anxiety

How the 3-3-3 Rule Helped Me Manage Anxiety

Nathan Smith2 Comments

Over the years, I’ve learned many different techniques to help manage my anxiety. Some of them have proven to be extremely helpful (I’ve written before about the power of meditation and consistent exercise), while others have not always done the trick (I once tried to schedule a time for my anxiety – that was a long day!). Since I’m a firm believer that I should try something more than once when it comes to managing my anxiety, I try to make sure I give things a chance. While the first few times can be a little bumpy, sticking with some of these techniques have proven to be very valuable on my mental health journey. And that’s why I’d like to share more about the ‘3-3-3’ rule, how it’s helped me deal with anxiety, and how it can be a useful tool for you.

What is the 3-3-3 Rule?

The 3-3-3 rule is a popular grounding technique when someone’s experiencing anxiety symptoms. While some symptoms of anxiety are mental or emotional, symptoms can also be physical. It’s often those physical symptoms that can become very overwhelming when dealing with an anxiety or panic attack. When someone is feeling anxious, they can turn to the 3-3-3 rule to ground yourself and try to stop the spiral of anxious thoughts and feelings that might be happening. The specifics language isn’t always the same but generally speaking, it goes:

  • Notice three things you see around you
  • Identify three sounds that you hear
  • Move three parts of your body

That’s it! What I love about this rule is that it involves you using your senses, activating various parts of your body and encouraging them to slow down and take stock of the situation. There’s also no wrong way to do this. If three things you see around you are a floor, a ceiling, and a door, that’s okay. The act of identifying and naming those things can slow people down, taking them out of the moment they’re in. These actions are not meant to be complicated or solve your problems – they are simply meant to help slow down an anxiety spiral, or ground you in a moment where you might not feel all that present.

How the 3-3-3 Rule Has Helped Me

While I’d say this rule is relatively simple, it’s not always easy to put into action; you might not always know what’s going on when you’re experiencing an anxiety/panic attack. Thoughts might be difficult to put in the right order; confusion could set in. You might not feel comfortable in your own body, and everyday movements might seem foreign. And to be honest, that might not be the time for someone to tell you to use the 3-3-3 rule. Anxiety attacks have a tendency to make the simplest things seem like the most difficult, which is part of what makes the whole situation so frustrating.

I’ll be honest – when I’ve tried to do the 3-3-3 rule, I often fail in the fact that I don’t do all three steps. But it has helped me manage my anxiety in a big way and in fact, has changed the way I approach anxiety attacks. The point of this rule is not just to use your senses to ‘get out’ of the current moment; it’s recognizing that you might not be fully present, and it is trying to bring you back to that present moment. Maybe you name a bunch of items that are around you. Maybe you close your eyes and detect what you can hear or smell. Maybe you just tap your hands to your legs to remind yourself that you’re human. Over time, you might learn how anxiety attacks impact your body, and use this technique to confront those specific symptoms.

How to Put the 3-3-3 Rule to Use

Like most mental health techniques I’ve written about on this blog, there isn’t a wrong way to incorporate the 3-3-3 rule. The main goal of a grounding technique is to engage your senses, come back to the present moment, be within your body, and relieve yourself of overwhelming stress. However you do this (as long as you are doing this safely, it should be said!) is up to you. Ultimately, the 3-3-3 rule has had a tremendous impact on the way I view my anxiety, and I’d encourage anyone to explore it if they are struggling with anxiety symptoms.

Now I want to hear from you! Have you ever used the 3-3-3 rule to ground yourself? Are there other grounding techniques you’ve used that you’ve found effective? Let me know in the comments!

"Being able to be your true self is one of the strongest components of good mental health." Dr. Lauren Fogel Mersy

How to Focus on Mental Wellness During Winter

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We are currently in the middle of one of my least-favorite times of the year – winter. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of aspects of the wintertime that I love. But very small amount of those things tend to happen in January/February. Whether it’s seasonal affective disorder or a natural reaction to the lack of sunlight and generally cold weather, the wintertime can be difficult and lead us to being more prone to mental health challenges. At times like this, I often feel like I want to take my foot off the gas when it comes to my mental health. But in fact, this is actually the time of year when our mental health toolkits can do a huge amount of good. While I always recommend to try new techniques and strategies to improve your mental health, it changes a bit during this time of year. This time of year, I try to stick with what works.

