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Those of us struggling with anxiety on a regular basis are always looking for most effective, quick to learn and easy to implement tools and techniques that will help us reduce anxiety instantly, enabling us to soften the grasp anxiety gets on us, high-jacking our bodies, paralyzing our willpower, kidnapping our minds.

With our hearts regularly racing, lungs pushing double-time, knees shaking, stomach clenching, throat constricting, sensation of throwing up, we feel terrible.

We desperately want to get back to our calm and relaxed selves, to reduce anxiety instantly, without drawing anyone’s attention to what is going on inside us.

Fortunately, if we understand how anxiety functions, we can outsmart it and utilize quick and easy ways to reduce anxiety instantly.

In this article we will explore 5 evidence-based scientifically proven ways to reduce anxiety instantly. We will also reference scientific articles that support the efficacy of these strategies.

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is a perfectly normal and natural mechanism designed to protect us from dangerous situations. It is the nature’s way of ensuring the highest probability of our species’ survival.

Without anxiety we would find ourselves in potentially unsafe situations, completely oblivious, unguarded, and unprepared. Our experience would probably be a lot more pleasant and relaxed if anxiety were not in our nature, but we, humans, probably wouldn’t live for very long.

Anxiety serves an important purpose of keeping us safe. It only becomes a problem if the level of anxiety we are experiencing is much more severe than is warranted by the reality of the situation, to the extent that it interferes with our lives and prevents us from successfully functioning in the world.

We don’t want to eliminate anxiety completely, we just want to develop the skills to lower its intensity and make it easier to manage, especially once we realize that we are reacting to a false alarm – the situation is not truly dangerous, only perceived by our bodies as such.

How is anxiety triggered?

Our organism registers a perceived threat. It doesn’t even have to be real. It may be a stick that looks like a snake, a tree branch knocking on our window, a person at the grocery store glancing at us for just a fraction of a second longer than ordinary.

Our body starts mobilizing internal resources to defend itself, before we even become consciously aware of what exactly the perceived threat is. There is no time to pause, investigate, and fully evaluate the situation. That would cause a significant delay and, in the event that the danger were real, risk wasting precious milliseconds, which could mean the difference between life and death.

When alerted to a potential threat, our body is programmed to give us the highest chance of survival.

The defense mechanism is initiated by an adrenaline rush to prepare our body to run or fight.

Heart rate and breathing are speeding up. Digestive system is tasked with making us as light as possible to give us an advantage in running and fighting by expelling anything it can, either by throwing up, peeing, or diarrhea. Our knees are shaking (preparing to run), our fists are tight (preparing to fight). All this activity is generating a lot of heat, so our cooling mechanism must also comes online in the form of sweat. Functions that are irrelevant in the moment are turned off to save energy.

With that intense level of preparation we have a good chance of making it when the danger is real.

However, if the snake turned our to be a stick, we might feel really stupid and annoyed for all that needless jumping, running, and sweating. If this happens to us frequently and in a wide variety of different situations, we will justifiably get frustrated with our organisms for constantly misjudging the risk, restricting our actions, and hijacking our bodies for extended periods of time.

We can think of anxiety as our over-protective parent, that is coddling us just a little too much with the best intentions of keeping us safe. It is trying to protect us by not letting us go out and experience the world, afraid that we might make mistakes and we might get hurt. If it could bundle us in bubble wrap and prevent us from leaving the house, it would.

How does anxiety dissipate?

Exactly the opposite chain of events need to play out for our anxiety to dissipate. Our organisms need to register a felt sense of safety (which is more than just an absence of threat). If we can figure out how to send a message of safety to our senses, we can take back control of how we feel, both physically and emotionally.

We take back the power to decide in what situations we no longer want to feel anxious and override any defenses our body wants to put up. To do that we need to stand up to the physiological and conditioned responses that were once keeping us safe but have outlived their usefulness and no longer serve us.

Teenagers who feel held back by their overprotective parents often have to stand up to them and say: “It’s OK, mom. You can relax now. You can let go. I can handle it. I got it from here.” Just like with an actual overprotective parent, standing up to our own anxious response is uncomfortable. There will be a lot of resistance. We will most likely need to repeat the message multiple time before it sinks in and the parent (or our body’s anxiety response) lets go.

We take control of our anxious response by communicating to ourselves that we are indeed safe.

Can we actually do that?

Absolutely.

The body and the brain are interconnected and are constantly communicating back and forth to get the most accurate information. This is great news for us, because that means we can use our brains to send messages of safety to our bodies, and we can also use our bodies to send messages of safety to our brains. That gives us plenty of opportunities to intervene and redirect the processes that our organism initiated, erroneously thinking that it is keeping us safe.

