5 Habits to Help with Anxiety
I'm not a mental health professional but I was recently diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder by my therapist so I've been thinking a lot about how anxiety shows up in my life and what habits I do on a regular basis to help keep it at bay.
When you think about physical hygiene, you probably think about things like showering, brushing your teeth, and doing your skincare routine. We do these habits every day to keep our physical hygiene healthy. We don’t wait until we are covered in grime and our teeth are rotting out before we start taking care of these things…it’s all about maintenance.
This is exactly how I view the habits I’m going to share with you today. They are habits you can practice in your everyday life to help keep anxiety from getting way out of control.
Keep reading this post to learn:
⋒ 5 habits that help ease anxiety so you can live your most peacefully productive life
01. Having a mid-day reset ritual or routine
I spared y’all from saying that having a morning and evening routine helps with anxiety because I talk about those ALL the time but starting a mid-day reset routine last year has really helped in the anxiety department.
Think about it, once you get going for the day…you are GOING. You’re in the zone, people are asking for your time and energy, work calls, kids need taking care of…before you know it, you look at the clock and it’s 8 PM and you haven’t paused to take a breath. And we wonder why it’s so common for people to collapse in bed at 10 PM and scroll social until they pass out and wake up still feeling exhausted AF.
Having a mid-day reset routine is a hard stop in our day to reel our thoughts in and focus on being instead of doing. Ever since I’ve started this habit, I’m more productive the second half of my workday (able to focus, more time-efficient, and my work is better quality) and I feel less mentally drained at the end of the day. It’s like a recalibration moment for your mind. It’s a great way to weave rest and self-care into your daily life, too.
For me, my mid-day reset routine looks like stepping away from my laptop and phone, eating an actual lunch that nourishes me instead of scarfing a protein bar while I stand at the counter and scroll Instagram, and going out in the sunshine for 20-30 minutes.
I spend the first 5 minutes doing my grounding prayer walk – I literally just walk around my backyard barefoot and chat with God and then I grab whatever fiction book I’m reading and sit in my egg chair out back and read for like 15-20 minutes. I can actually feel my brain decompressing and releasing some pent-up pressure.
I’m always in a calmer headspace the days that I do my mid-day reset routine and I can tell when I skip it because I’m irritable, the second half of my workday is usually a slog, and I feel so exhausted by the end of the day.
Some other ideas for a mid-day reset routine:
⋒ Going on a walk and listening to your favorite podcast
⋒ Taking a 15 minutes drive while you belt out your favorite songs
⋒ Calling your mom or best friend to chat
⋒ Just whatever makes you feel refreshed
02. Building good quality rest into your weekly schedule
If you have been around Hustle Sanely for a while, you know that we are big believers in operating from a place of rest here.
Rest is not earned. Rest is not the last resort when you’re on the brink of burnout.
Rest needs to be a regular routine in your life.
I’m so passionate about this because it’s something I struggled with for the longest time. Hustle culture tricked me into believing that I couldn’t rest until I reached all my goals or crossed everything off of my to-do list. But guess what? Those 2 things never actually happen – when we reach our goals, we set new ones. When we check something off our to-do list, we usually end up adding something else.
I read the most beautiful quote about rest:
“Rest is a faith-filled act. It’s not stopping once all the work is done, it’s stopping in the midst if the work. It’s the ritual of cultivating divine trust. It’s validating that amidst the doing, being is good too.”
I decided that 2023 was going to be the year that I started taking rest SUPER seriously. So in January, I started practicing a weekly Sabbath and when I tell you it completely transformed me…it completely transformed me.
Now let me be honest – the first month-ish of this had me feeling on edge and antsy. I felt so odd taking an entire day a week just focusing on being. But having a day that is dedicated to rest has made me a better version of myself.
That’s how I do it but you have to figure out what regular rest looks like for you.
Actually, part of The 5-Step Hustle Sanely Schedule Building Framework is scheduling your weekly rest ahead of time. You don’t necessarily have to know what you want to do ahead of time but you do need to get that rest on the calendar as a non-negotiable every single week BEFORE your week is jam-packed with meetings, calls, appointments, and all the things.
