Dealing with anxiety while you’re in college becomes more manageable when you learn how to limit its triggers.
For sure, life can feel overwhelming at times, especially when you experience new classes, professors, and dealing with students who tempt you to react in a negative way.
A Few Simple Solutions for Controlling Your Anxiety
One simple solution for controlling your anxiety is to remind yourself to drink lots of water throughout the day. It’s been proven that water helps reduce toxins (poisons) that accumulate in your body when you’re in stressful situations.
Depending on the level of your anxiety attacks, remember not to skip meals, because food helps create consistent blood sugar levels. You want to find ways to eliminate the triggers that cause you to react to anxiety-driven moments. By eating a healthy snack, your body helps to normalize itself, and when you take the time to enjoy a healthy treat, you just might focus less on your anxiety.
Turn Away from All Negative Input In Your Life
Watching and listening to negative issues happening in the news or allowing your college friends to share ugly gossip that’s being passed around will only feed your anxiety symptoms. When possible, go someplace quiet and serene to study or walk off your problematic reactions. Do you have headphones? Put them on, listen to the music, and let your heart rate get back to normal, even if it’s for 15 minutes. Negative input thrives on creating anxiety.
Today, write one gratitude and watch what happens
Have you ever written a gratitude in your journal or on a piece of paper? A gratitude is a short statement of a positive thought and something you’re thankful or grateful for. It can be something as simple as: “I’m grateful the sun was shining when I walked to class today.” Or, “I’m grateful for the opportunity to attend this college.”
You get the idea. Each one of those gratitudes can help get rid of any negative thoughts that find their way into your mind. When you’re grateful, breathe deep, and repeat your gratitude out loud. That’s how a certain amount of anxiety leaves your body immediately. Try it.
Before you fall asleep, and when you wake up in the morning, spend a couple minutes saying out loud what you are grateful for, and watch what happens.
Avoid Foods that Trigger Feelings of Anxiety
You’ve probably heard this before, but sweets, processed white flour products and beverages with large amounts of caffeine are not good for you when you have anxiety symptoms. In fact, sugar and sweets can worsen your condition.
How to Control Your Anxiety While at College
Two more things you can do to control your anxiety while you’re at college are: 1) Focus on your breathing patterns and try to slowly breathe your air in and out through your nose; 2) When negative thoughts or statements seem to bombard you with anxiety, mentally try to turn the situation around into a positive one.
Anxiety is a built-in and normal reaction to the challenges you experience in your life, but when anxiety starts controlling your life and you can’t feel relaxed, then you need to take more aggressive actions to control your stress.
Have you ever felt anxiety while at college? Tell me how you dealt with it. Your response might be able to help others.