What can we control?

You might argue that we don’t have any control of the situation when our bodies are freaking out. We are running on autopilot at the mercy of our system. It feels like we are powerless to resist.

Even though it does feel like we are helpless in that moment, this perception is not accurate.

We do have a significant amount of control in any situation.

This is the case because our organisms have both voluntary and involuntary functions.

We don’t direct our hearts to beat, diaphragm to contract, sweat glands to produce, blood to circulate through our bodies. All these functions and more happen involuntarily, outside of and independent of our conscious control.

On the other hand, there are many aspects of our being that we can control, at least to some extent, right in the moment.

Specifically, we can consciously and intentionally direct our thoughts, the focus of our attention (sight, sound, touch, smell, awareness), imagination, the movement of our bodies. If we befriend and engage these voluntary functions, we will be able to send the messages of safety to our system in order to self-regulate and self-soothe.

Breathing is a unique and powerful tool that we will be relying on heavily in our mission to reduce anxiety instantly, because it is both voluntary and involuntary. We don’t need to think about breathing. Our body knows it needs to keep moving air in and out to keep us alive. In that sense breathing function is involuntary.

Fortunately, we also have the power to intentionally slow down or speed up our breathing, to breathe into our tummies or our chest, to hold our breath for a certain amount of time, to breathe through the mouse or the nose. We will be using this capability to our advantage.

Anxiety is like a spiral.

When we are experiencing an anxiety attack, our brains are responding to the alarms sounding from our bodies and in turn our body is reacting to the danger signals from our brains. The brain and the body reactions feed each other and build on each other, escalating quickly, creating a closed loop, making us feel like prisoners.

If we chose to wait the unnerving feelings out with no intervention, the anxiety attack may take hours or even days to fully dissipate.

Unless we intervene.

All we have to do is to exercise some control of voluntary functions to mindfully insert ourselves into that feedback loop between the brain and the body. We simply need to gently and confidently redirect the run-away process instead of getting caught up in it.

In this article we will learn to reduce anxiety instantly and effectively by sending messages to our body and our mind, convincing them that we are indeed safe.

We press the stop button and override any potential false alarm and sense of danger that our organisms have erroneously picked up in our environment while trying to protect us from harm.

Even though our stress hormones will not dissipate instantaneously as soon as we feel safe, our heart and breathing rates will come down pretty quickly, our stomach muscles will relax, and we will start to perceive a sense of calm and peace.

By practicing the five simple techniques described in this article, we will learn how to start reversing the course of our body’s anxious response and getting it moving in the right direction.

Even though there is no magic solution to instantaneously stop the anxiety, below are 5 easy and effective strategies we can use to reduce anxiety instantly.

Reduce Anxiety Instantly – Strategy #1: Give Yourself A Hug

This might sound ridiculous in its simplicity, but giving yourself a hug is an amazingly effective for most people to reduce anxiety instantly for an obvious reason. The beauty of this tool is that we can do it literally anywhere, while sitting, standing, laying down. Nobody will notice. Nobody has to know.

This strategy works so effectively to reduce anxiety instantly because most of us are biologically and environmentally conditioned to feel safe when we are supported by a caregiver. We feel safe when we are held.

Luckily our senses either don’t care or can’t tell the difference whether this support is coming from an external source. Our nervous system will typically perceive a hug as comforting and immediately start to relax.

While giving ourselves a hug with the amount pressure that feels just right for us we are actively making contact with the skin which is our container and the largest organ in our body. The receptors on our skin quickly relay the message of safety to our brain.

It’s amazing how easy it is to tap into our mammalian care-giving system and change our biochemical experience. Our anxiety will instantly start to diminish.

We are physiologically wired to feel a calming sensation from physical touch.[efn_note]Kale, S. (2020, May 25). The Neuroscience of Why You Could Really Use a Hug Right Now. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/the-neuroscience-of-why-you-could-really-use-a-hug-right-now/[/efn_note]

For an extra bonus, research demonstrates that crossing our arms around the mid-line of our body has a pain-relieving effect. [efn_note]Gallace, A.a; Torta, D. M.E.b,c; Moseley, G. L.d; Iannetti, G. D.b,* The analgesic effect of crossing the arms, Pain: June 2011 – Volume 152 – Issue 6 – p 1418-1423 doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2011.02.029[/efn_note]. Availability of hugs is also associated with higher self-rated health in later life.[efn_note]
Rogers-Jarrell T, Eswaran A, Meisner BA. Extend an Embrace: The Availability of Hugs Is an Associate of Higher Self-Rated Health in Later Life. Research on Aging. September 2020. doi:10.1177/0164027520958698[/efn_note]

There is no right or wrong way to give yourself a hug.

