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Using affirmations to ease anxiety is as easy as breathing. The trick is to calm down before the anxiety hits, which is what affirmations are used for. When you feel anxiety rising, sit down, close your eyes, and take a deep breath. This is only anxiety, and it will pass. I know that my feelings are just feelings and I am completely safe. My amygdala is reacting to something it perceives as threatening right now. I am calm and I am relaxing. I acknowledge my anxiety. I also acknowledge it will pass. Do you see how each affirmation centers your attention away from your feelings and ends with a positive statement of truth? This is how affirmations are used. You can repeat them as many times as you would like until you feel calmer and move onto another coping mechanism. The tone of voice in your mind should be as calm and soothing as you can manage. 
Salt Of The Earth
This is essentially how we create habits. Habits are created in four steps. First, we have a cue, then a craving, next is the response to the craving, and then a reward that solidifies the habit. Once this has been repeated over time, the habit becomes mastered, and now we’re doing it without question. For example, brushing your teeth. The cue is imagining or having the picture of a toothbrush pop in your head. The craving is the taste of mint or the smell of freshness on your breath. The response is brushing your teeth, and the reward is fulfilling your craving. The cue is the trigger for the craving you need satisfied. Practically, the brain sees cues everywhere around us and is always working on building habits and routines because it relies mostly on a structure. Finally, the reward is no feelings of anxiety. This creates new neural connections in your brain to say, Hey, let’s do that again. Someday Your Ship Will Sail
So, essentially you just taught your brain to use your cravings to calm anxiety by using a coping mechanism to reduce, and then your reward is no feelings of fear or concern. Now that is a healthy way of dealing with anxiety, but our anxiety gets out of control most of the time because we have already created an unhealthy habit surrounding how we deal with our panic. As you can see, habits are everywhere. They are everything we do, from waking up in the morning to sleeping at night. Habits can help with your anxiety if you start to understand your habit’s cue, craving, response, and reward system. From here onwards, please take a look into your anxiety triggers, and find out what you currently do to solve it or reduce it to get your reward. We can replace our anxiety cravings by becoming curious to know what our craving is when an attack occurs. Since most of the time, all we want is to calm down, find a calming and healthy option to satisfy your craving, and over time, you will get the reward you desire in the end. Below are some of my favorite affirmations that I use regularly. May I be happy, may I be safe, may I be healthy, may I be at peace. I breathe in calm and breathe out tension. I am living a calm and compassionate life. Here, There and Everywhere
This feeling is anxiety, and I will be extra gentle with myself until it passes. Anxiety isn’t dangerous. I usually like to say them to myself while I am outside walking, as that is when I am less distracted. But you can do them anywhere at any time. Try them and see how they feel. Although you can use these affirmations at any given time, try them out when you are having an anxiety attack as your first attempt to calm yourself. All it takes is a little practice making something this easy a habit to change your mindset from Ahh! Basically, these traps make us believe the lies we tell ourselves and keep us in a pattern of fear and anxiety. Over time, these traps keep us inside our heads, altering our ability to think rationally which becomes our first response to just about everything. I am experiencing a heart attack. She looked at me wrong. She must not like me. Well, I am bad at this, so I guess I am bad at everything. I was late for my appointment. I can never do anything right.Sound familiar? Have you had at least one of these thoughts before? Well, these are thinking traps. It’s a state of mind where our thoughts say something, and we automatically believe it. If we thought it, it must be true, right? The truth is, a thought is just a thought. A feeling is just a feeling. The only reason we believe in our thoughts and feelings so deeply is that we genuinely believe the misinformation our brains are trying to tell us. It’s a matter of perception. Look at it this way, if your best friend calls to tell you that your current boyfriend or girlfriend is spreading lies about you, are you going to believe it right away, or would you look into it first? Your rational mind would want to look into it first, but your emotional mind would believe your best friend because, well, they are your best friend and would never lie to you. That’s how anxiety or thinking traps work. When we put our thoughts into writing, we can get out what we have been holding onto and then take a step back and read through what we wrote. We get our thoughts out – even if they are unorganized and unplanned. Prevents negative thoughts and thinking traps Some journal entries, you don’t even need to keep. A study from Psychological Science Journal in 2011 noted that you could effectively clear your mind by doing so. The research consisted of the students writing down their body image beliefs and then being asked to throw it away afterward.