Anxiety plays a huge role in my life. My anxiety often surfaces as chronic stress and concerns about my professional life and career. While it has held me back in many instances, I can appreciate some of the ways in which anxiety benefits me.

Panic attacks can be frightening to deal with when they are happening. As someone who has dealt with panic attacks for as long as I have been dealing with chronic anxiety, I have found that it is important for me to know how to cope when I experience a panic attack.

My name is Elizabeth Naraine, and I am excited to join the HealthyPlace community as a new author for "Treating Anxiety." Anxiety has affected me in different ways throughout my life. Beginning in the early years of elementary school, I experienced racing thoughts and a pit in my stomach before the day started. Throughout my teen and adult years, it evolved to constant worrying about my future, career outlook, and relationships. My goal with this blog is to help you feel supported and understood through the challenges of living with anxiety and offer a glimmer of hope that there are effective ways to treat anxiety and overcome it.

I've found exercise can help with anxiety. In my experience, physical activity allows me to release emotions that I am feeling, helps me feel less tense, and helps improve my sleep. Since developing a regular routine, I've noticed my anxiety has been helped by the exercise.

When we experience a stressful situation, we experience a stress response, also known as the fight-flight-or-freeze response. How we respond depends on several factors, but I’ve found that I often freeze in stressful situations. Because of this, I’ve had to learn ways to unfreeze to help me move forward in certain circumstances.

Now, I've learned how to keep my anxiety from hurting others. There was a time when I was a lot younger that I was easily agitated and often angry. What I realized later on in life was that this was related to my anxiety. I often found myself experiencing these intense feelings that I couldn't quite express, and unfortunately, I couldn't quite find an outlet for them either. As a result, I found that I would often express these feelings to others. Things are different for me now, though, as I work to keep my anxiety from affecting others.

I've noticed that slowing down helps my anxiety. When I am extremely busy, the pressures of having a demanding schedule and multiple deadlines begin to weigh on me and contribute to my anxiety. The busier my schedule gets, the more I feel anxious daily. Unfortunately, this becomes evident as I start having a hard time sleeping, concentrating, and focusing on day-to-day responsibilities. In these situations, I need to help my anxiety by slowing down.

I've found that grief and anxiety go together alongside the feelings of sadness, anger, regret, loneliness, and depression. However, in my education and throughout what I have learned, the relationship between grief and anxiety was not usually addressed.

When I'm anxious, one of the hardest things to do is to stop overthinking. After all, this seems to be what anxiety is about, beyond, of course, the physical symptoms. Anxiety causes you to worry about what you are experiencing stress about. Therefore, you end up overthinking about the situation and about various scenarios. It's hard to stop overthinking.

When you are constantly anxious, it is hard to confront traumatic experiences and process your feelings from trauma. What can end up happening as a result is that you may avoid dealing with the situation. However, processing your feelings from trauma is critical.