9 Ways to Manage Anxiety Without Medication
Whether you’ve got occasional anxiety or it’s an all-day-every-day part of your life, having some high quality strategies for managing anxiety is key to keeping it from taking over.
Medications can be helpful for some people in some situations, but some people prefer to keep things natural or don’t have anxiety that’s severe enough to warrant taking medication and most people who take medications still have occasional anxiety.
So just about everyone who experiences anxiety needs a healthy repertoire of all-natural coping skills to maximize their wellness.
Today, I’m bringing you 9 of my personal favorite strategies to manage anxiety without medication.
1. Train Your Attention to Undo the Anxious Habit of Living in the Future
When we’re anxious, we spend a lot of time living in our heads.
Most of the time, we’re living in the future…worrying about what could go wrong and how we’re going to prepare for it; but sometimes we’re living in the past…reliving past mistakes to criticize ourselves.
When we can train our attention to focus on the present moment, we can relieve a lot of the anxiety that’s caused by being stuck in our heads overthinking everything.
Another reason it’s important to train our attention is because our brains are specifically designed to pay attention to danger, which perpetuates our anxiety.
This is why we notice our boss’s critical comments more than their praise and why we remember the times we didn’t lock the door more than the times we did.
I mean, when you think about it, it’s helpful to pay attention to danger because it keeps us alive.
But most of the time, we’re not actually in danger of dying, so paying attention to danger is unnecessary.
Training our attention to focus on the present moment and on information that isn’t dangerous or problematic relieves anxiety.
Meditation is my favorite way to retrain my attention, and I practice every day with the Calm app.
Before I bit the bullet and paid for the Calm subscription, I practiced with free meditations on YouTube or on the internet.
2. Breathe Slowly to Turn Off Your Anxiety’s Fight-or-Flight Response
It won’t surprise you to see breathing exercises on a list of ways to manage anxiety without medication.
But before you roll your eyes, hear me out.
When our breathing gets out of whack, our entire physical system starts to change.
Try it out and see for yourself: Try breathing quick, shallow breaths for the next 60 seconds and watch what happens to your body.
You’ll probably notice that you get lightheaded, your heart starts beating faster, and you feel anxious.
When we’re anxious, our breathing changes to be quicker and shallower, which sends more oxygen into your body.
When your body feels a ton of oxygen coming in all at once, it assumes it’s because you’re in danger and you’re running away from something or using your muscles to fight something.
Your body will then turn on your fight-or-flight system to help give you an extra boost while you try to outrun that ostrich.
You know how when your heart rate has increased for a little while, your smartwatch assumes you’re exercising, so it turns on your activity monitor for you and gives you all sorts of praise for being active? Your body actually does the same thing, but instead of turning on the activity monitor and giving you praise, it turns on the fight-or-flight system and gives you anxiety.
Your body notices when things like breathing and heart rate change.
By slowing down how much oxygen is entering your body, you’re telling your body that you’re safe and relaxed.
Your body will respond by turning off your fight-or-flight system, which feels relieving.
My favorite way to turn around my breathing is 4-7-8 breathing: breathe in for 4 counts, hold your breath for 7 counts, and exhale slowly for 8 counts. Repeat x4, slowing down your counts each time until 1 count = 1 second.
3. Exercise to Reduce Your Sensitivity to Anxiety
Are you rolling your eyes again? I know, nobody likes exercising.
But repeated research shows that regular exercise reduces anxiety.
All you need is about 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise a week.
Let me do the math for you: that’s 25 minutes a day for 6 days a week or 30 minutes a day for 5 days a week.
Aerobic exercise reduces our sensitivity to anxiety.
Exercise definitely isn’t my favorite thing to do, but it’s one of my favorite ways to manage anxiety without medication because it (1) is free, (2) is incredibly effective, and (3) makes me feel like part of the cool kids group that can brag about exercising.
4. Catch Your Unhelpful Anxious Thoughts
The way we think has a lot to do with how we feel.
