Anxiety or hand-wrenching, tummy-turning worry, is a natural reaction to some of life’s most challenging situations.
A little bit of anxiety can be good. It helps motivate you to meet a deadline, past a test, or deliver a well crafted presentation at work. It also keeps you from walking head-on into danger. As part of the fight-or-flight response, anxiety causes your heart rate to increase and your muscles to tense should you need to act.
At its extreme, however, worry runs amok. Once it begins to interfere with everyday life, worry is considered an anxiety disorder.
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Anxiety disorders include panic attacks, generalized anxiety disorders, phobias, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anxiety disorders require medical attention and sometimes medication.
Millions of people fall somewhere in between these 2 extremes, however. They worry to much but don’t have an actual disorder. Chronic worriers are able to function from day to day, but the anxiety eats away at their emotional and physical health. Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., calls “persistent toxic worry.”
“We virtually train ourselves to worry, which only reinforces the habit. Worriers often feel vulnerable if they’re not worrying,” says Dr. Hallowell.
Worriers have good reason to stop. Excessive worry, or anxiety is associated with increased risk for depression, heart disease, and other medical conditions. Source: The Doctors Book of Home Remedies, rev. ed. pp. 34, 35
Natural Anxiety Cures
The authors of Natural Remedies Encyclopedia (pp.455-456), Vance Ferrell and Harold M. Cherne, M.D., listed basic suggestions:
- Find out what your ongoing problems and solve them. Problems are like a wall; you can go through them, go over them, or go around them. You go through a problem when you eliminate it. You surmount an immediate problem when you figure out a way to sidestep it and still do what is needed. You go around it when you learn to live with an ongoing situation you cannot solve. You stop worrying about it or letting it bother you, and turn your attention to other things.
- Think positive in every situation. See a good side to this; and learn to make the best of it. See it as an interesting challenge to solve difficulties. Trust in God to help you weather every crisis and carry on through the end. Think about something else for a time that will help your brain to rest and your emotions to calm down. Gradually answers will come to mind.
- Counsel with a good friend. If it is a problem with your husband, counsel with a woman, not with a man. The same holds true for a man.
- The primary problems in a person’s life are employment, spouse, money, children, deadlines and guilt.
- Sometimes you need to temporarily leave a threatening situation, get away and calm down. Take time to pray and rest your mind.
- Avoid situations which bring tension.
- Learn to laugh at some problems. Learn to cry over others. Both can relieve tension.
- Stretching your muscles can help move a circulation made sluggish by the situation, so you can think better. Massage muscles which have tensed up. Drop your jaw and move it left to right. This helps relax the jaw muscle.
- Take relaxing hot bath, so you can start thinking constructively again.
- Go outside and walk in the open air. Hold your head up, breathe deeply, and relax.
- Deep breathing, wherever you are, refreshes the mind and helps you through a crisis.
- Get extra rest. It can help strengthen your mind and nerves to handle the problems you must deal with.
- Many times the underlying need is to go to God and ask forgiveness, obey His Ten Commandment Law, and start living a clean life. Make things right with those you have wronged.
- Believe that, with God’s help, the situation can be dealt with. Keep trusting Him as a little child trusts his parents to lead him by the hand across a busy street.
- A change in diet is needed to help restore a sickly immune system. Fresh fruit and vegetables, especially raw vegetables. Eating a diet of 60%-70% raw fruits and vegetables will really help you. Kelp or dulce and raw seed or nuts.
- Do not eat high carbohydrates (white-flour and sugar products) and saturated fats. Indulging in them can hasten burnout. Instead, eat the slower burning proteins and quality oils (flaxseed oil). Avoid coffee, chocolate, strong spices, artificial sweeteners, MSG (monosodium glutamate), tobacco and liquor.
A note of Encouragement: Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed. Proverbs 16:3
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