reducing anxiety through self awareness

Reducing anxiety through self-awareness begins with recognizing your emotional and physical responses to stress. Often, anxiety manifests before we consciously register it—through rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, or racing thoughts. By regularly checking in with yourself and noting these signs early, you can interrupt the anxiety cycle before it escalates. Journaling or mindfulness practices like body scans can help identify your specific anxiety triggers and patterns over time.

To increase self-awareness, you can ask yourself what you are feeling. You may have more than one feeling. With attention you may discover 5 different feelings at one time. Once you are aware of the feeling, you can then sit with this feeling and give attention to where it may be coming from. You may be surprised of what has gone un-noticed. For example, you might discover you are thirsty, or that something from three days ago is on your mind, or you are putting off something because it feels difficult, etc.

Once you become more aware of how anxiety shows up for you, the next step is to observe your thoughts without judgment. Anxious thinking often involves catastrophizing or rigid self-criticism. Self-awareness allows you to step back and assess these thoughts more objectively, asking yourself if they are truly accurate or helpful. Reframing them into more balanced perspectives doesn’t eliminate stress, but it reduces the intensity of your anxious response.

Finally, use your growing self-awareness to develop and practice healthy coping strategies. If you know that social situations tend to trigger your anxiety, you might plan ahead by setting boundaries or practicing calming techniques beforehand. Similarly, recognizing when your anxiety is rooted in perfectionism or fear of failure can help you set more realistic expectations. Over time, tuning into your internal experience helps you respond to anxiety with greater intention and resilience.

One good exercise is to pause before you get out of your car, or before you walk into a public social situation and do a self-check in to see what you are feeling and what thoughts may be triggering those feelings. Often times our thought are stories that are made up. If we can recognize the thoughts that are not accurate and change them before we walk into a social situation, we can move negative feelings to positive feelings. For example, you might discover your thoughts are saying you don’t have anything to offer, or that you don’t look right, or that nobody will talk to you. With attention you will see that these thoughts are not correct and that if you smile and keep your head up and make eye contact, you have the power to make yourself approachable.

There is an order to awareness. First is noticing when your body is uncomfortable. Second is noticing what you are feeling, and last is attaching those feeling to a thought to determine if the thought is accurate. You have the power to change your distorted thoughts, which will then change your feelings and reduce anxiety.

Negative messages are created early in life from other people. sometimes our caretakers, and other times these negative messages come from other influences in society. If we can pause long enough to ask ourself if the thoughts are true-if they are really true, we can move our thoughts to something more hopeful and joyous.