7 Ways to Deal with Anxiety When Xanax is not Available

By | March 5, 2016

Anxiety sucks!  It can often be debilitating, getting into the way of our daily activities and simple thought processes.  I decided to ask my Facebook friends, aside from deep breathing exercises and medication, what is your go to solution for dealing with constant anxiety?

They gave me a lot of suggestions and ideas that you may find helpful for yourself.  Here we go.

7 Drug-Free Ways to Deal with Anxiety

Get moving.  There were many suggestions involving some sort of physical activity including running, weight lifting, bike riding, yoga and jumping on a trampoline for just 5 minutes at a time.

If you can bring yourself to do strenuous exercise like weight lifting or running, do it.  I find that strenuous exercise is incongruent with anxiety.  For me, anxiety feels like negative energy bottled up and swirling around in my gut; a general sense of discontent completely opposite of what calm feels like.   It’s a little more difficult to feel anxious when you are exerting all that energy in the form of exercise.

Sometimes the anxiety comes with a healthy dose of depression and that makes any physical activity less than desirable.  In that case… maybe some of the next suggestions will work for you.

Meditation.  Several of my Facebook friends suggested meditation. Meditation can be really difficult for someone experiencing severe anxiety.  I mean your thoughts are just a noisy mess wouldn’t you agree?  I’ve found that even what seems like a failed attempt at meditation is better than no attempt at meditation.

A couple of people suggested using this iPhone app called Calm.   It’s an app that will help with meditation & simple guided mindfulness to sleep, relax and breathe.  If you have difficulty meditating like me, try the guided meditations available through apps like Calm.

Tapping/EFT.  WTH is this?  I know that’s what I was thinking.  Well, when I’m struggling in severe ways with debilitating anxiety or other mental issues I’ll try almost anything to find some relief and feel better short of self medicating with drugs and alcohol.

“Tapping is a simple but effective technique somewhere in between hypnosis, meditation, and acupressure. You can learn it in a matter of minutes and use it to apply instant relief to stressful situations in your life.” — tapping.com

EFT is an Emotional Freedom Technique.  Check out the website above and give it a try, what do you have to lose?

Prayer.  Some of my friends are on the spiritual side and they seem to find some relief from anxiety in prayer.  It’s not my thing at all but it might work for you.  Prayer is defined as a “conversation with God”.  I imagine that if you focus on your God, higher power or the universe and have this conversation about things that are bugging you out, it could help.  I Googled “prayer for calm” and came up with a lot of pretty useful information.  If you think this is something that will help you with your anxiety, go for it.  Different things work for different people.  Find what works for you and apply it.

Writing/Journaling. This can certainly help when your thoughts are all discombobulated because of the anxiety that plagues you.  Start by free writing; just writing whatever is going through your mind.  Write it out.  Try writing out the things that are bugging you out, the things you are worried about, the things you don’t want others to know about.  Hey, it’s just you and the paper here so give it a shot.  You can always shred it if you have to.  Sometimes writing and journaling can help you gain some positive perspective on what’s bugging you and in turn provide a little relief.

Singing.  I never really thought about it but I guess it could help.  Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime.  If you think about it, singing takes some work with your lungs.  This causes you to breathe a little more than normal; deep breaths too.  If you pick some upbeat songs to sing this could truly help to soothe your soul.  I will suggest this:  put on some upbeat tunes that you know the words to, get into a hot shower and sing away.  To me, it sounds like a great diversion from the negative energy swirling around in my gut that I know as anxiety.

Sex and Screaming.  We all have that “unique” friend on Facebook that comes out of left field don’t we?  Well, this one of mine suggested sex and screaming… and lots of it.  I guess if you are willing to try anything short of self medicating with drugs and alcohol, it can’t hurt eh?

Final thought… I was really surprised by the people that responded to my question on Facebook.  I had people responding that I would never have guessed that they ever had to deal with one ounce of anxiety in their entire lives.  It made me feel less isolated in my experience for sure. Surprisingly, talking about it and asking questions like this helped me a little bit with my own anxiety.