In fact, that’s what my free course on how to reverse your anxious downward spiral is all about.
There are certain predictable thinking errors that our brains make when we’re anxious.
For example, when we’re anxious about an upcoming performance review at work, our brains will
- filter out all the positive experiences we’ve had at work over the past year,
- assume our boss is going to criticize us,
- pay extra attention to the way our boss talks to us in the day leading up to the meeting and assume anything “off” definitely means she’s disappointed in us,
- believe we’re going to get a bad review,
- interpret any constructive criticism as an indication that our boss thinks we’re bad at our job,
- tell ourselves we should have done more impressive things over the past year,
- compare ourselves to our coworkers — but only thinking about their attributes, not the mistakes they’ve made,
- etc.
When you can catch these thoughts, you can check to see whether they’re accurate and check to see whether your brain is forgetting to pay attention to certain information (see point #1).
Once we can see that our anxiety has created some exaggerated thoughts, the anxiety will tend to dissipate.
5. Write Down Your Fears & Anxious Thoughts
Once you catch those unhelpful, anxious thoughts, write them down.
No, not in your head…on paper. Write them down.
Our brains process information differently when seeing it on paper than when thinking about it.
Here’s how to prove it to yourself.
Think about the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your whole life…the thing you’re most ashamed of.
Now, grab a sheet of paper and write down what happened or what it is you’re ashamed of.
If you don’t have paper or you’re concerned about someone seeing it, grab the Notes app on your phone and type it there and then delete it.
If you’re finding yourself skipping this exercise, consider whether you might be avoiding it because it’s emotionally difficult to write that stuff down.
It’s hard enough to think about, but writing it down makes it more real.
The same applies to things that make us anxious.
We have the thought, “My boss thinks I’m bad at my job.”
You might immediately know that thought isn’t 100% true or rational in your head, but go ahead and write it down.
Writing it down creates space between you and your thoughts and helps us recognize that indeed that thought is just a thought, not a fact.
Bonus points for writing it down with an actual pen and paper versus typing it out.
6. Play Out Your Anxiety’s Biggest Fear
Anxiety really has a way of making mountains out of molehills.
We really can go overboard in predicting how badly something is going to turn out or how big of a problem something is.
I know you’ve been in this situation — you see one little mole that seems kinda weird and all of a sudden you’re on Google images comparing your mole to melanoma. I get it.
A funny little quirk of anxiety is that our imaginations tend to stop at the worst point.
“I’m gonna get a bad performance review and get fired from my job. The End.”
“I’m gonna ask the doctor about this mole and she’s gonna say I’ve got melanoma. The End.”
Have you ever wondered what happens after The End? Play it out.
So you get a bad performance review and get fired from your job. Then what?
You work for the company for another month while you apply for jobs, you draw unemployment while you continue the job search, you go on countless job interviews, and eventually you land another job that’s actually a better fit for your lifestyle.
So you’ve got melanoma. Now what?
You get that mole removed and work with your doctors to treat the condition, with your doctor reminding you that melanoma is usually curable when detected and treated early.
Not everything is going to have a happy ending, but most of the time we’re able to cope with even very tragic outcomes.
Playing out the worst case scenario to the very end will show you and your anxiety that you’re strong and resilient and you can cope.
7. Use a Scale to Test How Bad Things Really Are
Use a scale. Not a fish scale or a weight scale. A different type of scale…like a 0-100 scale or “awesome to terrible” scale.
Anxiety tends to exist in extremes.
I either got an A on that test or I failed.
I’m either great at my job or I’m terrible.
He either loves me or hates me.
This project is gonna go perfectly or horribly.
A scale helps us measure how extreme something is.
You can use it to manage anxiety in lots of ways.
One is to measure the anxiety itself.
So, on a scale from 0 (asleep) to 100 (must be hospitalized), how anxious are you in this moment?
Make some anchors for things you can judge easily — maybe a 25 is that feeling when someone stands too close to you in line at the grocery store and asks you questions about what’s in your cart, a 50 is that feeling when a stranger at the airport asks you to watch their bag, and a 75 is when your mom just randomly texts “call me asap.”
