If your mind is racing with catastrophic thoughts about what’s going to happen, your body responds in kind: the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, bracing you for a threat – your breathing becomes fast and shallow, and adrenaline races to your muscles, which can cause you to tremble and feel faint.

A great way to dampen this reaction is to practise exercises that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which has opposite effects on the body to the sympathetic nervous system, such as lowering your heart rate and blood pressure, and slowing your breathing.

One exercise is called ‘grounding’, which helps you connect with the present moment and the environment around you, rather than being consumed by fears about the future.

One popular way to do it involves pausing and naming five things you can see; naming four things you can feel; three things you can hear; two things you can smell; and one thing you can taste.

Another technique that activates the soothing parasympathetic nervous system is to stand with your feet a comfortable distance apart and lean forwards as if you’re going to touch your toes – it doesn’t matter how far you can actually reach – and then just hang there for a minute or so (you can also do this in a seated position by leaning forwards and allowing your head to hang comfortably between your legs).

The idea behind this exercise is that it sends a strong signal to your body that all is safe, and you can relax.

3. Regulate your breathing

Another way to calm your body down, promote parasympathetic nervous system activity and break the anxiety cycle (in which your body’s fear reaction to your thoughts makes you even more anxious) is to practise a controlled breathing exercise.

There are many different exercises you can try, but one of the simpler and more effective examples is known as ‘box breathing’ or ‘square breathing’, so called because you breath in, pause and then breathe out each for the same amount of time.

To do it, sit somewhere comfortable and focus on your breath.

• Inhale for four seconds
• Pause for four seconds
• Exhale for four seconds.
• Try to repeat this for at least 30 seconds and continue for as long as you feel comfortable or for as long as you need

The idea is that this will help to get your breathing rate and depth back under control, which is an effective way to calm the entire body.

4. Plan a ‘worry window’

If you find that your worries keep coming back, even after you’ve calmed your mind and body, it can be very unsettling and give you the sense that you’re stuck in a loop.

You might even come to form unhelpful beliefs, such as that you need to engage in worry to try to ‘solve’ a dilemma or to prevent a bad thing from happening – these are known as ‘meta-cognitions’ because they’re your beliefs about your thoughts.

However, unless you’re forming genuine solutions or constructive plans in your mind, then churning the same worries around and around is futile, like a car’s wheel spinning in the mud. Trying to banish these worries from your mind is unlikely to work.

A better approach is to plan a ‘worry window’ – a set period of time, about half an hour or so (ideally not too close to bedtime) when you’ll allow your mind to give vent to its worries.

The rest of the time, whenever your worrisome thoughts surface, you can remind yourself that you’ll be turning your attention to them later.

This can be an effective way to break out of a perpetual worry loop and allow you to get on with your life.

Read more:

• Anxiety stopping you sleeping? Here’s how to overcome bedtime worries, according to a psychologist

Long-term tools to lessen your anxiety

1. Confront your fears

It’s natural to want to avoid the situations that make you anxious but, in the long-term, this is only likely to fuel your anxiety.

When you avoid anxiety-provoking situations, not only do you risk missing out on opportunities in life, but you never get to ‘reality-check’ your worst fears – for instance, going on a date without it being a disaster, or flying on a plane and finding that it stays in the air.

Unconfronted fears can grow and fester, assuming an out-of-proportion aura of doom.

In contrast, when you face your fears and find that the worst doesn’t happen, psychologists call it an ‘expectancy-violation’. You burst the baleful balloon.

By undermining your negative expectations like this, you gradually teach your brain to be less anxious. The technical term for confronting your fears and anxieties is ‘exposure’.

It’s a good idea to start gradually. Choose a situation or challenge that you only find mildly anxiety-provoking and give it a go (using your emergency tool-kit before, during and after as appropriate).

If real-life exposure is too daunting – you can even try doing it in your imagination.

2. Exercise regularly

Building opportunities for physical exercise into your lifestyle isn’t only good for your body, it’s good for your mind too.

Studies have shown that exercise can boost mood and stave off depression. People who are more physically active also tend to show benefits to their personality traits years down the line, including keeping their neuroticism in check.

Other research shows that regular exercise can help prevent the risk of developing an anxiety disorder.

There are many reasons why exercise has these benefits, including distraction, camaraderie and improvements in physical health – which can break the known links between poor health and anxiety.

Yet another reason why exercise – especially vigorous exercise – is a great tool for beating anxiety is that it can get you used to the kind of physical sensations that fuel anxiety, such as a racing heartbeat and a feeling of breathlessness.

If you’re used to these sensations in your weekly run or boxercise class, they won’t be so disconcerting the next time you have to give a speech or go for a job interview.

3. Go easy on the caffeine

Whether it’s in your morning espresso or an energy drink at the gym, caffeine might be such an integral part of your routine, that you don’t stop to think that it’s actually a psychostimulant – a drug that acts on the brain.

Specifically, caffeine acts to block the brain chemical adenosine, which usually serves to calm us down physiologically, such as by lowering our blood pressure and slowing our breathing.

This neural action is great in terms of making us feel more alert and hyped up but not welcome at all if you’re prone to anxiety.

So, one modest lifestyle change to make over the long term to reduce your anxiety levels is to consume less caffeine, remembering that it’s also present in chocolate and tea.

Indeed, if you’re an anxious person and you currently consume an excessive amount of caffeine, it’s feasible that it could contribute significantly to your problems – psychiatry even recognises ‘caffeine-induced anxiety disorder’ as a subtype of the formal diagnosis of ‘substance or medication-induced anxiety disorder’.

4. Consider your long-term relationship with anxiety

If you come to believe that being anxious is a fundamental, permanent part of who you are, then whenever you’re confronted by situations that make you feel uneasy or afraid, you’re more likely to succumb to the discomfort and withdraw as quickly as you can.

In contrast, if you can try to see anxiety as a temporary, fleeting state – one which is part of being human and can affect anyone at any time – then you’re more likely to find the motivation to ride out the discomfort and seek more constructive ways to deal with it.

Psychologists call this latter perspective a ‘growth mindset’ as opposed to a ‘fixed mindset’.

You might have heard these terms used in relation to intelligence and learning, but emerging research suggests the distinction also applies to how we think about our experiences of anxiety. So, consider your relationship to anxiety and remember it can be useful and it can be tamed.

Read more:

• How a weighted blanket may alter your anxiety, according to a GP
• 7 simple, science-backed ways to better your mental health
• Yes, yoga is proven to reduce your anxiety. But not in the way you think

---