responsibility Tag | Family Matters

How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

In What is Anxiety, I explained the process of creating anxiety. Today, I want to start describing how to calm anxiety with simple, everyday tips anybody can do.

It is important to remember that Anxiety is a thinking process that we do in the present of imagining a negative future. Anxiety is the modern evolution of the “fight or flight” response. We are not certain about the future and we predict a horrible one. Most of us are very bad fortunetellers, but still most people try fortunetelling in hope that the future will somehow change from being scary to being great, if only in our mind.

It won’t, unless we change the way we go through that process, and actively, with intention, change it!

In this post and the next, I will share with you 59 tips on how to calm anxiety. Each of those tips can do the trick for short time and if you continue doing them, they will become a habit. All you need are 2-3 tips that you feel conferrable with and alternate them.

Some of the tips are very much applicable to children, so teach your kids to develop strategies to manage and calm their anxiety as soon as possible. Research shows that kids as young as 3 years old already experience anxiety, and if they live in a very anxious house, they will master anxiety very early in life.

In schools, we see many anxious kids and this can be very exhausting for the body. Think of your body in “fight or flight” mode 30 to 40 times a day. An anxious child becomes so sensitive that every word said around them becomes a lion or a snake. The road from here to developing full-blown anxiety disorder is not too long.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

What is anxiety? Anxiety is one of the biggest problems of our society today. Research has found that it is one of the main reasons for sickness, relationship problems, crime and failure. People who are anxious have a bad physical reaction to thinking about the future.

Everybody feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living.

The problem is with the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger. When people experience mild anxiety, we call it “worrying”. When the fear takes over and blocks the person from living a normal life, we call it “Anxiety Disorder”.

Think about it this way: anxiety is when your mind goes towards a possible, horrible, bad, unpleasant future and you react to it NOW. No one is anxious when they think about getting compliments, or having a great time. We are anxious about something that MAY go wrong in the future.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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Do Parents Let Their Kids Play Violent Video Games?

Recently, I received a question from a mother who said her teenage kids wanted to watch violent video games and they claimed other parents allowed their kids to do so. They thought she was just being mean and ignorant of what was happening in the world. “I do not like the idea of them playing violent and sexist video games but I feel helpless”. Her idea was to design a questionnaire for parents and see if her teenagers were right. She asked me what I think of her idea. Here is what I wrote to her:

Your experience is quite normal and it is wonderful to read that there are people like you still out there, advocating for children to be engaging in healthy activities!

Feel free to set the rules in your house. Your teen is a teen. He does not set the rules. You do! He is welcome to make different rules in his house!

You don’t need a questionnaire to back up what you already know is right. You can be the captain of your own family ship, regardless of what other parents do.

Kids cannot buy their own games, computers, iPhones, etc. You have a lot more power than you think! I have clients who found amazing result when they put their kids on a technology diet for a week. Their kids were suddenly like new! If they can’t use your credit card and don’t know your PayPal password, you have nothing to worry about.

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How to Save Your Kids from The Consumerism Trap

The world we live in promotes consumerism all the time. Sometimes, I feel like I need to take my kids to live in a hut or a cave, far away from civilization if I want to prevent them from falling into the consumerism trap. Just recently, the big shopping center closest to us was rebuilt. It is now more than doubled in size. I often have meetings there, in one of the cafes. I always look at all the people rushing past and wonder to myself, “Don’t they have anything better to do than just spend money here?” Of course, my excuse for being there is that I came there for work!

The scariest thing is going to the supermarket with my kids. We buy most of our groceries from two different supermarkets. To get from one to the other, we need to cross the entire shopping centered, which is shocking. Every window tells you why you must have that dress and that you are nothing without those shoes and that you are not cool if you don’t buy this and that you are fat if you don’t use that product. It is completely shocking and terrifying. People we know talk about how they do not have enough money for basic things, and yet their kids seem to have the latest iPhones and the latest brand name jeans that they bought for a bargain at $140 at a half price sale. They are totally over the moon that they can help their kids be considered cool for that price.

My main problem is that this excitement will last for a week at most. After that, the cycle of “buy me!” will start again, because we live in a society that teaches children to be consumers. We live in a society that convinces kids (and their parents) that they are inadequate and that they need to shop in order to survive! It is a trap because it turns desires and wants into needs. It is a very strong, well-oiled and sophisticated machine. It gives us that idea that “I can only be happy when I have this item”. As parents, we want our children to be happy from every teeny tiny thing they possibly can enjoy. We are helpless before such a well-rehearsed trap.

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Does Valentine’s Day Promote Violence?

