Are you tired of feeling held back by fear and anxiety? Do you find yourself avoiding certain situations or activities because you're afraid of what might happen? Do you have trouble sleeping or concentrating because your mind is constantly racing with anxious thoughts? If so, you're not alone.
Fear and anxiety are two of the most common mental health challenges people face. But there is a way to instantly stop fear and anxiety. That's right, you can literally stop feeling afraid and anxious in the moment. This powerful technique has helped thousands of people overcome fear and anxiety. It’s simple, yet incredibly effective. And it can be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Two Types of Anxiety: Body Based Anxiety
Anxiety typically starts in two different ways. The first way is body based anxiety. This is when anxiety starts as physical sensations in the body causing the voice in your head to go into hyper-drive.
For instance you might have a cup of coffee and your body feels the effects of caffeine and your heart starts beating faster. And then the voice in your head starts telling you stories that create fear and worry to match the experience of the body.
Two Types of Anxiety: Thought Based Anxiety
The second is thought based anxiety. This is when anxiety starts as the voice in your head leading to physical sensations in the body.
For instance, you could start worrying about a presentation you have to deliver and then your heart starts racing, and your palms sweat and your mind starts saying more things that scare you and your body responds. Either way, the voice in your head plays a key role.
The Voice In Your Head
When I speak about the voice in your head, I am referring to the intangible world of your mind—thoughts, ideas, perceptions, beliefs, and imagination. The voice in your head is the narrator, repeater, and reminder of your anxiety and worry—the voice inside your head that’s often critical, judgmental, envious, full of rage, or ready to bolt. This voice can mimic voices from your past—she might do a brilliant impression of your mother, your second-grade teacher, or your ex-husband. She can grab pieces of past conversations—usually the things you wished you could forget—and embed them in your head like a Katy Perry song, replaying them over and over.
Even though this voice might sound like your own voice, the important thing to remember is that the voice isn’t you. This voice is merely an aspect of your mind that functions like a software system running strategies to control and predict possible threats. The voice isn’t personal. The voice isn’t against you, trying to hurt your feelings, or trying to sabotage you. It is merely an aspect of your mind trying to make the world around you behave, to make it predictable so that you can be safe.
The Role of the Amygdala: Anxiety and Fear
To be fair, this voice is only one aspect of your vast, complex, and beautiful mind. This voice comes from a tiny part of the brain called the amygdala. If you imagine drawing a line in between both of your ears, and visualize two almonds positioned along that line, one behind each eye, you’d have a good idea of the general shape, size, location, and origin of this little beast of a voice. The almonds—amygdalae—are part of your limbic system. The limbic system, also known as the “reptilian brain” or the “emotional brain,” takes in information through your senses and attaches an emotion to it.
The amygdala serves as the triage master for all incoming information. Information comes in through the senses and those little almonds go to work sorting and ranking the potential threats, determining whether you’re safe or at risk. When things are familiar and predictable, your little almonds are nice and quiet.
But life is never all that predictable—reality is a constant barrage of things that change, things that are unfamiliar, and things that put us at risk, whether physically or emotionally. These perceived threats trigger the amygdala’s fear/rage response, raising your brain’s level of anxiety so you can pay attention and eliminate the threat.
When you understand the nature of this voice and the intention of it, you’ll see that it evolved for very important reasons. The voice is very helpful when you encounter something dangerous like a car skidding to a stop in front of you on the highway, a grease fire in your kitchen, or a black widow under the bathroom sink.
The problem is that this voice in your head yells loudly no matter what the threat is: whether the house is on fire or your jeans aren’t fitting right. To the voice in your head, both are dangerous. Both are triaged as threats. To this aspect of your mind, everything is an emergency and everything (and everyone) needs to be controlled.
The Evolution of Anxiety and Fear
This primitive part of your brain was handed down from your ancestors and evolved to keep you fed, watered, warm, and away from predators. It also kept you safe from acts of nature or attacks from neighboring tribes. It kept you safe within your own tribe so you weren’t exiled because that would have meant certain death.
Imagine all that history and all that beautiful programming that once kept humans safe from famine, flood, blizzards, and bear attacks, now being funneled into whether or not an Instagram post got enough likes, whether your coworker is talking behind your back, or whether someone swiped right.
Impending danger triggers a very old part of our brain, and when that part gets freaked out, the voice in your head can be a bit like an annoying car alarm going off at two in the morning—eeee-ahhhh eeee-ahhhh woop woop woop. It’s difficult to have a clear thought, and it’s nearly impossible to not react to the sound when it goes off.
The good news is just like a car alarm, this voice evolved to keep you alert and safe and it does a very good job at that when the threat is real.
The bad news is just like a car alarm, most of the time, there is no real threat, and until you shut it down, it’ll keep blaring for no good reason.
Distance Yourself from the Voice in Your Head
The work here is to train yourself to not react to the voice in your head and to see it more like that annoying car alarm in the middle of the night. It’s to treat that voice more like background noise, and less like the ultimate authority on safety. Once that car alarm is going, your mind automatically finds supporting evidence to reinforce its beliefs. It’s like an algorithm that’s on the hunt for fake news. When you believe a story like, “something bad is going to happen,” your mind gets busy offering you supporting evidence. It filters through information to offer more and more proof to support the belief. If your mind is anything like mine, it’ll full-on conspiracy theory mode in two seconds flat—seeking data to support the physical sensations that I start to feel.