Now what does it mean for something to “work” for us? Maybe it’s that something is easy for us to handle, or that it comes naturally to us, but I have a slightly different perspective. When it comes to my mental health, knowing what works for me depends on one thing above all else: what symptoms, if any, are being triggered in that moment.

When I say that my symptoms are being triggered, I don’t just mean how I feel in that moment. I actually take a step back and try to think about how my mental health is impacting me. This could mean running through the long list of symptoms of anxiety or depression. It could also mean thinking about if these symptoms feel new or are happening more than they used to. It’s a self-assessment of sorts, to try and understand the problem at hand. If you don’t understand the problem, how can you find the solution?

If I can figure out my symptoms, than it’s time to take the next step and attack them. Over the years, I’ve collected several mental health tips and techniques, all of which are solutions to specific symptoms or problems. With time, I’ve been able to identify the right technique for the situation, and am able to figure what’s needed in that moment. Am I always successful in doing this? Absolutely not. But I am doing better than I used to, and that’s a big win.

Whether it’s building mental wellness or combatting mental health challenges, this is a time of year where people are particularly prone to feeling worse than usual (and that’s not even factoring in *everything* that’s going on in the world today). While we should be paying special attention to our wellness, we should also remember what works for us, what heals us, and what helps us. The spring or summer might be the time to try something new or off-the-wall for our mental health. But if you know that reading a book brings you peace, or building a to-do list of little items to knock off will help you feel accomplished, please go for it. Little wins add up and this time of year, I know I could use all the little wins I can get.

Are there any special ways you take care of your mental health during the winter time? Do you think this time of year is harder on your mental health than others? Let me know in the comments!

"One kind word can warm three winter months." - Japanese Proverb

How Anxiety Leads to Assumptions

Nathan Smith2 Comments

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about the impact that my experience with anxiety has on me. It impacts the way I see the world, the way I interact with it, and the way I interact with others. But after years of learning about myself and my anxiety, I’ve started to notice the patterns that my anxiety creates. One pattern in particular is how my anxiety can lead to making assumptions, and how those assumptions can create problems in my life that didn’t exist before. Anxiety can lead to assumptions and if we don’t make the connection, anxiety can lead you down a road of miscommunications and life being more difficult than it should be.

We all know that old saying about assumptions: “when you assume...” And the wordplay aside, this adage makes a good point. Assumptions, no matter what they’re about, can cause problems for everyone involved and despite our best efforts, we all make assumptions at some point or another. But assumptions can cause trouble when they guide our decision-making, and that’s where it’s important to acknowledge the relationship between anxiety, anticipation, and assumptions.

There’s a lot in this world that can make us anxious (thank you, GAD), but one of the things that can trigger anxiety is when we are confronted with the unknown. Oftentimes if we need an answer to a question or there’s a piece of information we can’t get the answer to, we get anxious. The anxiety itself isn’t a problem — it’s the fact that this anxiety leads to making assumptions, and then acting on those assumptions.

Anxiety is an interesting thing. Your brain can feel like it’s moving a million miles per hour but simultaneously, your body is staying still. You want to do five things at once and because of that, you do nothing. And in trying to deal with the physical and mental symptoms of anxiety, in feeling sped up and out of control, we can try to deal with a situation in the quickest way possible. And often, that solution is acting on assumptions.

Anxiety can take the form of thoughts, patterns and behaviors that impact our day-to-day lives. When left unchecked and unchallenged, these feelings can grow and fester in unhealthy ways. Knowing how my anxiety works hasn’t stopped me from having anxiety (unfortunately), but it has helped me understand myself more. I probably won’t stop making assumptions, but I’m hopeful that understanding the connection my anxiety has toward making assumptions will help me moving forward.

Making connections won’t always stop us from doing certain things, but it can help us learn patterns that have developed in our lives over the years. And in learning about these patterns, we can also unlearn them, and find a healthier way to see the world.

What do you think? Do you feel like you make a lot of assumptions in your day-to-day life? How does that impact your mental health?

Five Ways I Build Mental Wellness

Nathan Smith6 Comments

As it is Mental Health Awareness Month, it’s a good time to share resources, tips and techniques about mental health and wellness. After a decade-plus of living with depression and anxiety, I am proud of how I’ve learned to manage my mental health challenges. However, chronic mental health issues can mean I sometimes go through my day on auto-pilot, which isn’t great for my mental health. That’s why I want to re-share a few things I turn to when I want to work on my health and build mental wellness. While there are a lot more tips and techniques in this area, these are five things that work well for me. Hope you find this information helpful!

