Small Things You Can Do to Overcome Your Anxiety

Hello all and welcome to another blog post. In this one we will be discussing small things you can do to help you reach your goals if anxiety is preventing you from doing so. This scenario is the story of my life, so I feel qualified to give some advice on it. Without any further ado let’s get into this.

1.     Baby Steps

This something I have mentioned in other posts and I will continue to say this because it has helped me the most in my anxiety journey. I was always trying to force myself to change or become a different person overnight. I was not patient and wanted everything now and didn’t want to put in the work. Because the work was scary and intimidating. And of course, me with my avoidant personality never actually did any of the work for some years. For all those years I was just beating myself up over not achieving these unachievable goals of mine. I only say unachievable for that time because what my goals where is something I could get, just not at that time of my life. You can really achieve anything if you try hard enough. But for me at that time I wasn’t actually doing any of the mental work I needed to do to help me reach my goal. That brings me back to baby steps, for those who don’t know what baby steps are, it’s doing small little things daily or even every other day until you slowly build up the courage to do bigger things. For me with my social anxiety it is very hard for me to go out in public and do things on my own. I usually need my emotional support person with me, but you can’t live like that forever. I reached a point in my life where I just got fed up and the feeling of life passing by me made me even more anxious. So that’s why I decided to make an actual change in 2024, hence this blog being born. An example of a baby step I took to help me overcome this struggle was to reward myself with something once I have completed a task. I started off small with going to check my mail during the middle of the day instead of waiting until 9pm to go down. I shouldn’t have to adjust my schedule to adhere to my fear of people. Now I still won’t get on the elevator if I know someone else is in there, but as I keep saying, baby steps people. Once I have completed something that would trigger my anxiety, I would bake myself something sweet or buy myself a silly little gift. My inner psychology student is coming out but training your brain that you will get good things once you’ve overcome a fear will overtime make it easier to do.

2.     Find Something Your Passionate About

This is probably something you’ve been told hundreds of times and trust me, me too. Up until my early twenties I never really knew what I liked or what my passion was. I was always trying so hard to make everyone around me happy instead of figuring out who I was and what I wanted growing up. Now that I am at that fuck it point of my life I have decided I didn’t care anymore if I was pleasing this person or not. As I said earlier, I feel like my life is passing me by so I am finally taking the steps to discover myself and what I want out of life. One of those things is writing and I now make 1 post a week on my blog. This is something that I look forward too and don’t see it as a chore. I love being able to express myself this way and finally be myself without fear. I almost wish I had discovered this passion back in high school, but we can’t be stuck in the “what ifs?”. Writing is my way of getting my emotions out of my head and being able to move on with my thoughts. If you also suffer from reoccurring thoughts, then you know what I’m talking about. Another passion of mine is video editing / photography. I am by far no means a professional because I didn’t actually start perusing this passion until recently. I am once again late to the game like I am with everything in my life, but at least we got there eventually. A huge struggle of mine with social anxiety is going to my classes and with the flexibility of college life avoiding this is very easy. Enabling me to skip and have no major consequences at the time is not good because I will keep on doing it. No major immediate consequences but not understanding the course material and just not studying in general lead to me failing all my classes. I would take online courses to try to help this but even then, if a professor required you to have your camera on, I would skip that class too. I truly hate going to my college campus, it puts me in a state on fight or flight the entire time I am there and it’s quite exhausting. So, the idea of having to go through that daily is out of the question for me. I can really only handle 1-2 classes in person a week right now. I am the type of student who really needs to be present to learn and understand the material. I am not one of those teach yourself people. So, I really do have to attend if I want to get good grades and so on. I saw some other people doing this on social media where they would video document their days, like a mini vlog. I started to do this and show myself doing things and overcoming my anxiety. I at first was so nervous about people seeing me film and all that fun stuff. And I am still very nervous, but the desire to get that final video product in the end drives me to move forward. Now am I out here with a selfie stick and light? No of course not. I am just using my phone and like filming my feet and hands and sometimes myself when I know I am alone. I make these videos on days when I have my in-person class as a way to motivate me to attend them. It’s been working and when I start to doubt myself or feel depressed, I go back and watch my videos of myself doing things I thought I never could. That gives me confidence as well to move forward. At the same time, I am teaching myself how to edit videos and I think it’s very fun. One day I will finally commit to my YouTube channel and upload consistently with my silly little vlogs. I want to make anxiety vlogs where it’s an extended version of my mini ones and hopefully people who are struggling with the same things as me will find some support or confidence in my videos to help them in their life.

3.     Don’t Overdo it / Keep Yourself Happy

My main warning with the previous two tips is to not overdo it. I have made this mistake before where I took things too fast and someone made a comment to me that I wasn’t ready to handle and sent me into an anxiety spiral. I started to dress more girly then I usually do around my family and immediately everyone thought something was up with me and that I was “dressing up too much” as I’m literally just in a skirt. I never dressed in a way that would bring me attention, I dressed to hide myself. I am still in the process of figuring out my style and what I like to wear, and my confidence level was still not that high at that time. I mean it’s still not that high, but I am definitely more confident than I was last year. I wish my parents would just let me be without making any comments, but unfortunately you can’t control other people. After those lovely comments I received I then questioned my whole identity and thought now other people would think I am trying too hard. Took me some time but I then tried again, but this time I went in prepared for those comments and new ahead of time they meant nothing to me. I am making sure I am putting myself first, which is something I am learning to do. It is not being selfish, just remember that. Then to my next and final piece of advice, keep yourself happy. If you at any time notice your stressing yourself out, then take a step back and then try again later. Yes, there will be times where you need to push yourself, but don’t be pushing yourself to the point of tears. Once again, been there done that. When I start to think of editing videos as something I need to do instead of something I want to do, I take a break. If I notice my chest starting to hurt when I am out trying to get exposure therapy, I will take that as my sign to leave. I never push myself to the point where it sets me back and makes me unhappy. My main goal in life is to finally feel really happiness and happiness with life.

I hope that if you made it this far in this post that you took something from this. Maybe start that hobby you’ve been daydreaming about for months. Put yourself out there and stop being silent. If you fear people’s judgment, just know they are too concerned with themselves and how the present themselves to us too much to care what we do in our free time or if you like to make silly little YouTube videos. Life is too short to be concerned about other people.

- airry