Please fall. You'll thank me later (hopefully).

There is nothing like the start of the fall season to encourage a spike in anxiety around the country. While this may sound a bit grim, a lot is going on for many this time of year (and this is common!). Some are starting a new academic year, a new job, or a transition to their first fall (semester) not going back to school. It could be a move to a new city, developing new friendships or losing touch with others from the summertime, or even current events around the world or this year's upcoming election. Really, you can take your pick for what anxiety triggering topic applies for you.

We can be so overtaken by anxious feelings that we will no doubt have times where we are feeling overwhelmed, grasping at ways to deal and cope with the stress. We may even fall; fall being loosely defined as emotionally crash, or have a panic attack amidst all of the triggers that are affecting our current ability to manage our emotions and moods. Everyone falls. We set ourselves apart from the next by not just how we pick ourselves up, but by how we manage to stay standing given the life and personal events that happen to us outside of our control (which can often feel like, almost everything!). So how does one remain steady and standing tall when dealing with anxiety? Well, it can vary but I can tell you that working proactively rather than just re actively (dealing with it only after you fall) is a place to start.

Managing your own anxiety is person specific in learning and developing the tools you need to help yourself reach a state of calm and feeling centered in yourself There are a plethora of ways that a person can both de stress and relax (and some of which I mention in my prior self-care post). What is really important to think about is the ways in which you have done this in the past, whether its reading, exercising, hiking, watching sports, TV, mindfulness tools, yoga, music, art, or writing; all of these can be and need to be completed on a regular basis in order to help yourself take more time for yourself to address your stresses. They may not feel directly related to that one work project you have been stressed out about, but they are. They each provide an opportunity to proactively work against the development of your anxiety that may build up within and that may cause you to fall. But again, I can't knock falling down. If anything its a true indicator of showing you that your body needs to spend more time relaxing and de stressing on the regular. And that is truly never a bad thing.   

The Importance of Self-Care

This may or may not seem obvious, however, for the majority of people when life gets busy or stressful, the time they take for themselves is unfortunately the first thing that goes out the window. Why does this happen? We need fuel to run our engine, so to speak, so why is it when we are over scheduled or running on empty we neglect to fuel our tank? I'll quit it with the fuel to tank analogy, however, I use it to explain this point that we often overwork ourselves way past capacity and somehow don't feel we have enough time in the week to perform self-care tasks. 

Whether you are a full time student or working full time at your job, we more often than not have some sort of schedule that we need to adhere to. We schedule in our 9-5 job, our classes, personal commitments, social outings, family responsibilities, or anything else that could be considered a task to complete related to others. After all of these thing that make up our lives, we leave little to no room for personal time to ourselves. Some may prefer it that way, to be constantly surrounded by responsibilities or others, and there isn't anything wrong with that per se', however, if it is somehow detrimental to your daily functioning then a line needs to be drawn.

Self-care can really be anything and is so loosely defined. It's very person specific, we all have different things that we enjoy doing to relax, calm ourselves, or to take a break from reality (from everything) and take a breath. We live in a busy world and are constantly inundated with information, technology, and the busyness of people while maneuvering interpersonal relationships, that sometimes the most important relationship we need to manage gets left behind; the relationship we have with ourselves. 

The amount of time you take for self-care can be as little or as much as you need. Whether its 20-30 minutes a week where you take a break, shut off your phone, and allow yourself to focus on your own thoughts and what is going on directly around you, or taking a long weekend from school or work to have a stay-cation or a trip somewhere can be very helpful for a person's self-care. Daily tasks even if they are just 5-10 minutes of mindful moments or listening to a song can do so much more than they are given credit for. 

As much as we prioritize all the things that make up our lives outside of ourselves (work, school, family, relationships), we need to make these changes to be sure we are prioritizing ourselves in the mix of all of these things. If we can't take care of ourselves, it will be that much more of a challenge to take care of others. So, be selfish, turn the phone off for a bit, take a long weekend and make it all about you. Give yourself that, for once!