Meditation

My journey with meditation has been lengthy, but I’m finally at a place where I can confidently say it’s part of my mental health toolkit. Meditation has grown in its importance and value in my day-to-day life, and I’d say there are more days than not that I get in a meditation session or two. What I enjoy most about meditation is that I’ve stopped seeing it as a solution to my problems, and more as a practice and way of being. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say meditation is the perfect solution for everyone (I’ve tried it more than a few times), it doesn’t hurt to try!

Exercise

You might already be aware, but physical exercise can play a big role in improving one’s mental health. While it’s important to make sure people have a healthy relationship with exercise and working out, I know that it can also be damaging to only do things when I have the proper motivation (thank you, depression!). Exercising, in any capacity, has the opportunity to give someone a brief confidence boost, raise the heart rate more than it might previously, and make us feel like we have accomplished something. There are many other benefits to physical exercise, but I’ve come to appreciate the benefits to my mental health and wellness more than anything else.

Therapy (There’s More Than One Type!)

Shocker, I know – a mental health blogger suggesting therapy. But I want to go beyond the generic “therapy is good for you” advice and take things a step further. Instead of suggesting that people look into therapy more, I want you challenge what your idea of therapy is. Yes, there is sitting in a room with a therapist, or on a Zoom call with a mental health professional; but therapy is so much more than that. There are several types of talk therapy, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT), Mentalization-based therapy (MBT) and so many more. And even beyond that, there are types of therapy that involve activities and movement, going beyond talking and trying to meet the needs of other parts of who we are. I’m not here to say that therapy will solve all your problems, but it is often a safe place to figure out where you can start.

Getting to Know Myself

One important part of building my mental wellness is improving my relationship with someone very important — myself. We spend our entire lives getting to know ourselves, understanding who we are and how we see the world. But there are some things about ourselves that are hard to come to terms with. Maybe it’s part of our personality, or an experience we went through, but all of these things encompass who we are and why we act the way we do. When I think about my mental health challenges, I know that there are aspects of my personality don’t play a significant role in why I deal with anxiety and depression. But those aspects do make up the person I am, and understanding how I see the world helps me understand how it impacts me. I know this might sound a little off-the-wall but the more I’ve focused on understanding why I do things, the more I’ve understood my mental health challenges.

Reflection

Whether it’s through journaling, talking with people or simply sitting and doing some thinking, reflecting on my mental health journey has done some amazing things for my mental wellness. When I reflect on the journey I’ve had, I can see my growth. I can see the improvements I’ve made, and the ways I’ve gotten better at managing anxiety and depression. Upon reflection, I can also look at the ups and downs with a gentler lens that I’d been able to before. I’m not perfect, and I’m never going to be. But rather than chase perfectionism and “getting rid of” my mental health challenges, my reflection leads to gratitude. To being proud of who I am and what I’ve experienced. And it’s that attitude that has made me stronger, braver, and better equipped to face the challenges that I know lie ahead of me. And I know that upon reflection of what we’ve been through, many people reading this might feel the same way.

While these are important ways to build mental health and wellness, they’re far from the only ones! What do you do to build mental wellness in your day-to-day life, and what helps you work on your mental health? Let me know in the comments below!

Suicide Prevention Awareness Month 2023

Nathan Smith2 Comments

CW: This post discusses suicide and suicide-related topics.

In case you didn’t know, September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month in the United States. Every year, I do my best to use this month as an opportunity to share information, statistics and resources related to suicide prevention. Suicide is not only an extremely serious topic, but a public health issue. We can’t continue to ignore this topic, as hard as it may be to talk about. Suicide prevention means speaking up, sharing our stories, and reminding others that they are not alone.

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Jumping From One Thought to Another

Nathan Smith2 Comments

One aspect of mental health that I think is fascinating is the idea of high-functioning mental illness. I’ve written posts about high-functioning anxiety and high-functioning depression and even though I’ve learned a lot about both over the years, there is still so much to learn. Lately, I’ve thought a lot about how my brain works when I’m experiencing high-functioning anxiety – the way I race to get things done, the pressure I put on myself to finish things by the arbitrary (often unrealistic) deadlines I’ve set. Today, I want to reflect on why it can sometimes be challenging to race from one thing to another all the time.

