How to Most Effectively Relieve Anxiety

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Anxiety can make it hard to think clearly. If you keep thinking about the same worry, you won't have much energy left to deal with other things.

Writing your worries down

One idea is to write down your worries instead of thinking them over endlessly. This is like keeping a diary, and involves asking yourself two questions: why am I worried, and what can I do to stop it?

I'll be honest: I've never done this myself. But over the last 66 years, I've had plenty of practice living with anxiety anyway, mostly because I know I'm just prone to it. This helps me to manage risk, but it also means that I usually imagine the worst-case outcome more often than most people, which makes things harder for me.

What East Asian medicine says about anxiety

In East Asian medicine, anxiety is closely linked to the Heart (心, shin) — one of the body's most important organs. The heart is said to control both higher mental activity (such as thought and awareness) and blood circulation. When the mental side of that balance breaks down, anxiety tends to follow.

Most experts describe three different types.

• Heart Blood Deficiency — You are timid and easily startled. You often feel anxious and your heart beats faster than normal. You also have trouble sleeping and concentrating. This is a sign that your heart is not getting enough of the blood it needs to function well.
• Liver Fire — You have the same symptoms as someone with Heart Blood Deficiency, but you are also irritable and feel hot.
• Heart Fire — You generally feel fine during the day, but when you have a lot of worries, your mind races as soon as you lie down. You also sleep poorly and you wake up feeling very tired before sunrise.

Looking back, I see that I was most like the first one. It is said to develop from long-term overwork and stress, which can exhaust the body's energy reserves. This seems to fit with the time when I was busy expanding my business.

What I actually do: needles, herbs, sauna, and the garden

You can't really get much use out of knowing the theory on its own, so here's what I actually do.

I use moxibustion (a type of heat therapy), acupressure (pressure on specific points in the body to stimulate the nervous system) with my own fingers, or intradermal needles (thin needles that are inserted into the skin) on points said to calm anxiety — the idea being to support circulation to the Heart from the outside. I also buy herbal medicine for anxiety from the pharmacy. If I take it consistently for about two weeks, it usually makes me feel better.

A wood-panelled sauna room. Sweating it out here every day has become part of my routine.
Photo by HUUM on Unsplash

I go to the sauna every day. When I exercise, it helps me think more clearly. The garden is important too. I'm growing zucchini this year, and I love getting my hands in the soil. It's so satisfying to see something alive growing there. It makes me feel less worried about things.

A seedling just breaking through the soil. Losing myself in the garden for a while has a way of lightening my head without my noticing.
Photo by Yohan Marion on Unsplash

But the best thing to do is simply talk to my wife. When I'm explaining what's bothering me, the solution often appears on its own — or I find myself wondering why I was so worried in the first place. Saying things out loud seems to work, but writing doesn't.

None of this is free, of course. Herbal medicine and sauna visits add up, and that matters on a pension. But I keep going because what I'm paying for is more than just the relief of the symptoms. I'm paying for the time I spend looking after my own body. The zucchini in the garden and the conversations with my wife give me something back that I can't put a price on.

The times I thought I was finished

The periods when I felt anxiety most sharply were dropping out of medical school, arriving in the UK, starting my business, retiring, and having cataract surgery. Looking back, it's always the moments when the stable ground under me felt threatened.

Money has been part of that too. In my fifties, specific numbers about how much I'd need for retirement would surface at night and keep me awake. Even now, retired, that feeling hasn't entirely gone.

If you ask how I got through those times, I don't have a method to offer. Mostly I just kept moving forward and let the chips fall where they may. There were moments I genuinely thought I was finished. And yet, somehow, things always settled into place in the end. At those moments, a line from the Bible tends to come to mind — that God won't give you a trial you can't bear — even though I'm not a particularly devout Christian.

Anxiety, the UK, and Japan

A quiet bench among the trees — the kind of breathing space I notice every time I come back to the UK.
Photo by Damian on Unsplash

Coming back to the UK, I feel something like breathing space. There's a comfortable distance between people, a lot of green, and that alone is calming. Even a city like London has large parks scattered through it that work as pockets of relief. Flying in and seeing the towns appear below always brings a sense of relief — a feeling I never quite get flying into Japan.

But where exactly you are in the UK matters a great deal. Cross one street and the character of a neighbourhood can shift entirely; I've learned to notice a kind of internal warning light going off in certain places. Japan, by contrast, feels safe more or less everywhere. It's not unusual to see a young woman walking alone down a dark street late at night. That sense of being able to walk anywhere without a second thought quietly lowers the overall level of anxiety I'm carrying.

Osaka, on the other hand, has very little greenery, and the social distance between people tends to swing to one extreme or the other — either overly curious or entirely indifferent. When it comes to how I sit with anxiety, the Beatles' "Let It Be" captures something of what steadies me in the UK. In Japan, it's a phrase from Buddhist thought, mujō — the idea that nothing lasts, that everything is in flux — that tends to settle me instead.

In closing

Writing down your thoughts on paper is a great way to do it. For me, "putting it outside myself" has taken other forms — like using a needle, drinking herbal medicine, sweating in the sauna, feeling the soil under my fingers, or talking to my wife. There are different ways of doing it, but the idea is the same: to get rid of my anxiety by expressing it in the world.

Writing this, I've realised that being anxious has actually been a way of managing risk for me my whole life. It has become a habit, and this has helped me stay balanced and get to where I am today.

You don't have to reply or comment for any of this to matter. Even a one-way message can help someone else — that's what I believe, and it's why I keep writing.

This article reflects my own personal experience and isn't intended to diagnose or treat any condition. If anxiety is persistent or severe, please consult a professional. See our disclaimer for more.