There are some easy tools that anyone can use to cope with their feelings of anxiety. They include:

1. Learning more about anxiety: This will help you to understand what is happen when you start to feel increasingly anxious. First, remember that we all feel anxious at times. It can help us to prepare for and cope with hard tasks – such as sitting an exam or teaching a class. However, it leads to problems when the danger isn’t real yet our body is signalling a high state of alert.  

2. Learning strategies that help us relax: The two most common strategies for relaxing and unwinding are calming down our breathing and muscle relaxation. The former involves taking slow, gentle breaths (breathing in through the nose, pausing for a few seconds, then breathing out slowly through the mouth, again). The latter involves learning how to tense and relax the different muscles - and then repeating this until our stress levels fall.

3. Actively challenging our anxious thoughts: When we’re anxious and tense we often see the world as a threatening and hostile place. This usually reflects faulty, negative thinking where we jump to conclusions or expect the worse to happen. This is out of proportion, exaggerated thinking which is unrealistic – and makes us feel uptight. A strategy for helping is replacing faulty thinking with a more realistic and accurate approach. This necessitates us challenging our automatic thinking so we see things in a clearer, less distressing way. Of course, it takes practise and effort to shift our change anxious thinking – but it’s worth the effort in the end

4. Facing our fears: One of the best ways of dealing with our fears is exposing ourselves to what makes us feel afraid. For example, if you avoid being with people as this leaves you feeling anxious then the best way forward is to simply face your fear.  You could make a list that goes from “least to most scary” - and then reward yourself each time you move a level up the list

(Source: onlinecounsellingcollege)

givemeajobplease:

… and asked, again, whether I would come there. Start our days with coffee, end with you making dinner. Forever. I feel myself tug towards yes and then I remember why it will always be no with you and I.

There are people in  your life who are going to love you for all of the wrong reasons. They will love you for the best part of your face, the best part of you naked, the best mood on your best day, the best story you ever wrote, the best outfit you ever wore.

They are going to miss the scar on the underside of your nose from the time your older brothers dared you to run across a pile of logs. They won’t know that you fell on a hidden nail just as you completed the challenge. They’ll miss the scar on your finger, too from the time you were seven and closed a swiss army knife on it. They won’t understand that these are two of only a handful of things you can remember about your childhood. They’ll notice that you have great tits, but they’ll miss that your thumb tucks into their palm when you’re walking together and that your eyes have darker circles when a migraine is coming. They won’t know you get migraines. They won’t ask where the story you wrote came from, so they’ll never know that it was true. They’ll love it because it feels real to them. They’ll miss knowing the sweatshirt full of holes that they criticized you for wearing was your dads. You might tell them some of these things along the way, but they will remember the best things instead.

They will love your good moods, your energy, your sense of humor, but miss that you never turn to them, but rather to a shower or a pillow or the back of your throat to shed tears. They won’t ever consider you strong.

When the parts that aren’t your best come out, some people will shield their eyes as if you have just forced them to look directly into the sun for hours until their irises burn. They’ll silently make you promise to never show them that again. Those things are not to be shown. Be at your best so I can love you. I would love you more if only you never show me those things.

And you do not marry those people. You do not sit and sleepily drink coffee with those people. You leave those people and you remind yourself that they missed the better parts of you.