Calming my anxiety
- Chelsey Mills
- Sep 10, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 11, 2021
You might be here because you have anxiety yourself and if that is your reason I am sending you the biggest hug through the cyber web right now – you WILL be okay.
Hello and welcome to my first blog article! I have always been a little OCD when it comes to documenting my life, journaling and taking photos, so I have to admit it feels very nice to have a place where I can organise my thoughts, feelings and experiences over the years.
I hope you can take comfort in knowing that I can almost guarantee I have been where you are right now, feeling hopeless, feeling like I had completely lost myself, feeling so tired, and wanting giving up.
I was a prisoner of my mind for a really long time, it beat me down to the lowest I have felt in my life, but the silver-lining in all of this is that it pushed me to heal myself.
So here are the 3 things that helped to calm my anxiety:
1. Cut out the stimulants
I was consuming A LOT of stimulants, I have learnt that stimulants have a direct impact on our nervous system, which just isn’t a great combo if you are an anxious person like me! In excess these stimulants can increase your heart-rate, blood pressure and breathing – over time this takes a massive toll on our adrenal glands (super important to take care of our adrenals when we are anxious!) making us feel more anxious and definitely made me feel more susceptible to an anxiety attack. At my peak I was consuming;
Two large long-black coffees a day - I think that was about 6 shots of coffee, enough caffeine to keep me up until 2am each night
Smoking around 6 cigarettes a day, and a lot more on weekends when I was out drinking
Binge drinking every weekend resulting in pretty horrific hangovers the next day, where I would only get out of bed for the Uber Eats delivery
I was really lucky that I didn’t have any trouble ‘giving up’ any of those stimulants, I know that they can be super addictive habits. The panic attacks I was experiencing were beginning to really scare me, I was so frightened to feel like that again that it scared me sober - I remember it so clearly.
The day I had my worst panic attack was also the day I quit smoking, never had another coffee and stopped drinking for almost 12 months (I still have a relationship with alcohol, it is a lot healthier which I will talk more about one day).
As for the coffee, I traded it in for chai tea with honey in the morning. Chai tea has so many great benefits, it’s rich in antioxidants, good for digestion, has anti-inflammatory properties and gives you a nice natural energy boost! I love it!
2. Yoga
Yoga saved me - I know that sounds super cliché but it did. I kind of swapped out my vices of partying, drinking, smoking and replaced it with Yoga.
My mum suggested I come to a yoga class with her, it was as simple as that. It quickly became my therapy. Each class I took the better I started to feel. I could feel the benefit not only to my physical body but I could feel positive changes in my mind and my heart that I couldn’t ignore.
When you arrive on the mat in a yoga class, the first thing you do is close down your eyes and begin to clear the mind of thoughts and at the end of the class in shavasana it’s a similar thing again, but this time you are laying down with your eyes closed allowing the body to rest after working through the yoga flow.
Initially, I found the beginning and the end of yoga the most difficult and confronting, because I was pushed into being alone with my thoughts – with my anxiety that was something I actively avoided every second of the day. The actual yoga flow was great because my body is moving and I’ve got lots to focus my mind on. I would struggle through meditation, my anxious mind rolling through all the ‘crazy’ things that might happen “what if I have a panic attack and everyone things I'm scary”, “what if I throw up right now”, “I feel light-headed, maybe I will faint”, “something bad is about to happen”, “I need to leave I don’t feel safe” and sometimes I did leave – I had completely overwhelmed myself. But overtime, I noticed I felt like needed to leave less and less. I had more control over my thoughts and less of them during my yoga practice. It was such a relief to have a break from the negative thoughts running through my mind, that’s the part of yoga I got hooked on.
Fast forward 2 years, I’ve been practicing of yoga consistently and decided to follow my passion and go deeper. I completed the 200hrs Yoga Teacher Training studies in 2019. The course was comprehensive in traditional yoga asanas (ashtanga & hatha yoga), pranayama (breathing techniques) and meditation. It’s those three components of yoga that have helped me to feel better.
This is something you can start today to help you feel good, most yoga studios offer a free class for new students, go and see how it makes you feel, give it a chance!
There are also great free resources for yoga on YouTube, I’ll leave a couple of links to my favorites...
If you do decide to give yoga a go, I would love to hear from you. Let me know how it went in the comments or send me a message on my socials.
3. Talked it out
I met with a psychologist. I was well into my yoga journey, and while it was helping me tremendously, I was still struggling. My anxiety had morphed into fear and avoidance of things where I had no control or where I believed no one would be there to help or understand my panic attacks. The big fear that manifested from those beliefs was driving, I began to believe I would have a panic attack while I was driving and no one would be able to help me because I was alone. I would have horrible panic attacks driving to and from work, even just driving short distances to friends' houses. I could feel it was getting worse and it was leading me down a path of never leaving the house and never being out of my comfort zone.
To be honest I was not comfortable with the idea of speaking to a psychologist, the idea of being so vulnerable with a stranger made me feel super uneasy, but I felt I needed to give it a chance the same way I gave yoga a chance.
It was jarring at first, after my first session I wasn’t sure if I got anything out of it, I wasn’t sure if I had a good connection with the psychologist, I wasn’t sure if this method was for me. It was emotionally draining, I probably cried for 50 minutes of the 1 hour session. Two weeks later I showed up again, a lot of the things my psychologist tried with me were hit and miss, but I opened up more, I told her all the scary things that were going on in my head, and saying them out loud and to hear someone who is trained in mental health say to me, “you are not your thoughts”, “you are not crazy”, “those scary things aren't going to happen to you” that really, really helped me.
Then again, two weeks later we met, I was set challenges to face up to my fears – this is called exposure therapy - I hated it, but I gave it a chance. I had become so fearful of driving sometimes it really felt like I was going to die, my heart would race, my body and face got hot and tingly, my head is floating, can’t breathe, need to run to safety, I need to call for help. I still get all of those feeling sometimes when I'm driving, but what the exposure therapy did was help to build a resistance to those feelings, push through and prove to myself that I am bigger than those thoughts.
It’s important not to let the ‘fear-talk’ get too loud and not to let it talk me out of driving around and living my life. I saw my psychologist consistently for 12 months and when we both felt like I made good progress we put our sessions on hold. I revisited them when I had a little anxiety flare up during Melbourne's long COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, just to check-in.
There is my special magic combo, I really hope there is something in this article for you, that speaks to you directly and gives you a little push into trying out. I have been my own little guinea pig, it’s been tried and tested and helped me to feel like myself again.
I will continue to lean into the things in life that make me feel calm, peace and full of love. Most importantly, I accept that I have anxiety and it will always be a part of who I am, I am grateful for the good days and am strong enough to weather the bad days, I will take it day by day without judgement.
Lots of love, Chelsey Hari Om
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