How to overcome anxiety with just 6 mental skills

You never know when having overcome anxiety will come in handy.

Once upon a time the school I worked at was going through a change of ownership.

The new owners were looking for ways to save money.

They invited all employees for interviews.

Yes, it was like having a job interview AT WORK.

Out of the gate, the first sentence a new manager said:

“We pay you too much money! Why? Why should we keep paying?”

It was said in a very monotone and a little irritated way.

The way that makes you tense, and defensive.

Your palms get sweaty, voice cracks, the brain shuts down etc. etc.

But I was calm and composed.

I was amazed by my own calmness.

Where did my anxiety go?

It was just gone, nowhere to be found.

I was able to calmly explain what they were paying me for and why they should keep paying me as much.

What’s more at the end of the interview I was offered a raise!

Having overcome anxiety can have real benefits.

You can see them in your wallet.

So, how did I overcome my anxiety?

By using the following skills.

The following skills have helped me manage the symptoms of my anxiety (GAD), ADHD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), and even autism. 

As I mentioned in this important article (Can’t Overcome Anxiety? Why not Outsmart it instead?), you may not be able to completely “cure” your anxiety. 

Still, managing your anxiety is a often good enough option. 

Everyone has anxiety. It’s healthy.

You goal should not be a total elimination of anxiety, but it’s “normalization”.

Just like the body temperature.

Too low and you’re sick.

Too high and you’re sick.

It needs to be “just right”.

For example, my anxiety used to make my life a living hell, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. 

I’m satisfied with my anxiety levels.

Each of these points have their own chapter in my Outsmart Anxiety course. In this article, I will give a short introduction to each of them. 

Some of the skills I mention in the course aren’t mentioned here to save space. Sorry.

They work best when put together, but you can learn them in any order. 

If I were you, I’d start with…

Pause And Plan to overcome anxiety

I used to have an anxiety-inducing manager at work (a language school).

Whenever she spoke to anyone, it would almost always be about something negative.

Something you needed to “work on”, “improve”, or “stop doing”.

I once witnessed how her “communication style” made a teacher quit ON THE SPOT within 5 minutes.

He said, I quote: “Learn to talk to people. F*CK YOU. Find another teacher!”

I’ve never been quite so impulsive, so I just endured this “communication style”.

Every time I heard my name, my heart would “clench”.

I’d feel physical pain in my chest and stomach.

At some point, I realized: I couldn’t go on like this anymore.

I couldn’t change my manager.

And even if I did…

I was still “weak”. I didn’t want to feel startled every time someone called my name.

I could change myself and how I felt.

Pause and Plan, combined with a deep breathing technique, was successful at overcoming my anxiety.

So… how does it work?

Like this:

We all know the fight-or-flight response. 

Heart pounding, palms sweating, thoughts vanishing from your mind. 

You know the feeling. 

This is the fight-flight-freeze response. 

It helps us in times of danger. 

When you’re in a warzone and you hear a whistling sound, you don’t think.

You duck and survive the upcoming shell hitting the ground nearby. 

Your fight or flight response just saved your life. 

But most of us are not in the warzone. 

We’re at home, in our cars, at a supermarket.

Our anxiety and stress are usually over something trivial, like a stranger talking to us.

Or we see a dog and feel scared.

Or we worry about the future. 

Or we worry about possible injury, death, or deprivation. 

The fight-flight-freeze (FFF) response here is not only useless, but also harmful. 

We can’t be fighting, freezing or running away from everything that stresses us during the day. 

So, what are we to do? 

How about trying the opposite to the FFF reaction?

Pause and Plan is a technique that helps us break the pattern of catastrophizing and constant stress response. 

It works just as it sounds.

When you feel upcoming stress, you stop and focus on it. 

But, more importantly, you ask yourself: what should I do now? 

You plan a conscious and effective response. 

In her book The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal PhD says: “The most helpful response will be to slow you down, not speed you up (as a fight-or-flight response does). And this is precisely what the pause-and-plan response does.”

Pausing and planning your next moves will let you accept and digest your anxiety. 

Anxiety loses its power. 

If you ignore it, it will scream at you. 

If you listen, it’ll whisper. You’ll be calmer and happier. 

You’ll focus on your life, not on what your anxiety is screaming at you in your own mind. 

4 Letters that solve all human problems

The next approach goes hand-in hand with the Pause and Plan technique. 

This approach is about solving your problems. 

As psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz once said, “Most people have problems living, not psychological ones.”

• If you don’t have enough money to pay rent, you don’t have an anxiety problem, you have a money problem. 
• If your loved ones are sick, you don’t have an anxiety problem – your family has a medical problem.
• If you have a chemical imbalance in your body, you don’t have an anxiety problem – you have an imbalance problem. 

Your anxiety is either a symptom of the problem (as in GAD), or it’s your mind trying to direct your attention towards a real or potential problem.

Learn to solve problems and your anxiety goes away.

So, how do you solve problems?

Here’s a technique I developed for myself.

Others have mentioned how simple yet effective it is. 

I am now more focused than ever, I accomplish more than ever, and, best of all…

I don’t worry about things as much. 

It can be applied to any situation in your life: from health to wealth to relationships. 

Anything that causes your anxiety can be fixed or managed with this approach.

So, what is this approach? 

I call it MIST. 

