I’m sure you often think you’d like to know how anxiety works and what you can do to control it.

One of the psychological problems that we psychologists see most often in consultation is anxiety. Specifically, people without serious mental health problems who are overwhelmed by anxiety .

All human beings, or almost all of us, can suffer a problem of this type in the course of life. And the most important thing I want you to know is that it is not about never being anxious or stressed, but that you are able to regulate anxiety . But to do this, we first have to understand this psychological phenomenon.

What is anxiety?

I’m going to explain to you in a few words what anxiety is and how we can keep it from overflowing.

You have to know that anxiety is an adaptive behaviour in the face of a situation that is dangerous for your integrity or is new.

In a situation that involves danger, we instinctively respond in three possible ways: we escape, we fight or we stay dead, blocked. The latter comes from our ancestors. When they were in front of a beast, they showed themselves as if they were lifeless so that it would pass by and not attack them. This is the explanation of being blocked in a situation that our brain interprets as dangerous .

When something is new to us, anxiety makes us active, “on top of it”. In short, we are where we need to be, with all five senses.

How can we regulate anxiety so that it doesn’t overflow us?

We can manage anxiety on three levels: physiological, motor and cognitive (thinking).

At the physiological level

These are the signs that appear in anxiety, we have palpitations, sweating, tightness in the chest, …, a long etcetera of things that happen at the physical level when we overflow with anxiety.

At engine level

As far as anxiety at the motor level is concerned, we feel very restless , we cannot stop moving and being still in one place.

At the cognitive level

Our brain is an extraordinary “machine” of survival , not of well-being. Therefore, what it does very well is to anticipate negative things that may happen to us and to ruminate on the negative things that have already happened to us. We are very often naturally in this state.

Well, when it comes to regulating anxiety, it’s not a question of not going through this process, because our brain has an innate tendency to fall into this bias of giving more strength and importance to the negative, but of being aware of it and, insofar as you know it, trying to give more value to the positive , and not believing everything negative that you think.

Several tips: what to do?

On a physiological level, then, with two fundamental tools. One is Jacobson’s progressive relaxation. It consists of tensing and relaxing the different parts of the body. As you train him, you will be able to relax when you are tense.

The other technique we have to regulate the level of physiological activation is deep breathing. When we feel anxious we hyperventilate ; we take short, shallow breaths. This means that we do not oxygenate ourselves properly.

To remedy this, what we have to do is something very easy: take longer and longer breaths and exhalations. This allows us to regulate the level of activation. The additional advantage it has is that you can do it at any time. No one will notice that you are breathing deeply.

At the motor level another important key that psychologists constantly recommend the regular practice of sport . To the extent that you practice physical exercise, it will increase your well-being, and you will be able to regulate your anxiety considerably.

As for what to do on a cognitive level, there is something to consider. As we commented before, the brain is a magnificent survival machine and, as such, it continuously presents us with the negative. We have to learn not to give so much value to everything negative that we anticipate or remember, and to do so we have to focus our attention on what we have, not on what we lack .

In this way we will manage to not give so much importance to all those negative thoughts that come easily to us. We have a lot of junk thinking that should not be given too much importance.

To the extent that you are able to put these tools into practice, you will be able to see anxiety as an ally, not an enemy. And if you are able to value anxiety as an ally, you will be able to control it.