How to CONTROL NERVES

When you live calmly you do not appreciate it, but when you are permanently in this state of anguish and restlessness you miss it a lot. Sweating, tachycardia, overwhelmed, lack of concentration, dizziness, feeling short of breath, blurred vision, dry mouth, stuttering, a lump in the throat..., does it sound familiar? They are typical symptoms of anxiety.

You may be nervous and know why: an important meeting, a move, a job change, problems with your partner, the medical intervention of a relative... There are many stressful events that can lead to a state of nerves. But, in addition, it is possible that you present symptoms of anxiety and you do not even know why. In both situations, you will ask yourself: does it have a solution? The answer is yes, there are many strategies and exercises to combat anxiety. We'll see now how to control nerves and anxiety with various psychological tricks and remedies to help you.

Index

1. Understand the body
2. Know the symptoms of anxiety
3. Look for danger
4. Breathe slowly
5. Loosen the body
6. Put your hands up
7. Describe reality
8. Tell
9. Go slow
10. Do exercise

The first step in managing your nerves and anxiety is understanding how your body works. Faced with a threatening stimulus, it is activated. Namely, in a situation that may pose a danger, the survival mode of the body is activated and that triggers the sensations that we feel that we often refer to as "being nervous". Specifically, the sympathetic autonomic nervous system, in charge of preparing our body to flee or fight, causing the anxiety symptoms that we will explain below.

It is important to know the symptoms of anxiety and not confuse them with any pathology. People who feel anxiety and do not know what it is, get scared, generating what we call "fear of fear." Therefore, in order not to continue increasing anxiety symptoms, it is important to know and detect them. What symptoms does anxiety have?

• Tachycardia. The heart pumps faster so that the blood reaches the muscles and they obtain oxygen and other substances that allow them to be optimal when running, fighting or climbing to hide.
• Cold, pale, and dry mouth. Blood travels to the muscles and areas necessary for survival and is withdrawn from the outermost areas so that, in the event of a superficial wound, the least amount of blood is lost possible.
• Sweaty hands. The blood travels to the hands, as they need skill to fight or escape.
• Muscle tension. Muscles prepare for action.
• Hyperventilation, tingling, and dizziness. The respiratory rate is accelerated to obtain more oxygen, which is the energy of the body.
• Pupillary dilation and contraction. The pupils are dilated to better perceive any visual information.
• Piloerection. Goose bumps and chills are due to this mechanism.
• Sphincter contraction and relaxation. The sphincters may relax to expel urine or stool to be lighter when escaping. It may also be that they contract, since during the fight it is not the time to urinate or defecate.

Other symptoms may occur. The important thing is to know that the body reacts this way because it wants to protect us. It's not dangerous.

The body is activated in this way because you are perceiving a danger. This can be real or imaginary. It is also important to know that the body reacts the same to an event when it occurs in reality or when it occurs in our mind. So anxiety can be caused by thoughts that you are not even aware of. This is why many people wonder why they have anxiety for no reason.

We can and will talk about many, many ways to manage anxiety. But, the really important thing is to get to the source of the problem. This requires a lot of self-knowledge, self-observation and introspection. You can start wondering:

• Where is the danger.
• What do you fear.
• What's the worst that could happen?
• What does this situation remind you of?

And so on until you find out what it is that worries you so much and why. You may be afraid of not liking others and being left alone, losing your job or the death of a family member. Beneath any intense reaction, there is an irrational fear linked to some learning derived from some event in the past. Surely, you are not aware of it, but through self-knowledge you will be able to understand why you react as you react in according to what situations and you will be able to rework the learning derived from that situation.

Finding those experiences and reorganizing those beliefs takes time, but in the meantime you can apply different strategies and exercises to manage anxiety and nerves.

The most effective and widespread technique for regulating anxiety is breathing. When we breathe with the diaphragm, slowly and deeply, we are activating the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, which produces a reaction opposite to anxiety. Therefore, to control the nerves it is very useful to perform diaphragmatic breathing exercises.

1. Place one hand on the abdomen and one on the chest.
2. Breathe in and puff your belly, slowly with a long breath.
3. Wait a couple of seconds.
4. Expires slowly expelling all the air from the abdomen. Exhale the air through your mouth making a slight sound.

To calm the nerves and relax the body, it is very useful to loosen the muscles. Start with the feet and go through all the parts in your mind: if they are tense, loosen them. The legs, the buttocks, the abdomen, the back, the shoulders, the cervicals... It is proven that body posture and psychological state feed into each other. That means that the posture of your body influences your mind. Relax the muscles to relax the mind, it is one of the best exercises to combat anxiety.

As we said, the state of the body transmits information to the mind. There is a very simple detail that we can do to help calm anxiety quickly: place relaxed hands on your legs and with the palm facing the ceiling. When we are in tension, the fists are clenched and the hands are stiff. Turning them face up is sending the message to the brain that there is no danger, that we are safe. Try this little trick to calm your nerves.

To quickly calm nerves and anxiety, one of the simplest and most effective exercises is to focus on a task that involves the senses, such as observing and describing reality. Ask yourself:

• Do you see
• What do you hear
• What do you feel?
• What do you taste
• What do you smell

Take a good look and write it down. Explain it in great detail. This is an easy technique to control nervousness.

Another trick to relax your mind and control your nerves before an exam or exposure is to keep your mind busy. You can use anything that involves reasoning: from doing sudokus if you are at home, to counting windows if you are on the street. You can also look up numbers and add them, count the steps you take, or name things that are blue. Any of these strategies will serve to distract your mind and calm your nerves.

However, as we have already explained above, these tricks to calm nerves and anxiety are only band-aids. That is, they are momentary solutions to relax at the moment. The relevant thing is to dive into oneself and to find the causes and work on the solutions.

Whatever you are doing, if you do it fast, you activate the body even more. Doing things quickly conveys haste and urgency, so you can keep your nerves. Take a leisurely shower, eat slowly, walk slowly... Going slow will help calm your nervousness.

Another strategy to control and calm anxiety is to exercise. It is not so important what exercise, what is relevant is perseverance. We all know that the benefits of sport are many and very important, but why does physical exercise relax? Physical exercise:

• Release endorphins, which provide a general feeling of well-being.
• Reduces cortisol levels, the stress hormone.
• Increases the production of serotonin and dopamine, whose effects are contrary to anxiety.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to How to control your nerves, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.

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