An Anxiety Therapist’s Top 5 Tips for Calming Down
Some days you wake up already feeling anxious, without a clear reason why. Other days, you know exactly what’s underneath the anxiety, but you’re trying not to think about it. For many women in Salt Lake City, anxiety can feel overwhelming, unpredictable, and hard to manage, especially when you’re juggling work, relationships, and the pressure to hold everything together.
As an anxiety therapist in Salt Lake City, Utah, I see anxiety show up not just as worry, but as a signal. Anxiety often has triggers, sometimes obvious, sometimes buried—and understanding that connection is an important part of calming it down rather than fighting it.
Anxiety Can Feel Overwhelming: Here’s What Actually Helps
When anxiety spikes, it can feel confusing and scary, especially when you don’t fully understand why it’s happening. Before we talk about ways to calm it, it helps to understand what anxiety is reacting to in the first place.
Common Triggers That Can Increase Anxiety
Anxiety doesn’t usually come out of nowhere. For many women, it’s connected to ongoing stress, pressure, relationships, or past experiences that haven’t had space to be processed.
Job/employment
Finances
Family Relationships
Strained relationship with a partner
Friendships
Worrying about children
Previous trauma resurfacing
Body image
Eating
Religious/spiritual beliefs
School/education
Dating
What Anxiety Does to Your Body
Our brains don’t know when a situation is truly dangerous or not based on what we tell it so it responds as if you are in danger and there is a threat. It doesn’t know if you’re anxious about what you look like that day or you’re dreading a conversation with your boss. Your brain thinks a bear is about to attack and is preparing to fight the bear. When you are anxious, your breathing and heart rate speed up. Blood rushes to your head in preparation for you to handle the threat. It can lead to feeling nauseous and lightheaded. Anxiety can have a significant impact on your digestive system where you might experience stomach aches, loss of appetite, and diarrhea.
With these symptoms, it’s hard to feel that anxiety is helpful, and I definitely don’t blame you. It might be helpful to understand that this is a natural response for your body when it’s under high stress and anxiety. There are actions we can take to calm these responses down when they are triggered.
5 Therapist-Approved Ways to Calm Anxiety
Slow Your Breathing to Calm Anxiety
As we just talked about earlier, anxiety speeds up our breathing so we need to find ways to slow it down. There are many deep breathing exercises you could try to make this happen. I would recommend pulling up youtube if you want to learn how to do these exercises and have someone to help guide you through them. The following breathing exercises to try: box breathing, belly breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, alternate nostril breathing, and lion’s breathe. Try these out and find the ones you like the most. Remember slowing your breath cues your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain’s way of calming your stress responses down. I didn’t try deep breathing for a long time because I didn’t understand how it actually made sense.
Use Mindfulness to Reduce Anxiety
First of all, don’t knock it until you try it. Mindfulness has focused on reducing stress, and it works. Not only does it work but it changes your brain in other aspects of your life, and it’s amazing. There’s a TED Talk I recommend that might be helpful in understanding this called, “The Power of Mindfulness: What You Practice Grows” that will help you understand more of how it impacts the brain. In instances of anxiety, being mindful helps bring you back to the present moment. When we are anxious, often times our brain is focusing on the past or on the future but not the present moment. To get started with mindfulness, I recommend the “Insight Timer” app. It has mindfulness meditation practices that are timed but aren’t too long. They are also categorized by topic so you can find one that suits your fancy.
Use Bilateral Stimulation to Ease Anxiety
This term just means stimulating alternative sides of the brain. We do this all the time without knowing it. Some examples of bilateral stimulation are walking, snapping our fingers back and forth, tapping one knee at a time, juggling, typing, dancing, reading, etc. Bilateral stimulation is what we use in EMDR therapy to help process trauma. When we want to help with calming, we use slower bilateral stimulation. This can decrease anxiety by creating distance between worry and stress and helping you relax. Finding a bilateral stimulation activity that you enjoy can be a helpful approach to take. I have had clients who enjoy playing the piano, taking the dog on a walk, dancing to music, listening to music on earphones, etc. Spend as much time as necessary trying different techniques to ease your anxiety.
