This article will provide practical tips and strategies for naturally calming anxiety attacks, especially during nighttime, giving detailed information about natural strategies and techniques for calming anxiety attacks.

Understanding Anxiety Attacks

Anxiety attacks can happen when stress levels get too high. These attacks are common with anyone who experiences high levels of stress or anxiety or has an anxiety disorder. For many people, these attacks happen at night, and they can manifest in the form of a panic attack, sleep paralysis, or other symptoms that interfere with sleep quality and make the stress worse.

This article will focus on natural methods to alleviate anxiety attacks and calm yourself down.

Tips for Calming Anxiety Attacks

-Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Progressive muscle relaxation is a viable tool for recognizing where you are holding physical tension. You can learn how to calm anxiety attacks at night by starting from your face and working your way down your body, clenching all of the muscles in a given area, and then releasing.

With this technique, you move down your body, contracting and releasing your muscles. In so doing, you can release tension you might not have known you were holding.

-Visualization and Imagery

You can also learn how to calm down from an anxiety attack with visualization and imagery. Visualization is a technique where you visualize something or someplace that is calming to you.

This level of imagery looks slightly different for everyone but involves focusing on all of the minute details of something positive, like:

• The sound of crashing waves and seagulls
• The feel of hot air on your skin
• The smell of saltwater
• The sensation of sand between your toes
• The feel of a beach towel wrapped around you and a chair against your back

-Grounding Techniques

Grounding techniques can also teach you how to calm anxiety attacks at night when symptoms are high. Grounding techniques are things that help you quiet any distressing thoughts and focus on the present, forcing your mind to turn away from anxiety, worries, or memories.

There are several grounding techniques that you can use. Some examples include the following:

• Hold your hands in water for a few minutes, focusing on the cold water against your skin
• Taking a drink of water or eating a quick snack and savoring the taste
• Picking up something near you and focusing on the way it feels
• Using your five senses to bring your focus to the room, thinking of the sounds, smells, sights, and so forth
• Placing your feet on the floor and stretching

Different techniques will work in several situations. If, for example, you’re having an anxiety attack at night, while you are sleeping, you can put your feet on the floor to physically ground yourself and then grab something that you keep next to your bed on your nightstand and hold it or just touch it. This can be something that is cold, squishy, sharp, or fluffy, anything that brings your focus back to the present.

You can keep smells that are strong and meaningful to you nearby next to your bed, where you work, or in your car so that if you are trying to figure out how to calm an anxiety attack while at the office or while driving, you can grab the homemade spice packet, scented candle, or bar of soap and inhale the fragrance deeply. This will help to turn your attention back to the present moment.

Strategies for Long-Term Anxiety Management

While the tips above are great if you are learning how to calm down from an anxiety attack, your long-term strategies should revolve around reducing anxiety in the first place so that the need for such tips diminishes. There are several ways in which this can be achieved.

-Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)

Long-term management of anxiety symptoms can be achieved with cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches you to recognize harmful automatic thoughts and to see the relationship between those automatic thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors. By recognizing this relationship you can learn how to better control the way in which you respond to your environment, to things that are said around you, and to stress.

-Stress Reduction Techniques

Stress reduction techniques go hand in hand with cognitive behavioral therapy, giving you the tools you need to reduce the stress in your life.

There will always be stress no matter how effectively you manage your day but it’s important to recognize what items of stress are within your control and what items are not.

While this is a simple example, it represents the idea that much of the stress people face is self-inflicted and learning to differentiate between what is within your control and what isn’t and, from there, what type of action you can take to mitigate the things within your control is imperative.

-Support Systems and Self-Care

It’s also important to have support systems. Support systems come from someone you can turn to, someone you might be able to call when you are stressed, who makes you feel better, who makes you laugh, or to whom you can vent.

Self-care routines are equally important, and they give you a chance to set boundaries, take care of yourself first, and know when to step away from a situation so that you can do something as simple as take a walk, meditate, or put on a face mask and sit quietly for 10 minutes.

Read more about anxiety attacks at Your Local Psychiatrist’s Blog