“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” –Benjamin Franklin

If you have constant anxiety, you probably just want an anxiety cure.  After all, we all just want to be happy, don’t we?  I haven’t met one person in my life that didn’t want to be happier.  Have you?  Well, wanting to be happy means something completely different when you have chronic anxiety when happiness sometimes feels like an impossible goal.  All you really want to do is cure your anxiety.  Banish your fear.  Eliminate your worry.  But an anxiety cure?  Can you cure your anxiety?

The fact is every human in this world has anxiety, fear, worry in their life (some more than others). But that’s not all. There are tens of millions of people who suffer moderate to severe anxiety—anxiety that interferes with their lives.

Now, you don’t cure anxiety like cure athlete’s foot. Anxiety is an emotion; eliminating anxiety would be like eliminating sadness, or eliminating happiness. Anxiety can serve a good purpose. In many circumstances having a “gut feeling” or “having a bad feeling” is incredibly valuable. An “anxiety cure” isn’t about eliminating anxiety, it’s about make it so anxiety doesn’t trap you.

So if you were going to “cure anxiety” how can you make your moments of anxiety, fear, and worry less frequent? How can you function normally most of the time?

Anxiety Solves Nothing

Well, the first thing is to realize that most of the time anxiety doesn’t make solutions. It is a fear about something that may or may not happen in the future. Often it is arbitrary or extreme: “If I make a fool out of myself in public I will surely die of shame.” Realistically, I’m pretty sure no one has literally died of shame. Doesn’t make the fear not extremely real, but don’t look to it for answers to problems.

Avoid Active Negativity

The trouble to most of us is that we don’t count the blessings around us; our loving family, our caring friends, a comfortable bed, a nice house, and a stomach that can eat three times a day. We tend to focus on the negative (one study suggested that about 80% of all American speech is negative; “this weather sucks,” “I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday,” I’m bored.”) When you have an anxiety disorder, always focusing on the negative keeps your anxiety ready to explode. Positive thinking won’t eliminate your anxious moments, but can you see how negative thinking makes them certain?

Spend Time with Close Family and Friends

For a lot of us this is easier said than done. Social situations are often the #1 cause of anxiety, shame, and panic attacks. Any social interaction, even with close friends, might be something that you fear. But for some reason, when you discuss your anxiety and worry with someone you trust, it unburdens it. It helps release it. Now, when you talk about your anxiety don’t try to get pity, you don’t need that. Don’t be too negative, it’ll bring them down. Just discuss your anxiety problems as a matter-of-fact part of your life. You don’t even need advice for it, the discussion will make you feel normal (and isn’t that what most of us crave?).

Relax!

One other way to treat your anxiety is by relaxing (I know, easier said than done). You know how focusing on negative thoughts makes anxiety almost certain? Well, if you have anxiety problems, a tense, tired, and unhealthy body makes it almost certain too. There are millions of ways to relax and get healthy, you just need to choose a few and follow through. You can meditate, do yoga, stretch, take a long hot bath, pray, have quiet time alone, or get massaged. Possibly most important, you need a long, good night sleep since exhaustion is a breeding ground for anxiety. You know what else helps your body relax? Strangely enough, it’s daily exercise, a healthy diet and avoiding caffeine, alcohol and drugs. Let me make it clear that if you have intense fear or worry, or an anxiety attack, alcohol and drugs are pretty much the worst ways to fix the problem. Beside negative health implications, they just don’t help anything and most of the time makes it worse.

If you are looking for an anxiety cure, you won’t find a silver bullet to cure everything immediately. Don’t trust anything that says it can. But if you’re someone who just has some stress related anxiety, these techniques will help; if you’re someone who has severe chronic anxiety, these techniques will also help. But if you have severe chronic anxiety, these methods will probably not be a “cure.” If you’re suffering, you may need to see your physician or therapist. Either way, a great first step toward conquering anxiety is to realize that you don’t need to completely “cure” anxiety, rather you need to make it so you can live your life without being controlled by it.

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