nerve, turn on your parasympathetic nervous system, and pump the brakes on anxiety. There are two different breathwork techniques that I would recommend.

Box Breathing:

This is a powerful technique for bringing the breath back to its regular rhythm. You breathe in through your nose and inhale for 5 seconds, hold your breath for 5 seconds, and then exhale for 5 seconds. When you exhale, pause and hold your breath for 5 seconds. I recommend repeating steps 1 through 3, three to seven times.

Wim Hof Breathing:

Wim Hof is known as The IceMan. He has broken Guinness World Records for withstanding extreme temperatures and holding his breath for long periods of time. He created a powerful breathing practice that involves taking 30 deep breaths, where you inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth.

After those 30 breath cycles, you hold your breath for 1 minute and then take another deep breath in and hold that for 15 seconds. I like to repeat that process twice. This is one of my favorite ways to relieve anxiety and put myself in an optimal state.

2. Move Your Body

Moving your body is another great way to relieve anxiety. Emotion is energy in motion. When you change your physiology, you change how you feel. Most people feel their anxiety when their breathing is shallow.

The best way to counteract this uncomfortable physical sensation is through radical movement. I like to put on music and dance each morning. Instantly, I feel amazing.

Your body and your mind are connected. Whatever feels stuck or stagnant in the body can be released through movement.

3. Heal Your Pain

Oftentimes, people have anxiety in adulthood because they have yet to heal their unresolved trauma. Early evidence of cellular memory shows that when we experience trauma, our brain and body’s cells hold an imprint of the traumatic event.

When a child experiences something traumatic, it is common for them to detach from their emotions as a way of coping with their pain. The anticipation of future trauma can manifest itself as anxiety because the mind and body are in a constant state of fight or flight.

Yes, trauma can change the brain, but so can healing. Even though the pain inflicted on us was not our fault, I believe that healing that pain is our own responsibility. There are many ways that you can heal trauma.

Working with a licensed therapist who specializes in trauma recovery and abuse is a great way to heal emotional wounds and turn your pain into power.

Another option is doing psychedelics or plant medicine like Ayahuasca to heal trauma. I recently had a life-changing Ayahuasca experience at the Soltara Center in Costa Rica that allowed me to heal my past trauma on a much deeper level. Only you can decide which healing modality works best for you.

4. Surrender and Let Go of Control

Anxiety comes from trying to control things in your life. Control is an illusion. We don't have full control over anything. We have influence at best. Life is unpredictable. You may have a plan for how you want your life to look, but life doesn't always like your plans.

It will hit you with twists and turns that will force you to change course and go down paths you never thought you'd take. People get into trouble when they resist the redirection.

The key to overcoming anxiety is learning to release the need for control. Whatever you resist, persists. When you are able to surrender to what is and trust that everything that is happening in your life has a purpose, you set yourself free.

The most painful events of my life have shaped me into the person I am today. If I hadn't gone through the worst days of my life, I would have never started investing in my personal growth, which inevitably led to me creating my dream life.

When painful things happen in our lives, it's easy to instantly judge the events as “bad”. However, when you adopt the mindset that everything is happening for you, you are no longer a victim of your circumstances.

In turn, you are better able to bounce forward from adversity and recognize an experience, either good or bad, for what it is – an opportunity to grow and become more.

If you want to learn more about what it means to surrender, I encourage you to read Michael Alan Singer's books, The Surrender Experiment and The Untethered Soul. If you want to do some deeper inner work on this subject, Michael has a great online course that I recommend called Living From A Place of Surrender.

5. Dopamine Detox

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in our brain that gets released whenever there is an anticipation of a reward. In fact, marketers of different companies are aware of this. They get you addicted to their products by stimulating your dopamine levels.

Dopamine is healthy and natural. It's what gives us motivation. However, the problem is that we live in a world that is constantly overstimulating our dopamine levels. Whenever you have a spike in dopamine, there will always be a crash.

This manifests itself as a dopamine hangover. It can take almost two weeks for your brain to normalize after you've experienced a dopamine spike. When you come down from a dopamine spike, your dopamine levels are low. This can negatively impact your mood and create long-term mental health challenges.

The solution to all of this is doing a dopamine detox. Cutting out and/or eliminating whatever is stimulating your dopamine is key. This is what allows your brain to reset itself so that anxiety and depression dissipate.

This may mean spending 24 hours or more without technology. I use a screen time blocker on my phone and computer. This allows me to limit how much time I use certain apps. For example, I give myself 30 minutes max scrolling on Facebook and Instagram.

Keep in mind that you will experience withdrawal symptoms when you're detoxing from dopamine. You'll feel worse before you feel better. As you are resetting your biochemistry, it's helpful to create an empowering morning ritual.

A morning ritual will help you stay energized, focused, and motivated.

For the last 15 years of my life, I've been studying the rituals of the most successful people in the world. I've compiled these rituals into a book that I wrote called 67 Morning Ritual Habits For The Body, Mind, and Spirit so that you can benefit from them. A lot of these rituals will help relieve your anxiety so that you can take back control of your life.

If you want to reprogram your mind and take your life to the next level, I've got a 7-day Morning Ritual Mastery program that shows you how you can model the most successful morning rituals of the most successful people in the world. The program consists of daily video lessons, downloadable MP3 audios, and worksheets.

These are 5 ways to overcome anxiety.

You don't have to live with anxiety forever. Do the inner work to get to the root cause of your anxiety and trust that you have the power to heal yourself. There is life on the other side of anxiety and it's waiting for you with open arms.