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A Busy, Busy, Busy Mind

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As someone who lives with anxiety, my brain often feels like it’s moving a million miles per hour. I think we all feel this way at one time or another; we have so many things to do, and it doesn’t seem like there’s enough time to do it all. I’ve noticed the themes of relaxing and slowing down on my posts in recent months, and I think that’s a response to my current state of being. I always deal with the challenge of a busy mind from time to time but lately, I feel like it’s a daily struggle. Why is my brain trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once? And what can I do about it?

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My Misperception of Self-Awareness

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There are many new buzzwords in the world of mental health, and one of the ones I’ve thought a lot about is the idea of self-awareness. In the past few years, self-awareness is brought up more and more in regards to living a mentally healthy life. Though it seems like a simple concept, my journey with self-awareness has been anything but simple. I used to be under the impression that once I improved my self-awareness, my anxiety and depression would go away. In today’s post, I’d like to share why I was wrong, and how I plan to fix it.

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Breaking Down Mental Health Terms: What is a Thought Spiral?

Nathan Smith7 Comments

Over the years, I’ve learned a number of words, phrases and definitions that have helped me understand my own mental health. Some of these are connected to mental illness or medicine, while others are connected to mental wellness. In this recurring series, I break down some of the mental health terms I’ve learned over the years. Today, I’ll be breaking down thought spirals: what they are, what they look like and what we can do about them.

What is a Thought Spiral?

There are many other names it goes by (anxiety spiral, downward spiral, spiraling thoughts) but simply put, a thought spiral is a series of thoughts that become increasingly overwhelming as a person gets stuck on them. They are typically linked to anxiety and anxious thoughts, but thought spirals can also exist when people are experiencing depression or other mental illness.

Another similar term (or perspective to think about this term) are the cognitive distortions catastrophic thinking and magnification. Both of these cognitive distortions can happen when a person’s thoughts have been spiraling out of control. Whether they are becoming increasingly overwhelming or unrealistic, our thoughts can spiral out of control and lead us into believing things that are simply untrue. When thoughts turn from rational to irrational, it’s time to take a look at what’s happening in our brain.

What Does a Thought Spiral Look Like?

One of the tricky things about thought spirals (at least for me) is how they can sneak up on us. Sometimes our thoughts will lay dormant, not bothering us at all. But then an intrusive or negative thought could enter our brains and if we’re unwilling or unable to acknowledge it, it gets stuck in our head. Before you know it, one thought has piled on another, and your thoughts are spiraling in a much more negative or overwhelming direction than you’d anticipated.

An excellent example of a thought spiral (image via guelphtherapist.ca)

As someone who has to be aware of thought spirals on a daily basis, I’ve gained a better sense of when I’m susceptible to thought spirals. Simply put, there are just some roads of thinking I don’t need to go down because I know what could happen. That doesn’t mean I’m always successful, but that bit of awareness has helped my mental wellness in ways that are invaluable. Thought spirals have the same method, but the unique properties of it – what those thoughts are, and how they’re triggered – will look different for everyone.

What Can We Do About It?

In my opinion, the most important thing we can do when it comes to this topic is to be as open and honest as we can. I think that all of us should be aware of thought spirals because they can happen to anyone. Sometimes I feel like my anxiety or depression might make me more susceptible to thought spirals. But also, anyone can land in a situation where they aren’t thinking as clearly as usual.

Recognizing a thought spiral isn’t always easy, but awareness is the first step. If you notice when your thoughts are getting increasingly overwhelming, name it and acknowledge it. When I can name or define something about my mental health, the challenge to overcome that obstacle eases. Be on the lookout for an upcoming post about other tips and techniques for dealing with thought spirals but in the meantime, I hope that awareness is helpful!

For a long time, I experienced thought spirals but never knew what they were. Now I want to hear from you! Have you heard of thought spirals, or do you know them by another name? What is/was your experience with them? Let me know in the comments!

Not Seasonal, Just Depression

Nathan Smith5 Comments

The more experience I’ve gained on my mental health journey, the better I’ve gotten at recognizing my depression and the reasons behind it. That being said, depression can still be tricky. There are times where I feel like I know exactly why I feel depressed; other times, it’s like a feeling or emotion comes out of nowhere. The wintertime is actually one of the trickiest times to recognize my feelings. Is it just a time of seasonal sadness, or is it something I need to look into further?

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