What with Christmas coming up - (major stress here we come!!) - I thought it might be helpful to share anxiety tips/tricks and hacks which we can then come back to on this thread if we need to once the Christmas misery begins!
Nothing works 100% for me, but I've had a lot of success with the ABC cognitive behavior therapy model. Find a quiet place with a pencil and paper, then write down the following:
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Activating Event: This is the real-world event triggered your anxious thoughts (e.g. someone cut you off in traffic, your boss yelled at you, etc.).
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Beliefs About Event: What are your impulsive thoughts concerning the activating event. try to identify the absolutes, so things that start with "I must", "I can't", "I don't", etc.
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Consequences of your beliefs: How are these beliefs influencing your actions and emotions. What are you doing as a result of these actions and what further activating events are being triggered as a result. How are you feeling right now? This is an important metric for review later on.
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Dispute your beliefs: This one is important. Take each belief you wrote down earlier and cross examine your self. Use logic over emotion. Contest absolutes, and try to pretend you are cross examining someone else stating your beliefs. The farther you can remove yourself from the situation, the better.
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Effect: Write down how you feel after the exercise. This is a good metric to evaluate how successful the treatment is. You can then go back and look at your most successful cases and try an emulate/improve on that success.
I've found this technique can help you "rewire" some of the bad patterns in your thinking and help you react in a more rational fashion.
What are your anxiety techniques? I've tried yoga in the past, it can help sometimes but it depends on how severe the anxiety is at the time.
It might help you or it might not but it's definitely worth a try.