On that scale, you’ll readily see that the melanoma anxiety that feels like 100 is actually just a 60, which tempers it.
Another way to use a scale is to measure the bad things that anxiety tells you are going to happen.
So, you’re convinced you’re going to get fired from your job. On a scale from 0 (I’ve got more money than I know what to do with anyways) to 100 (impending homelessness), how bad would that be?
Or maybe you did get fired: on a scale from 0 (best day ever) to 100 (death), how bad is that?
Again, make some anchors so the numbers are meaningful to you.
8. Make a Pie Chart
When was the last time you made a pie chart?
Middle school probably.
Time to break out those graphic skills folks and make a pie chart.
Just like anxiety tends to exist in extremes, it also tends to be really full of itself and assume that the one crazy idea it has is the only idea worth considering.
Example: mole = melanoma.
Bonus example: Meeting with boss = fired.
A pie chart can help you consider other options that could explain why something is happening in your life or other outcomes that could happen.
Think about all the things that could go right and wrong and all the possible outcomes, not just the bad ones.
So your performance review pie chart might look like this:
With the pie chart, it’s easy to see that the most feared outcome (fired) actually takes up a relatively small portion of the pie, whereas “receive some positive and some constructive feedback” is the most likely outcome.
9. Conduct Experiments to Test Your Anxiety’s Predictions
This is one of my all-time favorite ways to manage anxiety without medication.
Conduct an experiment to test your anxiety’s predictions.
Anxiety is all about making predictions.
And in almost every case, it’s predicting things are gonna be straight terrible.
Often we know at some level that our anxiety is just being dramatic, so call it out — conduct an experiment.
Let’s say your anxiety tells you that you must proofread each email three times before it’s sent or you’ll make a mistake.
Conduct an experiment: Try sending emails out for a day proofreading only twice and collect some data to see what happens.
If it goes well, try conducting a follow-up experiment of proofreading just once.
If it doesn’t go well, you’ve confirmed that proofreading three times is important for your process (or maybe then you use strategy #7 to test out how bad it really is to make a typo in an email…).
Let’s say your anxiety tells you that criticizing yourself keeps you motivated.
Conduct an experiment: Try criticizing yourself very harshly for a day and collect some data about how productive you were; the next day, try being extra kind to yourself and collect some data about productivity; alternate for a week to collect averages.
If criticism won, keep it up!
If kindness won, make some changes.
These kinds of experiments are really fun actually!
Knowing it’s an experiment takes some of the pressure off the outcome.
Maybe you make a mistake or do something embarrassing or maybe something doesn’t turn out well during your experiment.
That’s okay! You were just testing out an idea and now you know that it’s important to stick with what you were doing before (or maybe it’s an opportunity to challenge perfectionism).
Cheat Sheet: 9 Ways to Manage Anxiety Without Meds
This is a lot of information!
There are countless strategies for managing anxiety without medication.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with taking medication, and for many people the combination of medication plus these types of strategies helps the most.
But if you’re looking for something to boost your medication or you’re trying to go the natural route, these are my all-time favorite strategies.
You might not want to keep coming back to this full article, though, so I put all these ideas together into a one-page cheat sheet for you to reference.
Grab it here and print it out or save it to your desktop for an easy reference.
Part of mastering your anxiety is knowing how to cope with it, which is what today’s post was about.
But another part is understanding what triggers it so you can hopefully be proactive rather than reactive in your response to anxiety.
Next week, I’m bringing you 6 things that consistently trigger anxiety so you can stay ahead of it. Don’t miss it.
Talk to you soon,
Dr. Finch
P.S. Remember, this is education, not treatment. Always consult with a psychologist or therapist about your mental health to determine what information and interventions are best for you. See the disclaimer for more details.
Hayden C. Finch, PhD, is a practicing psychologist in Des Moines, Iowa, dedicated to helping you master your mental health.