Here is an effective way to give yourself a hug that works well for most people:

1. Put one hand under the opposite armpit.
2. Put the other hand on the outside of our opposite arm, just below the shoulder.
3. Put enough pressure to feel a soothing sensation of holding and support.
4. Squeeze as much as little as feels comfortable.

Now let’s gently close our eyes or relax our gaze, if that feels safe, and really tune into our sensations. We are sending our whole body a message of being held, safe, cared for, cherished, protected. We can even rock from side to side a tiny bit to enhance the effect.

If we are truly feeling so comfortable and relaxed, there must be no threat, no reason for anxiety to mobilize its defenses. The nervous systems relaxes, our whole organism starts to calm down.

Try giving yourself a hug for a few seconds or minutes, you’ll be surprised how quickly anxiety loosens its grip!

Modification for kids:

Little kids, as young as toddlers, can be taught to give themselves a hug to self-soothe when distressed. Ideally they will be held by a caregiver, but it is good to have a backup option for the situations when the caregiver is not immediately available, such as in a school setting.

Reduce Anxiety Instantly – Strategy #2: Ground Yourself

When we are anxious our thoughts are usually racing with catastrophic “what-if” scenarios. In an anxious state we are living in the future and seeking to control the future. This is a failing proposition.

The best way to stop the downward spiral and to reduce anxiety instantly is to bring ourselves back from the future into “here and now” by literally grounding ourselves in the present moment.

Our goal is to intentionally and deliberately re-orient our senses and awareness to the space our bodies physically occupy in the currently reality. We focus our attention on the present.

Another way to look at this is that during an anxiety episode we become stuck in our heads. If we could only successfully mobilize that stuck energy and direct into into our feet, we would reduce anxiety instantly.

This grounding technique is really easy to do and we don’t even have to rearrange our body to do it.

1. Mindfully and intentionally let our feet touch the ground.
2. Notice the sensation of our feet making contact with the floor.
3. Feel the stability of the ground beneath our feet, the security of earth supporting us.
4. Allow the ground to fully support us.

To do this technique we can sit or stand. We can also easily adapt this technique to practicing while laying down, walking, or even doing the dishes. The only requirement is that we bring our focus our feet. Buddhist mindfulness exercise of walking as if we are kissing the earth would achieve the same effect, because we are similarly redirecting our awareness to the moment and sensation of our foot touching the ground with every step we take.

The only prop required is the stable ground beneath our feet, or the support under our whole body if laying down.

We feel grounded and supported. Our minds stop racing into the future and become centered in the present.

Modification for kids:

Little kids can be invited to bring their attention to their feet by stomping, running in place, or jumping. Ask them how their feet feel, where do they feel sensations in their feet, does one foot feel more than the other, what color is the feeling in their feet, is the ground soft or hard, hot or cold, etc. Kids can hop like a bunny or a frog, stomp like an animal, crouch like a tiger. Let them make up their own movements. Do it with them, make it silly, make it fun.

Reduce Anxiety Instantly – Strategy #3: Breathe Into Your Belly

A lot of people have heard that it helps to focus on their breathing to lower anxiety. They often dismiss this advice, saying that they have already tried it and it doesn’t work for them, that it actually makes them feel worse.

It is true. The vague instruction to simply focus on our breath during an anxiety attack is misleading and might exacerbate the feeling of anxiety.

Why is that?

In the middle of an anxiety attack we are already breathing a lot. Our breathing is fast and shallow. If we now turn our focus to our breathing, we will most likely start to hyperventilate. We will feel a sensation of shortness of breath or inability to take in a full breath, which is really scary and will in turn aggravate our anxiety instead of reducing it. This is definitely not what we want.

Remember, our goal is to send our body and our brain a message that we are perfectly safe.

How do humans breathe when they are safe? How do children breathe when they are sleeping?

When we feel safe and relaxed, our breathing is deep and slow.

We can observe a sleeping child and notice their belly going up and down gently and rhythmically. Their chest is barely moving. Their breathing feels effortless. As soon as we can achieve this type of breathing, our nervous system will get the message that there is no danger, that anxiety response is no longer required, that mobilization of our defense mechanisms can be called off.

To achieve this calming effect and reduce anxiety instantly, we need to not just generally bring our attention to our breathing, but specifically and intentionally focus on breathing into and out of our bellies.

1. Focus our awareness on the area around our belly button.
2. Mentally watch our belly move in and out if we are sitting, or up and down if we are laying down.
3. Keep our chest still and just notice as our tummy naturally inflates and deflates.

To ensure we are doing this correctly we can put one hand on our belly and another hand on our chest. We want the hand on the chest to stay still and the one on the belly to go for a ride, in and out, up and down.