My mind races with thoughts like, “Someone’s mad at me, someone’s going to get me, life is chaos, things are just going to get worse,” until I’m in a total tail tailspin.
Your mind will replay that time when you didn’t listen to your intuition, and you ended up getting stuck in traffic. Or it’ll pull up current evidence—your greatest hits list of all your worries: worries about money, about your relationship (or lack thereof), or it’ll start obsessing about things that are beyond your control: like why your apartment building is so loud at night, or why you said a particular thing in a conversation that already happened. Maybe your neighbor didn’t wave when you walked by, or you forgot to pick up milk at the store, or your friend didn’t respond to a text—your mind starts to say, “See? I told you that life is dangerous.”
How to Calm the Body
While the mind is still the primary player in anxiety, the body still plays a role. So, Before you start to quiet the voice in your head, it’s best to help your body feel safe. My go-to is my weighted blanket—my absolute favorite is by Bearaby. It’s on the pricey side because it’s fancy and organic and super cute, so I also love the good ol’ tried and true ZZZhen Weighted Blanket which is more budget-friendly. You can use a weighted blanket as a quick and reliable hack to help you create the sensation of safety in your body, while you use this next tool to quiet the mind.
How to Calm the Mind
To find peace you must disengage from the voice in your head. The practice is to set a boundary with this voice. This means that as soon as you become conscious of any anxious story, you’ll interrupt the pattern, redirect, and refocus. Over time, you’ll stop taking that voice so seriously and you’ll begin to see it more like you would a faulty car alarm. Instead of allowing it to consume your attention, you’ll get better at minimizing your emotional reaction, redirecting your attention, and consciously focusing on a worthy story.
If the goal is to stop taking it all so seriously, how do you do that? How exactly do you stop reacting to a message that makes you feel so terrible?
One of my favorite quotes on writing is from Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast. In the book, he mentions what he’d say to himself if he found himself stuck, unable to get a story going. He offered, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
This advice is profound, and not only for writers but also for anyone who’s experiencing overwhelm, anxiety, or worry. If you typed up all the things the voice in your head says in a twenty-four-hour period, you’d have a lot of random nonsense, a lot of fear, worry and judgment. Sorting through thousands of thoughts and grievances and worries, is there even one thought that you’d keep as undeniably true? My guess is no.
Truth Calms the Mind
Truth is a sweet spot for the mind, an axis, a point of stabilization. It gives your mind focus, creating a sense of calm, harmony, and safety. It gives the mind something to hold on to, something to trust. One true sentence has the power to calm the mind. Focusing on one true thing, you find stillness. To quickly reduce the power of the voice in your head and to redirect your attention to inner peace, ask yourself to state one true thing, the truest thing you know.
What I want you to think about right in that moment is if someone had the very best attorney and took you to court to disprove that thought, would it hold up in court? So the truth will hold up in court. It will hold up against the best attorney out there.
Examples of How to Calm Anxiety
Try to find something actually true, something real, something right now. Here are a few examples of the truest thing:
Imagine you're anxious and you're trying to sleep and your thoughts are racing. The truth is: I'm just afraid. The truth is: I'm just tired. The truth is: I'm laying in my bed, my pillow is soft, my covers are cold or hot. Don't say something like, “Everything's going to be okay”. Your brain will go freaking bananas on that one because it's not true. You can't possibly know that's true, and your brain immediately calls BS. So don't say something like, “we'll get through this”, or “I'll be okay”, because again, anything but the truth is going to be like throwing gasoline on the fire.
Bring it back to super simple truths. This helps your mind reset. The one true thing doesn’t necessarily have to be a super-perky life-coach-y thought. To interrupt the pattern, you only have to say something true. For example, one true thing may be: I am in the habit of paying attention to my anxiety. This isn’t a great story, but it is surprisingly relieving to admit this to yourself. One true thing gets you out of that worry-obsessed-voice and redirects toward a more intimate relationship with yourself.
The truth offers solid ground to stand on. One true thing, even when the truth isn’t pretty, helps alleviate the sense of anxiety, overwhelm, and worry. By giving your mind a point of focus, you remember that you are not the voice in your head; you’re the one listening to it.
How to Stop Fear And Anxiety Instantly: 5 Steps
Grab your weighted blanket and settle your body down, and I'll take you through this tool step by step.
Think of a situation where you often feel worried, anxious, or overwhelmed.
Imagine the story that plays in your head during this situation. What story does your mind offer up?
Now set a boundary with that story. Instead of believing the story or allowing it to influence your emotions or behavior, take a moment to intentionally put that message in “faulty car alarm” category. Even though the message might be difficult to ignore, see if you can remove your internal reaction from the mental noise.
Redirect by asking yourself: What is one true thing? What is the truest thing I know? Tap into a deeper and wiser part of your consciousness by bringing your attention to the truth.
If you’re stuck use this: I am a woman/man/kid/person, sitting/standing/laying down. Because that’s always true!
A lot of times, anxiety arises when you’re in a dysfunctional situation where you’re being manipulated—at work or in your personal life. To learn about how to handle manipulation—read How to Handle Manipulative People.
