How often have you tried to lean into your anxiety? If you're like me, you've probably tried at one time or another to avoid anxiety as much as you possibly could. Unfortunately, trying to avoid anxiety tends to perpetuate it rather than relieving it. This conundrum has perplexed me many times in my own life, and I'm guessing you've experienced the same challenge.

How do we cultivate hope when feeling anxious? This question has been occupying me a lot in the last few weeks because in many ways, anxiety seems to act contrary to hope. Typically when we feel anxious, we're anticipating some future event that we are worried about or afraid of. By contrast, hope is defined as a positive expectation about some future event occuring.

As an anxious person, I have found that decision-making with anxiety can be very challenging. As a matter of fact, decision-making can seem like a daunting task, regardless of how major or minor the decision may be.

Years ago, I learned about the benefit of using meditation to cope with anxiety, but I did not really give it much thought. That was until I realized that I was already often doing it when I was experiencing tremendous anxiety. Meditation has been an incredibly beneficial tool in my anxiety-coping toolbox. You may find that it is valuable for you and that it helps you in several ways.

Using a trust test for anxiety helps you decide whether you should trust what your anxiety tells you. Often, anxiety comes on too quickly for us to do much about it, and we easily get swept up by the intensity of our anxiety. Whether we know it or not, this happens in part because we implicitly accept that our anxiety is trustworthy and only shares true information.

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about how to cultivate anxiety tolerance. With the beginning of my Ph.D. program on the horizon, I've been grappling with questions about how I'll handle a range of situations. I am worried about moving, succeeding in the program, making friends, and a random assortment of other questions that seem to pop up unasked throughout the day.

In my life, I have become accustomed to experiencing anxiety. Depending on my current life situation and the experiences I'm going through, it might be worse, or it might be better.

Losing my ability to focus is a symptom of anxiety that I often experience. Anxiety is a physical response to a stressful situation, and when we experience anxiety, we experience an increase in stress hormones which makes it more difficult to concentrate.

Yes, we're going to use a little bit of math on the blog today, but we're going to use it for an unusual task -- controlling anxiety. I can feel your incredulity all the way over here but stick with me for a minute, you can control your anxiety with math.

One of the most challenging aspects of COVID for me has been recreating a schedule to reduce anxiety for myself. Although I've been fortunate to keep my job, I've discovered that a lot of the structure I enjoyed in my life was the result of activities and obligations that have evaporated in the last two months.