As easy as that. Minimal effort required on your part.

Just a redirection of the focus of our attention. Do this for a few breaths or for a few minutes.

Try belly breathing while giving yourself a hug! You will be surprised by how quickly your body relaxes.

Modification for kids:

Little kids, as young as toddlers, can be taught to breathe into their belly. The best way to teach belly breathing technique to a young child is to tell them you are going to play a fun game. Have them lay down and put a little stuffy toy on their tummy (let them pick a toy). Then ask them to take the toy for a ride by making it move up and down on their belly.

Not only will the kids learn belly-breathing, there will be a lot of giggling as well (which is also great for reducing anxiety). Especially it will be a lot of fun if you are laying down next to them and modeling belly breathing with a stuffy on your tummy!

Reduce Anxiety Instantly – Strategy #4: Exhale, Exhale, Exhale

Belly breathing by itself can be extremely effective, but we can take it further by turning out focus to extending the exhale, making it longer, getting as much air as possible out. Once we get the air completely out, the inhale will be automatic and natural.

We don’t need to think about inhaling at all. Only exhale.

Pretend that our belly is a balloon filled with air. While keeping the chest as still as possible, we watch our bellies inflating when air goes in and deflating when air goes out.

We exhale intentionally, going longer then our body would want to when we feel anxious. We are letting all the air out of our imaginary balloon. Our belly button keeps reaching towards the back of the spine.

1. Keep exhaling, exhaling, exhaling.
2. Keep reaching the belly button to the spine. Keep reaching. Keep reaching.
3. Gently let go and allow a natural inhale.
4. Repeat.

It might help to exhale three times for every in-breath to make sure we completely empty the lungs. Our lungs will automatically take a natural gentle inhale to refill, which signals for us to exhale again.

It helps to focus our awareness on the breathing process, on the sensations, ignoring any chatter in our heads. Once we get the breathing under control, the sense of perceived threat dissipates.

We are no longer anxious.

We feel safe and grounded here and now.

So far we have three effective tools which we can combine or use independently to reduce anxiety instantly: 1) give yourself a hug, 2) breathe into your belly, 3) exhale.

Modification for kids:

Little kids, as young as toddlers, can be taught to focus on the exhale. Of course, we would want to turn it into a game and use props. Blowing bubbles is all about exhale. So is blowing pinwheels. Pretending to blow out birthday candles. Blowing through a straw to race pom-poms. Anything that involves blowing air out works great!

And don’t forget to make it super fun by practicing alongside them and making silly faces along the way!

Reduce Anxiety Instantly – Strategy #5: Tell Yourself You Are Safe

So far we have three techniques where we are using our body’s voluntary functions to communicate to our brain that we are not in any imminent danger.

We also have an opportunity to use our brains to communicate to our bodies. Our brains can talk to our bodies to let them know it was a false alarm and it is OK for our bodies to let the guard down and relax.

One way to do it is to tell ourselves that we are safe at this moment.

Notice, that we are not saying that we are always safe or that we are perfectly safe. We are only stating that we are safe at this specific moment in time.

1. Say to yourself: “At this moment I am safe.”
2. Repeat.

(If that is not a true statement and you are truly in a dangerous situation at this moment, then anxiety is your friend, you want that adrenaline, heart pumping, and hyper-alert state so that you can most effectively take action).

Modification for kids:

We can definitely teach older kids, who have enough self-awareness to know that they are not in actual danger, to whisper “I am safe.” For younger kids, we can model by looking getting down to their level, looking into their eyes, saying gently and softly “You are safe at this moment.”

Summary of 5 Strategies to Reduce Anxiety Instantly

The beauty of these five anxiety-reduction techniques is that they are so simple to learn and so helpful to reduce anxiety instantly. As we have seen, even a toddler can be taught to give themselves a hug and modeled how to exhale (the hug from the caregiver is ideal but it is still valuable to learn the self-soothing skills for situations when the caregiver is not immediately available). Each strategy is effective on its own and even more powerful in combination with the other ones.

Here is the recap:

1. Self-hug
2. Grounding
3. Attention on the belly
4. Exhale
5. Safety Statement

How to Maximize Chances of Success

Like we discussed in 5 Strategies to Improve Mental Health, it is important to remember that our nervous system learns by experience and repetition. Our organism learns by actually taking actions to reduce anxiety, not simply learning about it, or intellectually understanding the concept of how one would go about reducing it, or liking the idea of being able to do it.

Just thinking about reducing anxiety is not enough, we have to take action.

It is scientifically proven that our bodies and our brains find it easier to do things we are familiar with. If this routine becomes second nature for us, our organism will start regulating itself with the first breath or as soon as we put wrap ourselves in a hug.

Remember that having the intention to reduce anxiety instantly will not help us reduce anxiety. We actually have to practice the techniques regularly to feel the benefit, to get the results we want.

The more we practice the strategies to reduce anxiety instantly, the easier self-regulating and self-soothing will become for us.

For the best outcome we must be consistent and committed to any approach that we take if we want it to work quickly and reliably every time.

It is also important to experiment. We are all unique individuals and need to figure out what works most effectively to reduce anxiety instantly specifically for us. Then just do more of that.

We are committed to sharing the best mental health self-help resources with you on this site, but if you need individualized support from an anxiety counselor, please reach out. We are here to help!

How do we manage anxiety and stay calm and present?

When learning how to regulate our own nervous system and manage our anxiety during challenging times, it is important to develop awareness of the small shifts in our felt-sense, the nuances of our feelings, sensations, and experiences. If we can catch that we are begging to get out of balance and take a resourcing action right away, we can usually easily return to functioning within the limits of our “window of tolerance.” It is much harder to come back to balance after we have been significantly dis-regulated.

There are only two steps to staying calm and present and managing anxiety, but they rely heavily on you knowing yourself, catching that moment, and engaging the resources that you know from experience will help you recover back to your emotional balance.

1) Notice when you are BEGINNING to get dis-regulated or going beyond your “window of tolerance”:

• Your breath is shallow and/or you are sighing or your breath is faster than normal.
• You are picking at your fingers, biting fingernails, rubbing hands.
• You are engaging in other nervous behaviors such as swinging a foot, chewing gum, chattering or talking a lot.
• You are reaching for an unhealthy snack, smoke, alcohol, or other substances.
• You are holding tension in various parts of your body.
• You are more emotionally sensitive than usual.
• You notice an increased heart rate.
• You have a sense of being spacey, foggy, cranky, or irritable.
• Your voice is whiny and you feel like crying.
• You feel tired or bored.
• Your negative self-talk is getting stronger.
• This looks different for everyone. Know yourself and what you do when you are starting to get dis-regulated.

2) As soon as you notice any of your signals of dis-regulation, begin to resource yourself:

• Notice and name the experience, feeling, or sensation.
• Focus on slowly breathing in and out of your belly.
• Make the exhale longer than the inhale.
• Drink water or tea.
• Engage your senses: Colors, contrasts, textures, sounds, smells, sensations, temperature.
• Change the position of your body.
• Get up and walk around, step outside, or go for a jog.
• Have eye contact with someone.
• Touch someone, ask for touch, or give yourself a hug.
• Stretch, do yoga, qigong, or taichi.
• Massage your hands, feet, ears.
• Move your awareness to your feet.
• Squeeze your hands or move something with your feet.
• Say a mantra (affirmation), such as “I am safe at this moment.”
• Change the lighting.
• Gently rock yourself.
• Laugh or smile inwardly.
• Take a nap.
• Sing or listen to music.
• Have a healthy snack.
• Take a bath or a shower.
• Brush your hair or massage your face.
• Talk to a friend.
• Put the palm of your hand on your forehead, your chest, or your abdomen.
• Different approaches are effective for different people. What helps you to regulate yourself?
  

What is Reggio Emilia Approach to Play Therapy?

Reggio Emilia is an pedagogical approach committed to the creation of conditions for the child to learn, grow, and develop through synthesis of all the expressive, communicative, and cognitive languages. This approach was first developed in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and has since because a model around the world. The Reggio framework of working with children is a valuable resource to educators, parents/caretakers, counselors, clinicians, and anybody working with children in any capacity.

Applications for Play Therapy in Parenting and Child Counseling:

Reggio Emilia philosophy ties into the foundation of play therapy. Rather than expecting kids to engage in an “adult-like” intellectual exchange with us (parents/teachers/counselors/caregivers), we need to communicate with the children in their own language and develop a way to understand what they are communicating to us in their own language. What does their language look like? It is not English, or Spanish, or Chinese. It is creative and abstract and takes many different forms. Kids communicate through the games they play, the pictures they draw, the singing and the whining, the laughter and the tears, the hitting and the hugging, the tantrums and the joyful bursts of energy, the questions they ask, the books they like to read.

Any behavior, regardless of how frustrating, annoying, or not socially-acceptable to adults, is a form of communication. The kids don’t “misbehave,” they don’t have “anger issues.” They are trying to tell us something with their behavior. They are trying to communicate a need. If only we would listen.

“The hundred languages” are a metaphor for the extraordinary potential of the children, their knowledge-building and creative processes, the myriad forms with which life is manifested and knowledge is constructed.

No Way. The Hundred is There.

poem by Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)

The child is made of one hundred.

The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.

A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.

The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.

They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.

They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.

They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

Is it even possible for us to improve mental health? It seems that no matter what we do and how hard we try to improve mental health we still fall back into our old dysfunctional patterns. Is the pursuit of better mental health is a waste of energy? What are we doing wrong?

First of all, it is absolutely possible and doable to significantly improve mental health, our functioning, and our sense of well-being in the world. However, to increase our chances of successfully achieving better mental health, we must first revisit five basic assumptions and expectations of what it really takes to get there.

How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #1 – Commit to Sustained Action

When we are taking medication for a chronic physical illness we typically take it every single day. We follow doctor’s orders without question. We know that if we stopped taking the medicine, the illness would come back or flare up.

There is no doubt in our minds that our diet and exercise routine also need to be consistent in order to be effective. Any positive gains in how we look and feel will start to wear off as soon as we stop.

We spend years and a small fortune on orthodontics, wearing those annoying braces and uncomfortable expanders to straighten our teeth, to get that perfect Hollywood smile.

We apply the same expectations of discipline and consistency to our jobs and even to cleaning our houses. We know that if we stopped making progress on our objectives at work or taking care of our houses, our job performance would suffer and our houses would get really messy quickly.

It also goes without saying that we have to regularly and consistently wash the dishes, the laundry, take showers, brush our hair, eat healthy, take care of the kids, walk our dogs, exercise. We know that we have to do many of chores at least daily for the rest of our lives.

Yet, we are refusing to accept the same reality when it has to do with our own mental health, our emotional well-being. Even when we realize that we are suffering, when we know there is a problem. We might say that want to improve mental health and we might even believe it. Yet, we are willing to accept only a silver bullet solution, a brief, low-effort ,and low-cost intervention. We want to wave a magic wand, be “cured,” and feel great for the rest of our lives.

Sadly, this magic wand to improve mental health doesn’t exist. There is no silver bullet either.

Just like some of us are born with a fast or a slow metabolism, we are genetically and environmentally conditioned for a certain baseline level of mental health. Due to a combination of bio-psycho-social factors, our organism develops a physiology that may be prone to anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD, or PTSD. These conditions are very much a part of us, a part of our organism, of our make-up.

When we talk about “better mental health” or “how to improve mental health” we are not comparing ourselves to some stereotypical benchmark or to others. Instead, we are trying to improve on our own individual baseline that life has dealt us through genetic lottery and environmental conditioning. Rewiring and reprogramming our organism, that took generations to develop, will require a lot of work, commitment, and perseverance.

The mission to improve mental health is really not that different from addressing physical health. We can think of an illness as a process that goes on in our organism.

Instead of looking at our mental health concerns as a short-term or acute illness, like ear infections that are expected to completely clear up after ten days of antibiotics, it may be more beneficial to see our mental health challenges as a chronic condition similar to heart disease or cancer. Chronic conditions might never be completely cured, but they can be successfully improved upon and managed throughout our lifetime.

Improving our mental health requires a commitment to sustained and targeted action as well as a continuous focus throughout our lifetime, similar to managing chronic conditions, diet, and exercise.

A realistic destination of a journey to improve mental health should not be seen as a magical instant cure (this expectation would set us up for failure from the start). Instead, our mental wellness can be viewed as an informed strategic way of being in the world which makes the condition manageable and ensures that it does not interfere with the felt sense of well-being and successful functioning.

Once we identify that unique recipe that is effective for us and helps us to improve mental health, it needs to become an integral, continuous, and central part of our lifestyle, not just a short-term intervention.

How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #2 – Choose a Lifestyle that Works for You

Before we bring home a new plant or consider adopting a pet, we do research to understand what environment this living thing requires. We ask ourselves: “Would I be able to provide an optimal environment for it to survive and thrive? How would I do that? Do I have everything I need?”

Yet, we don’t ask what is the right environment for us, for our own well-being. Are we living in the right environment? What changes can we make to make our environment more suitable for our own optimal functioning?

We just assume that what is right for everybody else must be right for us. We let society and culture dictate what we should need and want, what environmental conditions we should thrive in. We somehow think that we can be thrown into the harshest environment and make ourselves function successfully just by pure willpower and perseverance. We are conditioned to believe that hard work is the answer to all the questions.

Not being able to “succeed” under the circumstances imposed by our society is considered a sign of weakness. Society’s message is that if we had only tried harder we would be able to successfully navigate the situation.

We don’t expect a fish to just suck it up and live in a tree, just like we don’t expect a gibbon to teach itself how to swim, yet we often push ourselves to go against our unique needs as individuals and do what “society” tells us to do, even if it feels unnatural and wrong for us.

We, humans, are living things. We are organisms that are in constant contact with our environment. We don’t live in a vacuum. We affect our environment, and in return it affects us. Some environments are not great for us, but we might still be able to survive and function in some way. In other environments we might not. There is no one universally perfect environment that ideally fits all humans, despite what society wants us to believe.

Some people like to be social, others prefer solitude. Some people are energized by the hustle and business of the big city, others are drained of energy in crowded places and need to be immersed in nature to feel sane. Some prefer intellectual work, others love working with their hands. Some are comfortable leading, others would rather follow. Some need to be surrounded by bright colors to feel alive, others find the visual stimulation overwhelming.

There is an infinite number of conditions and choices that life throws at us. Unfortunately, most of us don’t even slow down enough to realize that most of the time we actually do have a choice.

Each one of us, humans, is in some ways different from others and requires different conditions to thrive, but we have been trained from an early age to ignore our unique needs and adjust to whatever society wants us to believe is right for everyone.

We don’t even question the expectation that our five-year olds have to sit at desks silently for many hours each day, that we have to stay married to a toxic partner for the sake of the children, that we have to act extroverted at work because networking and water-cooler small talk is good for our careers, that we have to work ourselves to exhaustion to make more money so that we can buy more.

It doesn’t even occur to us that if we have to “act” extroverted in our jobs, or if our jobs leave us depleted and exhausted, maybe we should be pursuing a different career.

Yes, our bodies can and do adjust to meet societal expectations, at least temporarily (until physical illness manifests), but our mental health suffers and fights against our reality by sending us messages disguised as anxiety, depression, anger, attention deficit, or addiction.

What if we saw these mental/emotional illnesses not as our enemies but as our friends who are desperately trying to communicate to us and get us to notice that we are not living our truth, that something in our environment is not working for us and needs to change?

Maybe in our journey to improve mental health, we don’t need to do any more than we are already doing. Maybe we need to do less. Maybe we need to do something completely different.

If we stopped for a moment and truly listened to our bodies, if we opened ourselves to hear what it is they are trying to communicate to us, we would likely get some accurate guidance on what our unique organism truly needs to survive and thrive. If we then started to take the tiniest steps in that direction, we would see our mental illness symptoms (and often physical illness symptoms as well) lessen and eventually disappear.

Unfortunately, in our culture it often takes a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness for a person to stop running in the hamster wheel and reevaluate their lifestyle choices. Often people say that they started really living only after their diagnosis. We don’t have to wait for such a dramatic wake-up call.

How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #3 – Take a Hands-On Engineering Approach

Our organisms are infinitely complex. Our environment is infinitely complex. Our mental health is a function of so many different variables that are constantly changing. Is it realistic to expect that there are simple and universal answers?

For a different perspective let’s look through the lens of engineering.

Before we even begin running any experiments and collecting any data, we define parameters, state our assumptions, establish the definitions and boundaries of the process we are optimizing, create hypothesis, identify control, response, and noise variables (those we can’t control). We determine how much data needs to collected in order to draw statistically-significant conclusions and exactly how the data needs to be collected to ensure the most reliable and reproducible results.

We also realize that no experiment is perfect and proactively identify the limitations and flaws of the study as opportunities for further exploration.

All this work is done before we even begin to analyze data and draw conclusions in order to gain an understanding and hopefully be able to control processes much simpler than our human experience.

It would be reasonable to expect infinitely more complexity when we are trying to understand and control the functions of the living organisms which are constantly changing in response to themselves and their environment, further complicated by the fact that we understand very little about human consciousness, experience, and behavior.

Unfortunately oversimplification of any process can be dangerous and misleading. Consider cooking or baking, for example, which we are all familiar with. Even these simple processes require just the right ingredients in just the right amounts, the right tools, the right temperature, the right length of time at specific conditions.

The process often requires performing many steps in a specific order and with certain skill. Adding baking soda might not make any difference in a recipe (it actually might make baked goods taste bitter). This might lead us to believe that baking soda is bad and even declare it as an ingredient never to be used in baking due to its bitter taste. If we did that, we would miss out on all the great properties of baking soda, because once it is mixed with vinegar in the right proportion something amazing happens as it creates a leavening agent that helps baked goods become light and fluffy.

When desperately seeking a path to improve mental health we often look for quick straight-forward definitive answers to extremely complex questions. We want to know yes or no, black or white, pass or fail. To meet this need there are plenty of sources (books, magazines, digital media) that offer instant off-the-shelf solutions to any problem.

All sorts of media tell us unequivocally what is good for us and what is bad (and what they claim today might not match what they say tomorrow). On our mission to improve mental health it would be much easier for us to just follow the latest fad in the magazine or on social media and not take the time to truly understand, explore the nuances, experiment, and draw conclusions for ourselves and our own unique situation, for our own living organism.

Is it nature or nurture that makes us who we are? Is psychiatry or psychotherapy more effective for better mental health? Does psychotherapy really help people? Are the effects of Qigong and Yoga on mental health scientifically-proven and evidence-based?

These are not straightforward questions. The answer for all these questions is “it depends.” We are byproducts of both our genes and our environment. The combination of both psychotherapy and psychiatry shows the best outcome in published studies. Psychotherapy, Qigong and Yoga help a lot of people, and there are a large number of styles and approaches. Which one is right for you?

Why not try an engineering approach? Trial and error, design of experiments, combinations of several variables? Control your inputs and measure your outputs?

Don’t take anybody’s word. What’s right for them might not be right for you. Try things. Experiment. Tune in and listen to your body.

If something is helping to improve mental health for you, notice it, and do more of that. If something is not working, also notice and do less or none at all. All that is required is for your to be present, collecting data on your own unique experience, and constantly optimizing your own internal process.

How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #4 – Embrace Self-Acceptance

A lot of our mental health struggles are an illusion, a sign that we fell into the trap of society telling us who we are, who we should be, and how we should feel.

We fall into the labels of good or bad, smart or stupid, ugly or beautiful, success or failure. We try these labels on for ourselves. Then we make ourselves suffer because of these self-imposed artificial labels. We feel not good enough. We feel less than someone else.

Even our desire to improve mental health implies judgement. We somehow decided that there is something wrong with how we are, that our mental health is bad. Then our organisms rebel against this rejection of self or just shut down.

Is there really one right way to be in the world?

In Eastern culture it is considered healthy to be modest, serious, and reserved, otherwise you would be labeled as vain and foolish. Here in the West, modesty is considered a weakness of character and not looking cheerful is considered a sign of a mental health problem to be corrected with a lifetime dose of expensive medication. Bragging and exaggerating our accomplishments is encouraged.

We are expected to look happy at all times, to always be “fine” even if that affect doesn’t match the circumstances. Notice, society doesn’t actually ask us to genuinely feel happy, just to appear happy, to pretend, to act, so that we don’t offend others with our grumpiness and make them uncomfortable. Ironically, looking happy frequently and for no apparent reason would be perceived as a sign of mental illness in the East.

In United States a lot of value is placed on being independent. Every person is for themselves, their own interests take priority over family or society. In this country, those rare circumstances where adult children are still living with their parents are seen as a failure to launch, enmeshment, and a dysfunction that needs mental health treatment. In contrast, in collectivist societies, not living with your parents, especially when one’s parents are elderly, is considered a betrayal of family ties and an expression of extreme selfishness.

Is it really a pathology if your personal unique experiences doesn’t match the majority culture of where you are living? Why should we let society dictate our values?

When did we start labeling feelings as good or bad? Is it realistic to expect someone to always be happy (but not too happy), to never be sad (at least not too sad and not for too long)? Aren’t feelings just manifestations of human experience and human expression? Isn’t our sensitivity and vulnerability exactly what makes us human?

If we only opened our eyes and looked around, if we were well-traveled and well-read, if we were not constantly bombarded with predigested spoon-fed dumbed-down information trying to convince us that there is something wrong with us and that we are lacking something (to get us to behave in a certain way), we would immediately notice how fake all of the labels are.

Maybe if we stopped comparing ourselves to artificially imposed ideals of what success and mental health looks like and accepted ourselves for who and what we are, we would no longer need to improve mental health.

We would be a little more compassionate with ourselves and others, we would be more open and curious.

We would be able to observe and learn from our own experiences instead of getting paralyzed by them and needing to numb ourselves with medication, addictive behaviors, or just running from ourselves and trying to be someone else.

How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #5 – Strive for Continuous Improvement

Lastly, it is important to stress the fact that our journey to improve mental health is a continuous on-going process, not an action.

It is an experience of continuous learning and growing.

We don’t expect the path up the mountain to be perfectly straight and ridiculously easy. There will be setbacks, but with focus and perseverance, with an eye on the goal, we will keep moving towards it and when we get there, it will be so worth it! We will definitely grow and learn a lot about ourselves and the world along the way.

We don’t need to beat ourselves up for how we felt yesterday, how we experienced life, and what actions we took, because we always deal with the world the best way we know how at that point in time. When we know better, we do better.

What are your thoughts on these strategies? Do they feel right for you? What have you tried to improve mental health? What have you discovered to be effective for you?

Let us know!

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