03. Journaling in the morning and in the evening
Okay listen up, I don’t even feel a little bit bad for the plug I’m about to put in here – the Hustle Sanely Peacefully Productive Journal has been such a blessing to my mental health and my anxiety.
Now I’ve always been a journaler – I have all of my old journals from my 20s and it’s so rad to look back through them and recognize how much I’ve grown. I used to only journal in the mornings but adding in and evening journal practice has been incredible for me.
I love bookending my days with journaling because it helps me thoroughly process what I’m feeling, it helps me get clear on what I want, and it helps me to be more present throughout the day because I know I’m going to be writing about what my favorite part of the day was.
This journal is so special because there are guided prompts for each morning and each evening that encourage you to keep consistent track of your mental health every day plus there is a free write page for each day so you can write whatever is on your heart outside of the prompts.
I can’t even tell you how many DMs I’ve screenshot from people telling me how much this journal has positively impacted their mental health. It’s really no secret that this journal is my passion product and truly my favorite thing we’ve ever created.
Spending 10 minutes journaling in the morning and 5 minutes journaling at night is a habit that has really helped me keep my anxiety at bay.
04. Using batching to plan your weeks
I used to look at my weeks as continuous – as in, I’d be like okay I have this list of tasks that need to be done this week. Then on Monday, the start of my work week at the time, I’d sit down and just start doing tasks from the long weekly to-do list at random until I was too tired to do anymore. Then I’d wake up on Tuesday and repeat. And Wednesday and yeah you get it. So I had a long weekly to-do list and was going into it with no strategy is basically what I’m saying.
Then I learned what batching was and it changed me life. No dramatics here. I now work so much less because I’m more efficient with my time AND I’m hardly ever stressed out about when something is going to get done because I know when it’s going to get done thanks to batching.
Using batching has also allowed me to be more present in my personal life because of the same thing – I’m not worrying about when I’m going to get everything done for work because I know when it’s going to get done.
I teach how to batch hardcore in the How to Create Your Peacefully Productive Schedule Course and I walk you through how to create a weekly outline so that you don’t ever have to be panicking over when stuff is going to get done.
I’ll give you a little taste here and explain what batching is:
Batching is doing the same task over a period of time to refrain from doing it multiple times like day-to-day or week-to-week. It’s basically “work smarter, not harder” in action.
Batching makes it to where you’re not constantly having to mentally shift from task to task (called task switching). You can focus on doing one type of task, which preserves energy and helps you get to a flow state in your work.
I like to think of a well-oiled machine when I think of operating in a state of flow. This is also referred to as being “in the zone.”
Picture each day of the week as a bucket, you put similar tasks into the same bucket.
I’ll add it to my list to do a whole episode on batching because I think it would serve a lot of you well.
05. Going on a technology-free walk
I’m not gonna lie – I used to hardcore roll my eyes when people would suggest going on a walk to lower anxious feelings. I don’t know, I used to think it seemed too simple or maybe even frivolous but here I am eating my words and telling you that going on a walk – and not just any walk but a technology-free walk – a few times per week has done wonders for my anxiety and my mental health in general.
Real quick disclaimer– obviously, if you need to bring your phone for safety reasons do it, but try to keep it in your pocket or on airplane mode or something.
Anyway, when I walk, I like to mentally recite some affirmations. I was reading this book The Body Keeps the Score – which by the way is an intense and dense book so I can only read it a little bit at a time – and it was talking about our brain and it says on page 56 (I’m paraphrasing):
Neuroplasticity is when neurons that fire together wire together. When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting. If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.
So to me, speaking positive affirmations over myself makes me feel safe and loved – it helps create an environment for me to grow and thrive in.
Anyway, this is just me telling you not to write off the calming powers that a walk has. Going on a walk can take you 5 minutes and it’s going to really benefit your headspace.
When I get back from walks, I feel calmer, clearer, and sometimes I’m even like, “What why was X stressing me out again?”
And there you have it — 5 tips to help with anxiety! Don’t feel like you have to do all of these at once either. Choose one, make it part of your routine, then add another. These tips aren’t meant to overwhelm you but are here to help you create your peacefully productive life!
Want to snag the Peacefully Productive Journal™?
If you enjoyed this blog post, tune into episode 120 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to dive deeper into this topic:
