7 Changes I Made to Relieve Anxiety and Depression

Hello there, and welcome! I’m glad you’re here, and you should be too. Deciding to seek help for your anxiety and depression is a big step in the right direction. Most people, myself included, likely do not feel comfortable asking for the help of others when trying to relieve anxiety and depression.

Having been in this position, I know I would have found it helpful to learn how to relieve anxiety and depression symptoms from someone who knew what I was experiencing. This is why I’ve decided to share the changes I made in my life when I was learning to overcome anxiety and depression. These changes ultimately helped me relieve my anxiety and depression symptoms whereas they’re almost non-existent now.

1. Get Away From Toxic Situations

On my journey in dealing with anxiety and depression, getting away from toxic situations was the first thing I changed. Toxic situations can include things like relationships, living environments, and workspaces.

When there is an unpleasant situation you are presented with day after day after day, it is hard not to dread this repeated cycle. If you are at a low point in your conscious awareness, your mind is likely focused a good majority of the time on these daily toxic situations. While your mind is playing a part in letting this cycle continue, what you can do is physically remove yourself from these situations.

If you have the opportunity to get away from them, then, by all means, do so. If removing yourself from these situations is not an option, then consider how you could improve the situation. Sometimes all it requires is a change in attitude or a change in thought on your part.

My Experience

For me, this meant leaving relationships, quitting my job, and moving across the state. Don’t take this to mean you should run away from your problems, because that is not what this is. Now, I went a bit extreme here, but you don’t have to. What you should consider doing is taking some time to recognize the situations you are consistently presented with that you feel are causing you grief.

The reason I took to extremes when getting away from toxic situations was that I was at such a low point in my conscious awareness. Part of me did feel like I was running away. But what really happened was that I was able to remove myself from things I had to deal with daily that I felt caused me pain. This allowed me to focus on healing myself, rather than spending my time constantly dealing with those toxic situations.

As a side note, as you begin to expand your self-awareness, these toxic situations won’t matter so much in terms of anxiety and depression. What I mean by this is, they simply won’t impact you as much as they did before. For more information on expanding your self-awareness check out this article on How To Overcome Anxiety and Depression.

2. Spend Time Around Nature

Spending time in and around nature was the second big change I made when overcoming my anxiety and depression. When you are immersed in nature you are surrounded by an abundant plethora of negative ions. In our day to day lives, we often are surrounded by too many positive ions. This is in part due to technology, stuffy workspaces, and industrialization.

Positive ions are said to exacerbate feelings of anxiousness and depression. This is why it is so important to recharge your aura and your environment with negative ions. I did this by spending as much in nature as my day allowed, when first getting over anxiety and depression.

At the time, I did not know about negative or positive ions. Without knowing this, I did notice a huge change in my mood after I began to spend more time outside. I also noticed I was a lot less sick. When I was going through a long period of anxiety and depression, I was constantly sick. I’m talking about headaches, fevers, colds, the flu, and sore throats constantly. Negative ions are said to help clear the air of airborne allergies, smoke, and bacteria.

Now that my days and living environment don’t allow me to spend as much time outside as I would like I get my negative ions in other ways. I use House Plants to help clean the air in my home, as well as essential oil diffusers and smudging. This helps even out my intake of positive ions, keeping me healthy and happy.

3. Exercise More

Exercising was next on my journey. I wouldn’t consider myself someone who is unfit, but I know I don’t exercise as much as I should. Now, exercise is already known to help relieve anxiety and depression symptoms. This is partly because when you exercise you’re focused on your body and making all the moving parts function together in a specific pattern. When you are focused on getting your body moving, you are not thinking about all those things that may cause you grief. Another reason is that exercise helps you release those feel-good endorphins, like recreational drugs and you naturally sweat out toxins.

The reason I started exercising more at this time was not for any of those reasons, though. One piece of advice my father gave me when I was at this low point in my life was to do some deep breathing exercises. This can be accomplished through meditation, but also through physical exercise. Of course, when you exercise, you are forced to breathe deeply. Breathing deeply helps connect your mind, body, and soul one to the other. Plus exercise is well, healthy for the body too.

For me, I prefer efficiency over a lot of things. I prefer to exercise outdoors. Two birds one stone! Except I would never kill a bird. I seriously cannot even hurt a fly, just ask Jessy. Get your negative ions and exercise done all in the same go. Better yet, if you do yoga outside you can meditate, exercise, and immerse yourself in nature all at the same time.

4. Start Meditating

Meditation is something I started doing early on in my journey to learn to relieve anxiety and depression. However, I did start focusing on this practice more so during this time in my life. Specifically, I began meditating at night before bed to help me get some sleep. When my anxiety and depression were at their peak, my mind would be buzzing with meaningless and irrational thoughts at bedtime. This typically happens when you’re left alone with your own thoughts.

Instead of allowing myself to be overcome by my anxiety and overwhelmed by my own tears, I started listening to guided meditations to help me fall asleep. I used the Headspace app, which is free to join for the basic plan. I listened to the basic plan over and over again, and I still use it to this day. The breathing and mind exercises I practiced with headspace allowed me to get a better grip on my mind.

The more I meditated, the more I was able to control the way my mind functioned. Slowly but surely I was able to rewire how my brain functioned on autopilot. Instead of just allowing myself to be focused on all the negativity in my life, meditation allowed me to create room for goodness in my mind. To learn how to meditate check out this article on Meditation for Beginners 5 Helpful Resources.

5. Use Healing Crystals

Using healing crystals did play a part in my journey of overcoming anxiety and depression. If you are not familiar with crystals, they are essentially rocks with superpowers. Call it magic if you will, but it’s just science. Healing crystals are rocks with a specific vibrational frequency. Different types of crystals vibrate at different frequencies, but all vibrate at a level high enough to assist you in raising your own vibration.

Now, don’t go expecting to feel a crystal vibrate like your phone does when it gets a text message. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about vibrational frequencies that are aligned with levels of conscious awareness. For reference take a look at this chart that maps out the levels of consciousness. The higher the vibration, the higher the level of consciousness. Just like spending time around positive people, who are usually of a higher level of consciousness, so to do crystals help make you happy. They help relieve anxiety and depression systems by bringing you into their frequency.

For me, I used amethyst, rose quartz, clear quartz, and citrine the most when first experimenting with healing crystals. I prefer pocket-sized crystals so I can carry them with me easily. However, larger crystals are good for stationary places like a bedside table or coffee table. Some crystals are said to help with certain things more than others. When you are choosing a crystal you want to choose the one you are drawn to the most as that is probably the one with the healing properties you need the most. For more information check out my articles on Healing Crystals, rose quartz, and amethyst.

6. Read Self Awareness Books

Further along in my journey of self-help in dealing with anxiety and depression, I started getting into books about self-awareness. The books I read were primarily focused on the concepts of expanding your conscious awareness. This is essentially the same as raising your vibrations. These books helped me open my mind to new concepts and theories about our existence in the world. Most importantly these books taught me how to be aware of the present moment and to be consciously aware of my own thoughts.

I began to realize as I read through these books just how often I allowed myself to be depressed and anxious about things that already happened or that may happen in the future. The past and the future simply don’t exist, except in your mind as these books taught me. We cannot control those things that may happen or that have already happened. We can only control what is happening right now, in the present moment, which is all there ever is.

As I became more aware of this, I realized that in the present moment, everything was okay. Sure things could have been better, but things could have been worse too. You’ve got to be thankful for what you have right now before you can expect something better to come along. The books that I read were by authors Eckhart Tolle, and David Hawkins. I first started out reading The Power of Now, then I moved on to Stillness Speaks. After those two books, I read Conversations with God, then Truth VS Falsehood. None of these books are religiously based, for those of you with religious reservations like myself.

7. Change My Thoughts

Last and most important in learning to relieve my anxiety and depression was changing my thoughts. From reading books on self-awareness, and taking advice from life coach Heather Matthews, I learned just how big of a role the mind plays in anxiety and depression. When you are depressed and anxious, your mind has completely overtaken you to a point where it’s hard to come back from. Everything in your life just seems like a struggle, and bad things just keep happening one after the other.

This is because that is what your mind has thought, decided, and created in your world. Your thoughts literally create the world around you. And when I say literally, I mean literally. Your thoughts physically manifest into things, events, people, and situations around you. It’s basically the law of attraction. What you are thinking, whether it be negative or positive will draw like energies towards itself. So if you are in a slump, thinking bad things will happen tomorrow, of course, they will. Because that is what you already decided, and the universe just brings it into existence.

After changing my thoughts, the things in my life started to look different. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change” as said nicely by Wayne Dyer. This quote could not be closer to the truth when you are trying to relieve anxiety and depression in your life. I talk about this a little bit more in my article about How to Overcome Anxiety and Depression.

Resources and Disclosures

I hope this article and the resources listed help you on your journey in learning to get past your tendencies to be anxious and depressed. Comment down below if you have different techniques for overcoming anxiety and depression. Sign up for our free 5 Day Self Care challenge to commit to self-care today.

Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products I personally use and trust, or think my readers will find useful. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Medical Disclaimer: Listen, folks, I am not a doctor, nor do I claim to be. The content of this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical decision.

If you are having thoughts of self-harm and are in need of someone to speak to without fear of judgment, please feel free to call or text this 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (988). Every life has the opportunity to progress further along the journey as a soul, and this does include you.