Fight Stress & Anxiety by Breaking These 3 Habits

Being an anxious person, someone who forever finds themselves piling on the stress, can eventually run your life and make you less happy. Therefore, it's best to try and discover ways to manage that stress in a way that will not only make you feel more at ease as time goes on, but will also help rid yourself of those overwhelming fears you find more prevalent at the moment. And much of the time, it is us who put on the stress by the way we choose to react or think (or overthink) about something that has happened in our lives. With this in mind, there are three specific habits we are doing to ourselves that we must break to fight that stress.

According to Psychology Today, "repressing anxious thoughts won't work" merely because they will more than likely come to you again. So perhaps it's best to face them head on and discover ways to fight back.

Let's take a look at what habits to break for a less stressful, less anxious life:

BEING CLOSE-MINDED
If you're not broadening the way you see situations (and the world, for that matter) then you're basically walking backwards. Per the Psychology Today report, "Anxiety makes our minds contract and focus on the immediate threat without considering the broader context." If the problem is not something that will be of importance to you some time down the line, then maybe you shouldn't worry yourself.

NOT LIVING IN THE MOMENT
Like many things, this is easier said than done. As we grow older, we find ourselves (hopefully) thinking more in the moment, or thinking more about thinking in the moment. Therefore, practice staying in the present. Whether you're out with friends or in with your family, try and live wherever you are. Whatever happened during the day, and whatever might happen tomorrow, doesn't matter. All that matters is now.

STAYING PUT DURING STRESSFUL TIMES
If you're stressed, one of the better things you can do for yourself is to keep moving. If you're stagnant, you have more time to get your brain "stuck in a loop," as PT notes. Therefore, get up and move around (i.e. exercise, do a task, run some errands, etc.), and by the time you get back to relax, you'll often find that whatever it is you were stressing about earlier is much less severe.

For more tips on how to cope with and beat your anxieties, head on over to Psychology Today.

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A photo posted by Anxiety Support (@anxietysupport) on May 5, 2015 at 5:42am PDT