Stop Anxiety Before It Begins
Because everyone gets anxious sometimes, anxiety is one of the hardest mental health conditions to get your head around. We all fret. We all worry. But for some people, anxiety is much more than the occasional sleepless night – it’s an unwanted companion, an illness.
Right now, such anxiety is a wildfire. In 2023, the Mental Health Foundation found that 60 per cent of Brits suffered anxiety that interfered with their daily lives. And in the US, almost one in five adults now have an anxiety disorder.
You’ve probably heard of the well-established treatments, including cognitive behavioural therapy and drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. But as effective as these are, they’re mostly reactionary.
What if there was a way to ‘inoculate’ yourself from the worst of your worries – to stop anxiety escalating from everyday stress to something clinical or catastrophic? If that sounds like a stretch, there’s research to suggest otherwise.
In January 2025, a paper in the journal Emotion studied people using 18 different emotion regulation strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, including exercise, journaling and cognitive reframing. The study found that using a mix of these strategies worked for different people in reducing anxiety over time. The most interesting finding: many of these effective techniques weren’t just quick fixes for when anxiety strikes.
In other words, you don’t have to rely on mindfulness in a crisis or breathing exercises when you’re already hyperventilating. There are tools you can use to regulate your day-to-day emotions and reduce the likelihood of anxiety becoming a serious problem in the first place, says Prof Ethan Kross, director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, in the US, and one of the authors of the paper.
“A lot of people think that managing your emotions is incredibly hard,” he says. “But lots of tools are easy to use. My recommendation is to learn about all of them, because what we’ve learned from our research is there are so many different combinations of tools that work for different people – and even the same person across different days.”