Valentine’s Day is coming soon. My junk mail is full of advertisements for gifts for the Valentine’s Day couple. Just like every year, I am a little disgusted. Valentine’s Day, which is supposedly a day to share and express love for each other, is in fact a day that promotes very specific gender stereotypes – aggressiveness and violence in men, and vanity in women. You might say I am over reacting but I dare you to look at Valentine’s Day ads and see how stereotypical they are. Women are perceived as obsessed with their looks and man are obsessed with anger, violence, sex, aggressiveness and technology.

Since when do women only care about their beauty? It is a sad state of our a society if everyone believes the Valentine’s Day ads that think women are so shallow and dumb that they only care about their looks.

Since when do men only want to be perceived as strong and aggressive? It is a sad state of our a society if everyone believes the Valentine’s Day ads that think men are so shallow, angry, aggressive and childish that they will do anything to make themselves feel “manly”.

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Self Love Affirmations

Love is important and it takes up lot of our energy. We want to love and be loved in return. I think of love as a battery. When we have love, we feel powerful, energetic, optimistic, creative and motivated. It drives us forward and it is addictive. Yes, addictive. Once you feel love, you are not the same person anymore.

I realized all this about love when Eden, my eldest, was born over 25 years ago. With her, new feelings were born inside of me and there was nothing that could take those feelings away.

Before Eden was born, my first nephew, Adam was the first kid I ever loved. And I loved him so much (and still do) that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to love my own child as much as I loved him.

When Eden was born, I was glad to discover that there is no limit to love. I loved Eden so much and my love for Adam did not change one single bit. But at that point, I realized that we bring kids into the world to learn to love ourselves. Our own kids teach us so much about ourselves and we should appreciate that.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Affirmations

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Parenting 101: Top Parenting Essentials

After coaching so many parents, and raising my own kids, I have accumulated many essential parenting tips that I want to share with you. I hope you find them useful.

Take care of your happiness first. Just like they tell you on a plane, you should put the oxygen mask on your own face before helping your kids. If you want to raise happy kids, you must take care of your own happiness first. If you do not have oxygen, you are no good to your kids. Happy Parents Raise Happy Kids.

Be positive. It is very easy to notice what your kids are doing wrong but harder to pay attention to the great things they are doing. Parents tend to take the good things for granted. In life, you get what you focus on and parenting is exactly the same. If you focus on good thing, you will have more of them. If you focus on problems, conflicts, difficulties, bad manners, you will have more of them. If you notice your child doing something good, say it! Praise kids for being kind, congratulate them for making an effort, acknowledge their kindness and you will see more of it.

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Anorexia: Fix the Broken Body Image Created by the Media

Media is one of the major contributors to the damaged body images we have in our society. Once, it was only girls, but now we have more and more boys suffering from low body image.

Movies and magazines show celebrities who look tall and slim, with smooth skin at every pose. It is no wonder people spend money on products to try to “fix” themselves. What they do not know is that the photos they see are heavily photo-shopped and that the person they see in the magazine never looked like that.

It seems fitting that we should use the media to fix the damage done by the media. That way, our daughters and sons can see it. Yes, the photo-shopped images are beautiful, but they are not normal.

This post is part 8 of 8 in the series Anorexia

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Judgment and Forgiveness

Forgiveness is not something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. Judgment robs us of our happiness. Forgiveness restores it.

I love Byron Katie. I think reading her book “Love What Is” helped me a lot as a person, as a mother, a partner and as a life coach. In my coaching, I cover many aspects of Byron Katie’s techniques and I have been asked by my clients to share it here on my blog, so they can teach it to their families.

Think of your mind as a house, prime real estate. The different qualities of your house include tenants knocking at your door, asking to rent some space there. As a property manager, you want to rent the space to very good tenants and avoid the trouble makers. Judgment is like a very important tenant. As much as you think you do not want it residing in your mind, it is very important and no house can survive without it. We all have to have some definition of the world so that we can navigate through life efficiently. Still, it is important not to give judgment the biggest room when we talk about judging others. Forgiveness on the other hand is a very important tenant. If you have a few trouble tenants, it can help you manage them and bring peace in your mind.

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How to Have a Happy Life

I have dedicated my life to promoting happy living. I have watched many people living the life they want and, unfortunately, too many people who have no clue about bringing happiness into their lives.

I suggest to all my clients that they come up with an A to Z list of living a happy life. Below is just one version of what they have come up with. I hope it will encourage you to come up with your own.

Appreciate yourself and others. Accept everything as it is. Appreciation is the ability to see good in yourself and others. It does not change who you are but how you perceive things.

Be yourself! This is the main goal in life. Do not try to be someone else. It is draining. You are unique, special and perfect, just the way you are. Cherish it!

This post is part 4 of 6 in the series A-to-Z Guides

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