Morning Anxiety - How to Minimize It
Morning anxiety is tough and hard to deal with. You never know when it’ll show up. However, it tends to do so at the most inconvenient time of the day.
It begins as persistent, circular reasoning that sneaks in like a shadow, a sort of anticipation that leads to physiological arousal. Unfortunately, your morning anxiety can easily condition the rest of your day. It leads to an intense fear of the obstacles or challenges that may come your way.
Morning anxiety can be rather limiting for a person who doesn’t know how to manage it properly. Thus, continue reading this article to discover some tips that might seem simple but can help you reset your day after a bad start.
Get out of bed if you have morning anxiety
You wake up in the morning and open your eyes and before you can think of anything else, you feel anxious. So, you immediately begin to feel restless and this translates into physiological arousal, followed by a possible compulsion to cry and some feelings of inadequacy. There’s also apprehension and, at some point, you decide you don’t really want to go on with your day.
Your schedule is full of things you have to do, such as an appointment with a person you’ve never met or a party with friends. Perhaps you need to go shopping or finish a project. But whatever your plans for the day might be, anxiety is there to discourage you. Not only that, it invites you to run the other way.
For that reason, it’s important for you to know how to bring down the catastrophic thoughts that ruin your day as soon as they start. This is because such thoughts aren’t there by accident and can easily integrate into your internal dialogue while you’re still lying in bed.
In fact, there are techniques for dealing with your mental trash. They’ll help you avoid obsessive thoughts, both when you wake up and before you go to bed.
Circular reasoning can aggravate by staying in bed. This is because the only thing you can do there is think. You become easy prey for anxiety when you wake up and stay in bed half-awake.
Thus, if you can detect the signs that inform you that your anxiety is on the rise, it’s time to get up.
Change of plans – the same plans
Avoidance, as a strategy, will only increase your anxiety. These situations aren’t usually accompanied by something specific that may elicit their activation, such as running into a venomous snake or a scheduled visit to the dentist. Anxiety can make you believe that you shouldn’t continue certain plans. This is because your catastrophic thoughts get stuck on a loop, kind of like a broken record. They’re so persistent that you start to believe you won’t be able to overcome certain challenges.
You might decide not to do certain things you had planned due to your anxiety avoidance mechanism. However, this alone won’t reduce your anxiety in the long term. Instead, it’ll encourage you to do the same the next time you feel anxious. Unfortunately, not fulfilling your goals will further undermine your self-esteem.
Therefore, even though it’s difficult to wake up with anxiety, avoiding your daily activities will only worsen your situation. How so? Because your daily duties will only pile up if you don’t deal with them.
The best thing to reduce your anxiety is to confront your demons, even it makes you anxious. Often, the obstacles you perceive are easier to deal with than you think, so you’re not as vulnerable as you perceive yourself to be.
Coffee, without milk and without coffee
A typical morning routine often begins with a cup of coffee. But you must keep in mind that caffeine is a stimulant that increases your heart rate. This could be mistaken as a physiological manifestation that’s physically similar to anxiety.
Caffeine can be very positive for your body as a starter but it can be to your detriment when you’re psychologically aroused. This is because you shouldn’t encourage your heart to beat faster under a state of anxiety. It could have a cascading effect on your already increased breathing, profuse sweating, and in every other scary physical symptom.
Therefore, morning anxiety should be a sign that coffee isn’t your friend that day.
“The natural effects of caffeine stimulate a host of sensations, such as your heart beating faster, your body heating up, your breathing rate increasing — all things that mimic anxiety.”
Let vanity be your ally
Keeping up with your personal grooming is the final recommendation to prevent morning anxiety and waste your entire day. Proper hygiene habits are simple activities that’ll calm you down.
Thus, when you wake up anxious, you must resort to active and conscious strategies to confront it. Anxiety is a mixture of catastrophic, irrational, and negative thoughts that convince you of your worthlessness. They belittle you. So, you’re in danger because you’re not able to realize that it’s all a lie.
Thus, your first instinct is to run away from anything painful and hide in a warm, comfortable place against such harmful conditions. These simple gestures will have a crucial impact on your feelings. They’ll impair your self-efficacy.
Finally, it seems relevant to mention that people aren’t born knowing how to control their anxiety.
Morning anxiety is a symptom of a disorder that a person doesn’t have to face alone. You must seek therapy if anxiety is affecting your overall social, family, emotional, and occupational functioning.