Anxiety and panic attacks can strike at any time, and are far from pleasant.

I was a victim of anxiety for several months following the birth of both Beans and Ziggy.

I’m no stranger to depression—I’ve fought it on and off since puberty and through my adult life, but nothing prepared me for the alarming feeling anxiety can produce.

Worry and stress is commonly labeled as anxiety, so it’s important to distinguish between feeling overwhelmed versus true anxiety.

What is Anxiety: Signs and Symptoms

Anxiety is a very real mental health disorder. While most of the symptoms of anxiety are internal, marked by an overwhelming sense of fear and impending doom, there are important physical signs to look for if you suspect you suffer from anxiety:

Palpitations
Sweating
Trembling
Shortness of breath or choking sensation
Chest pain
Nausea and dizziness
Numbness or tingling
Amongst others

An anxiety episode will last upwards of 10 minutes, but can feel like an eternity.

Like I said before—anxiety is not fun.

Because anxiety is so widespread, there’s a silver lining to all of this: there are many homeopathic and natural ways to help alleviate your feelings of anxiousness via herbs, spa treatments, and even solutions as simple as altering your daily routine.

Natural Herbs, Supplements, and Treatments to Deal With Anxiety

Lavender and Aromatherapy

Lavender is the tried-and-true herb to de-stress and relax. When I was a child, I remember my mother making homemade lavender sachets to put under her pillow in order to sleep better.

Because lavender is so popular, there are tons of fun ways to incorporate the herb into your natural routine.

How does it work? Exposure to lavender via aromatherapy triggers the areas of the brain that bring on feelings of calm by acting as a natural sedative for your brain. Also, it’s been shown to reduce cortisol, the stress hormone.

However, there are some increasingly popular herbs and supplements on the market that specifically target stress and anxiety.

Aromatherapy: CBD Oil for Anxiety

No—CBD oil (or cannabidiol oil), is not marijuana. In order for marijuana products to affect you to the point where you feel high, it needs to include the compound THC.

CBD oil is gaining mainstream popularity because of its plethora of benefits. Now you know why you see CBD oil in your natural health food stores—it’s completely legal!

To get started, buy a high quality oil and start with the recommended dose. Increase the dose over time if needed. There are also tons of fun natural DIY beauty recipes online to try from CBD bath bombs to CBD oil lip balm and more.

I personally am in love with this Happy Hydration face cream by elf. I can’t actually tell if it’s doing anything in terms of relaxation, but I’m sure the extra CBD doesn’t hurt.

Massage and Acupuncture Reduce Anxiety

There are so many benefits to massage—whether it’s from a professional spa treatment or via at-home massage therapy. Anxiety is worsened by lack of sleep, and massage is proven to help you relax your muscles and therefore sleep better. There’s no doubt massage can relieve the physical symptoms of anxiety.

While acupuncture can feel a little new-age, it is acclaimed for its instant relief of anxiety. According to ancient Chinese medicine, acupuncture, or placing small needles at specific energy points of our body, can naturally and quickly help restore balance in the body and the brain.

I haven’t tried acupuncture myself, but if you’ve tried it and found it beneficial for anxiety, please share your experience in the comments!

Dealing With Anxiety Through Good Lifestyle Habits

Get More Sleep to Keep Your Body and Mind Healthy

A lack of sleep can affect you mentally and physically, and is detrimental to your health. If your body doesn’t achieve deep, restorative sleep, your mind and body will protest and is much more susceptible to anxiety and depression.

According to sleep expert and neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker, “Sleep is the elixir of life.”

Whether you aid sleep with a homeopathic remedy or regular exercise, it’s important to get the recommended full night’s rest: 7 to 9 hours on average.

Exercise and Getting Outside Can Help Treat Anxiety

I’m not telling you to get up an hour early every morning and go for a 5-mile run. However, getting outside for as little as 15 minutes per day has a tremendous positive effect on your mood.

If you take your family outside, everyone will reap the benefits of outdoor fun. Between the vitamin D, the fresh air, and light activity, your brain and body will get a chance to reset and take a break. Just remember to leave your cell phones on silent in your pockets (or in the car)!

Meditate

Meditation has astounding effects on anxiety and mental health. Incorporating meditation into your routine can help you regain control of your emotions through deep, concentrated breathing. Contrary to popular belief, regular meditating is attainable! Chris and I have been meditating for nearly two months now, and I can’t stop talking about how beneficial the practice is for us.

Natural Calming through Creativity

Once you have healthy habits in place and an army of homeopathic remedies to help relieve anxiety, you can pick up some new hobbies that innately reduce stress.

If you'd like to see instant gratification for the work you put in, then you should try gardening. It's known for centuries that spending some time with plants can have a healing effect on the body and mind.

Adult coloring books are wildly popular because drawing and coloring help the mind relax and achieve a flow state, which will bring the mind into a meditative state without much thought.

If coloring isn’t for you, pick up a blank notebook and keep a journal. Studies show putting pen to paper can help you gain perspective on a situation and put your mind at ease. A journal is also a good place to record gratitude points, and focusing on positive aspects of life can help reframe the mind.

If you prefer to do something more creative without boundaries, I find hand lettering and embroidery to be very relaxing.

What do you do to help keep anxiety at bay? Do you use natural remedies for stress relief?