Practice Self-Compassion When Anxiety Is High
I have written about self-compassion and why you need it here before, and I want to reiterate again why it’s essential especially when you are feeling anxious. If you are berating yourself and trying to tell yourself you’re being stupid for the way you think, not only is it not going to work, it’s going to make you feel even more stressed. You don’t deserve to feel worse than you already are feeling. Be kind to yourself. Validate your emotions. Even if you don’t feel like being gentle with yourself do it anyway. You are going through a lot right now, and it really is ok. There is nothing wrong with you for feeling anxious or worried. I know you don’t want to feel this way. If you need to say statements to yourself repeatedly, do that before you give yourself critical thoughts. Some positive statements I like are: “I am having a hard time right now, and that’s ok” “I am allowed to feel the way I do” or “I am worthy of compassion, and I will treat myself with kindness.” Choose a statement or create one of your own that you feel like you can connect to and repeat rather than your unkind thoughts.
Create Distance From Anxious Thoughts
Changing your thoughts sometimes feels impossible. It seems you can try it, and it works for a little bit before they start showing up repeatedly. Honestly, sometimes this really isn’t worth your energy because it can make you feel more and more defeated. If changing your thoughts and choosing something else to think about helps you, by all means, do it. Sometimes it will be helpful to change the channel on your brain and think about your favorite vacation or someone you love. If this isn’t effective, I like to utilize thought diffusion. Thought diffusion is a skill to create distance between your thoughts. Another youtube video to help you understand this concept is “Passengers On A Bus - an Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) Metaphor”. We can have thoughts floating around in our brains, but it doesn’t mean we have to listen to them. A thought diffusion technique that I like is talking to your anxious thoughts like you would a little child. You can give those thoughts awareness and compassion and respond with something like, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I know it’s important, but I really don’t need it right now. I will take, it from here” or you can repeat the thoughts you are having in a different accent, or you can sing the thoughts you are having. These are all techniques you can do to decrease the impact and intensity anxious thoughts might have on you.
Maple Canyon Therapy’s approach to anxiety treatment
I believe some of us are prone to be more anxious than others. It can be part of your temperament but if your anxiety is on average, an 8 every day, I want to help you get it down to a 3 or lower. The approach I utilize with my clients is helping them find a balance between coping with their anxiety but also getting to the roots of it too. Anxiety is often related to other experiences in your life that haven’t been properly healed before. I believe working through those negative experiences and trauma in your life that are still painful or elicit strong emotions using EMDR can contribute to having less anxiety. No matter what, I believe in going at your pace and focusing on the things you want to.
Anxiety Therapy for Women in Salt Lake City, Utah
If anxiety feels like it’s always humming in the background or spiking the moment you slow dow, you’re not alone. Many of the women I work with in Salt Lake City and across Utah are high-functioning on the outside while feeling overwhelmed, on edge, or emotionally exhausted on the inside. Anxiety therapy isn’t about “fixing” you or forcing calm. It’s about understanding what’s driving your anxiety, learning how to respond to it differently, and working through the experiences that keep your nervous system stuck in overdrive. If you’re a woman in Salt Lake City, Utah looking for anxiety therapy that goes deeper than coping tips, this work can help you feel more grounded, present, and like yourself again.
Start Anxiety Therapy in Salt Lake City, Utah
You don’t have to keep living in a constant state of worry, tension, or emotional exhaustion. Anxiety therapy can help you understand what’s driving your anxiety and learn how to respond to it differently. If you’re a woman in Salt Lake City, Utah struggling with anxiety, working with a therapist who understands high-functioning anxiety, overthinking, and emotional overwhelm can make a meaningful difference. To begin therapy, follow the steps below:
Complete online forms and schedule your first appointment with an anxiety specialist
Start working on reducing your anxiety!
Online anxiety Therapy in Utah
Finding a therapist that you feel understands you and knows how to treat your anxiety isn’t always easy or convenient. I want you to feel safe and comfortable in therapy, and I want it to be accessible for you. This is why I provide online therapy in Utah. Online counseling is just as effective as in-person therapy without traveling or commuting.
Through online therapy, I work with women across Salt Lake City and throughout Utah, making anxiety treatment accessible without adding more stress to your schedule.
About the Author
Ashlee Hunt LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker and owner of Maple Canyon Therapy. Ashlee holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, a bachelor’s degree in Family Life and Human Development, and a master’s in social work. Ashlee has extensive training and experience in working with women who deal with anxiety, including dating anxiety, high-functioning anxiety, and performance anxiety. Ashlee believes in teaching coping skills balanced with digging deeper into why triggers for anxiety show up.