It’s an acronym. 

• M stands for Materials.
• I stands for Information.
• S stands for Skills.
• T stands for Tools.

Basically, when you identify a problem (during your pause in the Pause and Plan response), you can then ask yourself: 

• What materials (time, money, ingredients) am I lacking? 
• What don’t I know? 
• What skills do I need to make it happen?
• What tools can I use?

I challenge you to find a problem in the world that can’t be solved using the above four components.

So, when you start thinking in terms of MIST, then you will be able to solve the underlying problems. 

Not only that, but you will start thinking about whatever worries you as of challenges, and not dead ends.

A study conducted by Anat Drach-Zahavy and Miriam Erez in Haifa, Israel showed that, quote:

“the same level of goal difficulty may lead to high or low performance and adaptation to change depending on the appraisal of the situation as challenging or threatening”

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597802000043

To simplify: you will do a better job if you think of your situation as a challenge, and not a threat. 

Pause and plan and MIST help you do just that.

This Military-grade technique Helps You overcome Anxiety

This technique is what the military calls After action review (AAR for short).

This technique will help you understand how you’re doing, and improve.

For example, you feel anxiety.

Next step is to identify a reason for the anxiety. 

It can be “I don’t have enough money in my bank account”, or “My body feels bad for no reason”, or “My family member is sick”.

For example, as I’m writing these words, my grandfather is in intensive care at a hospital. 

Just a couple hours ago he underwent an operation on his head to remove a hematoma (a bruise) inside his head. 

Of course, I’m anxious! 

I worry about his well being. 

But this anxiety doesn’t interfere with my life. 

How come?

What I did: 

• I paused, accepting that I’m anxious.
• I understood why I’m anxious.
• I asked myself: what can I do?
• I planned what I will do.

There are a lot of things that I can’t do to help him, or my parents. 

But there are things that I can do, and I focus on what I can do. 

And this is where AAR shines!

After you do something, you need to understand if it worked.

Otherwise, we’ll be like in the saying:

“doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” by Rita Mae Brown.

The definition of insanity.

So, having done something towards solving the problem you can ask yourself:

• Was it a good/reasonable thing to do? 
• Was it effective?
• Did it work?
• How did it go? 
• What were the results?
• Should you do it again next time?
• What should you change about your approach?

After action review is basically asking yourself the above questions, and remembering the answers.

Then, next time, you can continue doing what worked well and improve what didn’t go well. 

When you use these three techniques you will become a tough cookie. 

When faced with a problem you will stop, assess the situation, plan your reasonable response and then review how it went. 

You will start dealing with your life in a more proactive way. 

Why is it important? 

Studies show that there is a consistent association between avoidance coping and distress. Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jts.20276

In plain terms, we all have problems and challenges in life. 

How you cope with your problems can either ruin your life, or it can improve your life and make you stronger!

Next, let’s take a look at some skills and techniques that will help you manage your mind better and help you overcome anxiety faster, easier and more effectively. 

The first one is the scientific method.

Basically, it’s using logic and facts to direct your thinking. This 6-step approach goes hand in hand with Cognitive behavioral therapy’s ABCDE approach.

I go in much more detail in the course.

Journaling the correct way (as I show in the course) will let you put all the above techniques into practice. 

Journaling, by itself, doesn’t do anything, yet it can supercharge your thinking, your planning and your efforts to overcome your anxiety. 

Journaling is often misunderstood as “writing what you think” and it doesn’t work for anxiety like that. 

If you journal using the above techniques (pause and plan, MIST, AAR, Scientific Method) you will quickly realize that writing helps you put them into practice. 

You stop rambling and become your own therapist.

Journaling becomes almost effortless.

It’s hard to remember all the questions from the AAR approach. 

It may be hard to remember what the M and I and S and T stand for.

But when you’re writing, you have the time and space to remember them and use them.

Journaling has been responsible for more progress in my life in the past half a year than in the couple years before I started. 

Lateral thinking – is a great method to quickly break negative thoughts.

As I was writing the script for the course, my family was flying over the Pacific Ocean. My natural tendency to worry reared its ugly head and I started imagining their airplane crash. 

All the horrible images included.

I then forcibly started imagining all kinds of “crazy images” that made no sense: 

• an airplane being filled with stuffed toys or balloons instead of passengers.
• my 6-year-old son dancing and joyfully singing “we’re all going to die!”

Totally unreal.

And that’s the whole point. 

In its simplest form, anti-anxiety lateral thinking is using your creativity to create absolutely ridiculous images in your mind.

And then, these images will replace the catastrophizing thoughts you’re having. 

Your catastrophizing thoughts are often as unreal as the ridiculous images we can create using lateral thinking. 

So, why not settle for something in the middle?

Something more realistic.

So, if you tend to catastrophize, this technique is how to overcome anxiety in your case. 

So, now you will have a more balanced view of the situations in your life.

The above techniques work great not only for anxiety, but for many other conditions. They also work well even if you don’t suffer from anxiety. 

They can improve your life.

Another “bonus” mental skill is grieving.

Yes, I said it.

Grieving is not what “happens to you”. It’s a skill.

You can read about it in my article about death anxiety: How to Kick Death Anxiety’s B*TT

Next step in overcoming anxiety is to understand it.

You can read about it here:

50 shades of anxiety: How to identify and destroy yours?