Click for Video Transcript

There are definitely ways that you can help your anxiety in a natural way.
Hey everyone, I'm Jenn Palandro. Hello Brio is a community of conscious creatives. And if that sounds like you made sure to hit like on this video and subscribe to the channel for weekly videos about intentional living.
Now, first things first, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a mental health professional, but I have experience with anxiety. So take my advice with a grain of salt.
I have struggled with anxiety a lot, but I especially struggled with it after postpartum; after my first and second son was born.
Nothing could really prepare me for the alarming sense of fear and just wanting to jump out of my skin. So anxiety became something that I really wanted to learn how to manage on my own with medication and without medication. I'm going to go through some of those methods.
So anxiety is a very real mental health disorder. Most of the symptoms are internal, but you can also have kind of external symptoms that you can explain to a doctor like heart palpitations and sweating, trembling, a feeling of choking, or tightness in your chest, nausea, dizziness, numbness and tingling, and other symptoms as well.
Anxiety in an anxious episode can last for up to 10 minutes, but generalized anxiety is just kind of like your entire existence is just smeared with a layer of anxiety.
Because anxiety is so commonplace, there are a lot of homeopathic and natural remedies to help you with that.
First, I'm going to talk about some natural herbs and remedies like that. I'm sure you've heard that lavender is relaxing. Lavender is the tried and true herb when it comes to relaxing. When I was a kid, I remember that my mom would take lavender from the garden and dry it out and make little tiny bags to put under your pillow at night, because it also will calm you down and help you sleep. So how does lavender work? Well, when you have exposure to lavender via aromatherapy, what it does is it triggers the calm response in your brain, and it acts as a natural sedative. Also lavender has been shown to reduce cortisol, which is stress hormone.
Of course, there are other things like CBD oil and acupuncture, but I haven't personally tried them, so I'm not going to go ahead and speak on them. But if you have go ahead and comment below and let me know what your experience was.
One of my favorite ways to manage my anxiety is through lifestyle changes. I find that habits and making sure that I have really good sleep hygiene and things like that are really good ways to manage my anxiety.
So first is sleep. Getting enough sleep is crucial. And I know that it can be really hard to get enough sleep when you have high levels of anxiety, because you are anxious and you can't sleep and your mind is going a mile a minute. So believe me, I get that. There are some things that you can do to make sure that you have good sleep hygiene. And I'm sure you've heard these all before. Things like don't look at a device an hour before bedtime.
The other thing that will really help with sleep is exercise. And I know it's one of those things that like, if you get enough sleep, then you have the energy to exercise. So it's really important to just make sure that you get out there for about 30 minutes a day, even if you're going for a walk or run or something more intense, like HIIT exercise or something more relaxing like yoga.
Whatever works for you, just get your body moving at least 30 minutes a day because it's really going to help you sleep better because the higher that your energy level goes during the day, the more calm that you're going to get at night.
Also getting outside is key for good sleep. What you can do is go outside within the first hour of waking up and hopefully by then the sun will have come out. Even if it's cloud cover. Seeing that seeing that natural light is really gonna jumpstart your circadian rhythm so that your body knows like, "Oh, it's daytime. I'm supposed to be awake."
Make sure you actually go outside instead of sitting by a sunny window, for example, because the windowsill actually filter out a lot of that important natural sunlight.
The other thing you can do is go outside for a quick walk after dinner, and this is really going to help your brain tell it that, you know, it's the end of the day. I can see that the sun is going down and it's going to help your circadian rhythm, know that it's time to wind down and go to sleep.
The other thing, and I'm sure this isn't a surprise to you, but meditation is amazing for anxiety. And if you watched my recent video about why deep breathing works for calming yourself, you will better understand why meditation and deep breathing and breath work and things like that are going to help you with anxiety. It's all about activating that parasympathetic nervous system to make sure your body knows that it's safe to rest and relax.
One of my favorite ways to manage my anxiety is to take it and change it and make it something else. So a good way to do that is through creativity. In the past, I've done things like embroidery and hand lettering, and I find those to be very soothing activities, but find something that works for you. If it's doodling, drawing, painting, whatever might work for you and whatever you enjoy, that's just going to take you out of your anxious state and allow you to express it in a different way.
I would love to know what do you do to keep anxiety at Bay and what may or may not work for, for you from this video? Let me know in the comments below.
I'll see you next week.

Sources

Anxiety and Panic. (n.d.). Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/guide/anxiety-attack-symptoms
Nena, S. (2017, August). Lavender and Anxiety. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.livestrong.com/article/334641-gaba-supplements-anxiety/
Chamine, I (2016, June). Aroma Effects on Physiologic and Cognitive Function Following Acute Stress: A Mechanism Investigation. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27355279
Hohman, M. (2014, August). Why Acupuncture Works for Anxiety Relief. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.everydayhealth.com/news/why-acupuncture-works-anxiety-relief/
Rogan, J. (2018, April). Sleep Expert on Insomnia. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iQHE5tdUI
How Much Sleep Do We Really Need? (n.d.). Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://sleepfoundation.org/excessivesleepiness/content/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need-0
5 Minutes Meditation Technique for Stress Relief. (n.d.). Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.healthproblog.com/2018/01/31/5-minutes-meditation-technique-for-stress-relief/
Markway, B. (2014, April). How to Keep a Thought Diary to Combat Anxiety. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shyness-is-nice/201404/how-keep-thought-diary-combat-anxiety