Anxiety can sometimes get out of hand where you feel like you can’t manage it. If you’re like me, when this happens, you also forget all the tools you may have learned to help with your anxiety. A creative way to handle these situations is to create an anxiety toolkit.
An anxiety toolkit is a list of all the calming activities that work for you. Make sure you keep it somewhere easy to reference, such as saved on your phone or in an easily accessible cabinet.
You may also want to have nearby things that help you manage your anxiety – whatever those may be. For me, I keep a few things around the house to help manage my anxiety. One of them is my weighted blanket, which is sure to help in a pinch. The other is a ball, which I use as a type of bilateral stimulation to calm down.
Ideas for Your Anxiety Toolkit
The tricky thing about an anxiety toolkit is that it is not a one size fits all situation. What works for one person, may not work for you.
So, if you haven’t had much experiencing trying out the various ideas mentioned below, you may need to try out several until you find one that works for you.
The main idea behind these ideas is to calm your nervous system down and relax your body so it stops thinking it is under attack.
The ideas suggested below are specific to calming your nervous system, though there are many other daily techniques that can be used to help alleviate anxiety such as journaling, talking with a friend, and therapy.
1. Weighted Blanket
The pressure that weighted blankets provide can help reduce the symptoms of anxiety by releasing hormones to combat it.
You can use them any time of day if needed, and sleep with them at night. To learn more on weighted blankets, check out this article from Healthline.
2. Butterfly Tapping
Butterfly tapping is a bilateral stimulation technique that can help calm you. Click here for a video.
What you do is place your hands, palm down on your chest with your thumbs interlocked. In this position, your right hand is above the left side of your chest and your right hand is above the left side of your chest.
Then you proceed to tap with your fingers, similar to a butterfly flapping its wings. Do the tapping slow and steady.
This is both a way to ground yourself and to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which will help calm you.
3. Should Tapping
Shoulder tapping is similar to the butterfly tapping above. Instead of having your hands over your chest, you put them onto your shoulders.
Your left hand is on your right shoulder and your right hand is on your left shoulder. Then you slowly tap, alternating hands.
Do this until you start to feel your anxiety levels decreasing.
4. Ball Pass
Passing a ball between your hands is another bilateral stimulation technique that you can use to calm your nervous system.
I have seen two ways this is done. One is to take a ball and simply pass it in a straight line between your hands in front of you.
The other is to toss the ball in the air between your two hands, back and forth. Then, periodically drop the ball. You don’t need to drop it after a certain number of passes or anything, just do it randomly throughout.
5. Bilateral Stimulation Music
Bilateral stimulation music is yet another way to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to calm your nerves.
What you need for this is headphones – both of them for those of you who have wireless ones. The point is that during the calming music, there will be noises, beeps, or calm dinging, that will come on opposite sides of the headphones.
The goal is to have it activate both sides of your brain, which is why you need both earbuds to hear all of it and have it work.
I find bilateral stimulation music highly soothing for those situations in which my anxiety is running high.
6. Belly Breathing
Belly breathing is a well-known technique to calm your nervous system. Society, it seems, has taught most of us to be chest breathers.
Chest breathing is a “flight” response of the body because your breathing is less noticeable when you are breathing through your chest.
However, belly breathing helps you release the tension you may be holding in your abdomen or pelvic floor and helps calm your nervous system.
Take a deep breath in so your belly expands and your chest stays fairly flat. Then blow it out through your mouth.
If you are highly prone to chest breathing, holding one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach can teach you how to belly breath properly because you can tell where your breath is going easier.
7. Grounding
Grounding techniques are things that bring you back into the present moment.
The most common one I have heard of is the 5 senses meditation, which you can read more about in my Meditation for Beginners article.
There are other simple techniques to ground yourself in the moment. Something simple like splashing your face with water or playing your favorite song to dance to can also ground you in the current moment.
Try out These Techniques for Your Anxiety Toolkit
I find it helpful when using these techniques to take note of my anxiety level before starting any of these activities and then re-evaluate the anxiety level after you have been doing the activity for a while.
Rate your anxiety on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being maximum anxiety.
Then, after you have completed one of the activities above, rate your anxiety again. Ideally, your level of anxiety should have decreased.
If your anxiety didn’t go down much, it is possible that the technique you tried isn’t one that will work well for you. Try another until you find one that does help.
When I was first in therapy, my therapist had me try several of these techniques and had me rate my anxiety after each. In doing that, I was able to tell which ones worked really well for me.
Personally, I found the shoulder tapping and ball passing to be the most effective of the bilateral stimulation techniques I tried that day.
Create Your Anxiety Toolkit
Now that you have a few techniques to choose from, try each of them out. See which ones work best for you.
Then, make sure you write them down and have them somewhere easily accessible. I recently had a situation that caused me to flip into extremely high anxiety.
I didn’t have my list readily available and I hadn’t had a high anxiety episode in a long time. That means I hadn’t practiced my techniques recently.
Having not practiced them recently, I couldn’t remember what to do or how to calm down, which caused the anxiety event to span a longer time than it could have.
If I had a list somewhere, I could have easily referenced it and let my anxiety flow through me, and activated my parasympathetic nervous system more quickly, because a heightened response wasn’t actually needed for my situation.
The keys here are to:
- Try the techniques above out
- Write down which ones work best for you, so you can reference them when needed
- Practice them periodically when you don’t need them
The more you practice these techniques when you don’t need them, the more naturally they will come to you. I had kind of forgotten that since I had been in such a good place for a while.
Now that I have had some time to revisit the tools I learned in therapy and made a note of them, I will be able to activate them sooner in the future.
Do the same for yourself so you can live your best life. As always, please reach out to a doctor or therapist if you are struggling.
If you are wondering if therapy will help you, read my article on it to see how you might benefit.
