Top 6 Tips To Overcome Anxiety Without Medication
Anxiety can have a very negative impact on your life.
If you are often anxious for some reason, this affects your quality of life.
Very extreme anxiety can even cause you to become socially isolated.
People often turn to medication to suppress anxiety.
It is much healthier to overcome fear without medication. But is it best to do this? In this article I give you 6 good tips for this.
Table Of Contents
What is fear?
What do you need to know about your fears?
The consequences of fear
6 tips to overcome anxiety without medication
Purpose of this article: you will learn why fear does not always have to be a negative emotion. Fear only becomes dangerous when it starts to have a negative influence on your life.
With the 6 tips at the end of this article, learn to overcome your fear without medication.
What is fear?
For some, fear is an all-consuming feeling that completely paralyzes them, for others it is as if they lose all grip on reality. Anxiety can suddenly overtake you, but it can also be dormant.
If you are walking home along a deserted road on a winter evening, you may suddenly be overcome with fear when you hear the sound of a wild dog in the distance.
Your heart starts beating faster, you start to sweat and the first thing you think about is running away. This is a very normal form of anxiety. This dog may indeed come closer and attack you.
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Phobias are a very different form of fear. For example, if you suffer from claustrophobia , you are so extremely afraid of small and closed spaces that this fear gives you all kinds of frightening symptoms.
The fear you experience with phobias is completely out of proportion to the real threat posed by the object of your fear.
You may not immediately think about it, but fear is an emotion that can be perfectly explained scientifically .
When you experience some form of anxiety, your body prepares to defend itself against possible dangers.
When the body’s defense mechanism is activated, a lot of stress hormones are released so that you are strong enough to counterattack.
These cause the well-known symptoms of an anxiety attack such as an accelerated heart rate, excessive sweating, shortness of breath, shaking limbs, dizziness, etc.
The Amygdala also plays a major role in this entire defense process of the body . This almond-shaped core of neurons in the brain collects all the information needed to carry out a stress response. This is the positive role that the Amygdala plays.
However, this core of neurons also has a less positive quality: the amygdala is also responsible for ensuring that fear responses take root in your mind so that you can suffer from this fear permanently.
In order to overcome your fear, it is very important to learn as much as possible about your fears. Would you like to read along?
What do you need to know about your fears?
Fear is healthy
Don’t think that fear is abnormal. The ability to fear is part of the normal functions of the brain. What’s more: if you are not afraid of anything at all, this could indicate brain damage.
Just imagine that you are not afraid if – although this chance is quite small – a hungry tiger walks up to you. If the body’s fear mechanism didn’t kick in, it could just attack and tear you apart.
Fear has many forms
Anxiety is an emotion that can be very mild or very overwhelming.
For example, you may experience a mild form of anxiety while awaiting the results of a medical check-up. However, if you are confronted with someone committing a robbery, your fear may be so overwhelming that you may have an anxiety attack or a panic attack.
Some events can scare you so much that they stay with you forever and cause an anxiety disorder.
Anxiety can have several causes
Fear can have an instinctive cause. For example, if you have had stomach pain for a while, you may be afraid that there is something physically wrong with you.
Anxiety can also be caused by certain experiences. For example, if you ever fell from a ladder as a child, it is not surprising that you are afraid of heights as an adult .
Fear can also be learned. Suppose your mother had an obsessive fear of dirt and she spent all day cleaning.
This fear of contamination from your mother may have led to you also developing an extreme fear of unsanitary conditions.
Fear does not have to mean that you are in danger
Especially if you suffer from a phobia, your fear is completely out of proportion to the actual danger posed by something or a certain situation.
In fact, you are mainly afraid of what could possibly happen if you are confronted with the object of your fear.
The more anxious you are, the scarier things seem
Despite your fear of flying, your family convinced you to travel by plane. With shaking knees you get on the plane and you hope that you will reach your destination safely.
Suddenly the pilot announces that he will be flying through a turbulent zone. You were already afraid of flying, but now that there is turbulence, the fear takes over completely. Turbulence isn’t bad at all, but your anxiety only makes it seem worse.
Your fear determines how you respond
People can react very differently to fear. For some people, fear paralyzes them, others will have the urge to flee or attack.
Flight or attack are the best responses to fear. These mean that you respond to your fear and take action.
If fear is paralyzing or if you are in a permanent state of fear without taking action, fear can completely exhaust you. This can cause many mental and physical complaints in the long term.
- You may also like: 6 Positive Ways To Overcome Fear Of Death.
The more real the threat, the more intense the actions you take
We respond differently to imaginary threats than to real dangers.
If you suffer from vertigo , looking out the window of the top floor of an apartment building can literally paralyze you. You are then completely unable to take action.
Compare this situation with a truck driving towards you. This is a real threat and your first reaction will be to jump out of the way with full force as quickly as possible.
Fear can have very dire consequences on the way you live. Curious about what consequences these could have? Then read on!
The consequences of fear
Fear can cause you to avoid certain things. Sometimes you can live with this quite well. For example, if you suffer from a fear of heights, you are often very creative in avoiding heights.
Other fears, such as social phobia , can have much worse consequences. If you feel anxious in social situations, you may be so afraid of coming into contact with others that you avoid people and end up in social isolation.
If your fears are so extreme that they negatively impact your daily life, then it is high time to overcome your fear. One of the solutions is to visit your doctor and ask him for medication such as antidepressants, beta blockers or anti-anxiety drugs.
The problem with this medication is that it can have many negative side effects and should only be used as a temporary solution.
If you want to overcome your fear in a healthy way, the tips below can help you perfectly.
6 tips to overcome anxiety without medication
Even if you know where your fear comes from, overcoming it is not always easy. Medication can help with this, but it does not tackle the problem at its core.
Overcoming fear without medication is much healthier and the effect is usually permanent.
Tip #1 Name your fear
To overcome your fear, you must first and foremost know what exactly scares you.
Are you someone who worries about many things? Are you afraid of a certain object? Are there certain situations that scare you?
Only by clearly formulating your fear can you take targeted steps to overcome it.
Tip #2 Acknowledge your fear
Once you know what you’re afraid of, acknowledge your fear. When you acknowledge that you have a certain fear, only then are you mentally prepared to work on it.
As long as you do not view your fear as a problem, there is nothing wrong with you and you cannot take any action.
Tip #3 Try to understand your fear
Try to determine the history of your fear as clearly as possible. How did this fear arise or what triggered this fear? How long have you been suffering from that fear?
Consider how your fear manifests itself and how it affects you. Do you feel a general sense of panic coming on or do you get very specific symptoms?
Do these symptoms make you think you have a physical or are you fully aware that they are the result of your feelings of anxiety?
Do you have the urge to flee or does your fear paralyze you? Do you avoid certain things because of your fear?
Tip #4 Rationalize your fear
Fear is a healthy emotion that protects us from danger. Ask yourself very consciously whether the source of your fear is really dangerous.
You may label something as dangerous, triggering your body’s defense mechanisms, but the object of your fear is not dangerous at all.
Tip #5 Confront what makes you anxious
Many people think that by avoiding what makes them anxious they can control their anxiety.
In some ways this is also true: if you avoid what you are afraid of, you will not feel fear.
Yet this is not the right way to get rid of your fears. You will feel better if you avoid the object of your fear, but this will not conquer your fear.
Exposing yourself to what makes you anxious is actually a form of therapy: exposure therapy or in vivo therapy. Research has shown that this is one of the most effective forms of therapy for overcoming your fears.
By confronting the object of your fear, you may find that you have made things much worse in your mind than they actually are.