How to Manage Stress | Nuffield Health

The most important thing to realize about anxiety management is that, even though there are many techniques to help you manage your anxiety, your mental coping skill is still your strongest tool. Everyone – no matter how much anxiety they experience – has that coping skill inside them. It’s like a muscle, and you can train it to help you overcome anxiety and reduce its effects. But you can also make it weaker, and you can do that by using unhealthy anxiety management practices. For example: Alcohol Drugs Overusing medications Gambling Reckless behaviors These are always unhealthy behaviors, but they’re especially damaging when you’re trying to manage anxiety. That’s because they become crutches that essentially tell your brain that it doesn’t need to practice its coping skills because you have something else dulling the anxiety for you. Your mind and body adapt when outside forces require it to do less work. It’s the reason that steroid use in athletes is so dangerous. Take too many steroids, and your body will naturally produce less because it doesn’t think it needs to do any work for them anymore.

https://www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/management