Lowering Anxiety

Some ways to lower anxiety:

Relaxation Techniques before event: If something is causing you anxiety, practice deep breathing and relaxing your entire body.

Preparation: If the anxiety producing event has something to do with performance, one way to lower anxiety is by proper preparation, making sure your ducks are lined up in a row.

Visualizations: this works for any type of anxiety. When you feel anxious use visualization techniques, where you actuallly go over what your role will be, what you will do, what you will be like, what the environment will look like, etc...

Building Self-Esteem: reminding of competence and abilities. After you allow yourself to feel anxious and/or nervous and you have already done the proper preparation, you can begin to use positive self-talk reminding yourself that you are competent, able, relaxed, prepared, accepting of yourself, and ok.

Practice all the time proper processing of emotions: practicing processing emotions all of the time will at first feel like you are feeling more anxiety, but what is actually happening is that you are practicing and being aware of what your body is doing, so that you will be lowering the overall intensity of anxiety in the future. Increasing body awareness is another way to look at it. It is building that connection between body and mind.