This Is the #1 Best Habit for Anxiety, According to Mental Health Experts

Leah Groth
·5 min read
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This is a great go-to to keep in your back pocket.

Anxiety is the most common mental disorder in the United States, affecting about 40 million adults in varying degrees of severity with nearly 16 percent of adults experiencing mild to severe symptoms of anxiety over a two-week period.

“Anxiety is the brain’s danger signal. It’s like an alarm going off,” says Christopher Pittenger, MD, PhD, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry. However, there is one major problem, according to Pittenger: it’s often a false alarm.

“The brain evolved to be alert to signs of incipient danger and to go into a state of higher alertness when it detects a potential threat in the environment. And that’s a good thing—if you’re in an environment where bad things have happened in the past, it’s good to be on alert for the possibility that they might happen again,” he explains. “If there’s a rustling in the bushes, and it’s dark and you’re alone and there are tigers about, it’s good to be ready to run. This acute sense of alertness, and the emotions that go with it, we generally call ‘fear.’ When it becomes generalized and somewhat more amorphous, we call it ‘anxiety.’”

Unfortunately, anxiety can become untethered from actual threat, resulting in a state of chronically elevated alertness and stress. “This may be particularly pernicious in the modern world, where our environment is so different from the one in which we evolved,” Pittenger continues. “And so anxiety—a chronic false alarm going off that is decoupled from any real danger—becomes a source of suffering and a target for treatment.”

Related: Feeling Anxious? We Found 7 Tried and True Strategies to Help You Deal

How Is Anxiety Treated?

There is a range of ways to treat elevated, autonomous anxiety. “Sometimes, in mild cases, all that’s required is to recognize it for what it is—a false alarm, a reflexive search for danger when none exists,” Pittenger explains. Lifestyle changes can be very helpful too—good sleep, regular exercise, a healthy diet, walking in nature and meditation.

But sometimes these are not sufficient “because stubborn patterns of thought get in the way,” Pittenger maintains. For example, some people feel a need to be sure that there is no danger before they can bring themselves to relax, “and of course, in a complex, uncertain world, one can never be absolutely sure,” he points out. “It’s always possible to imagine possible bad outcomes, even if they’re not particularly likely.”

And in the cases where an environment is, in fact, dangerous—like in a toxic or abusive relationship or an unhealthy work environment, for instance—it is adaptive and appropriate to feel some anxiety. “Then, the goal of treatment isn’t to remove the anxiety entirely, but rather to better understand and modulate it,” he says. This is where therapy may be helpful, especially various forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). “A good therapist can help you identify cognitive structures and biases that reinforce anxiety and make it maladaptive, like perfectionism, intolerance of uncertainty and catastrophizing,” he says.

There’s also a role for medication in some cases—although these medications should absolutely only be taken under the supervision of a doctor. “Short-acting medications like benzodiazepines can be helpful for discrete episodes of anxiety, like panic attacks or performance anxiety, but they can create problems in the long term, including tolerance (reduced benefit over time) or addiction,” he continues. The best-tested medications are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), like fluoxetine (Prozac) and escitalopram (Lexapro). “These won’t help immediately, but over time, they can have a significant benefit,” he says.

Related: The Number 1 Best Food for Anxiety

The Number One Habit To Treat Anxiety

In those cases when you feel as though your life is out of control, you may develop catastrophic thinking, which happens when your emotions ramp up into a state of panic. In those moments, you might not have a therapist or medication on hand, so having healthy habits to treat anxiety comes in very useful, explains family and addictions therapist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, PhD, author of Fragile Power.

“One of the best habits I teach my patients to pull themselves out of this dilemma is the age-old practice of counting from one to 20 as many times as needed,” he says. Why does this work? It effectively “pulls their chaotic mind and emotions back from the realm of turmoil into the realm of linear logic.”

For treating anxiety in the longer term, Pittenger recommends prioritizing self-care and doing things that will help shift attention to focus on the positive things in life. “I’m a big fan of walking in nature and of meditation, though these can be harder to do for some people, in practice,” he says. “An easier strategy is to just focus on the breathing—in on a count of five, out on a count of 10. Both the slow breathing and the focus can be very helpful.”

Next up: 10 Breathing Exercises for Anxiety that Work

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