Believe it or not, about 6% of people will suffer from PTSD at some point in their lifetime. This could be due to any kind of trauma and can lead to lasting stress, anxiety, and other symptoms in their lives.
If you struggle with severe PTSD symptoms, you may need a couple of coping mechanisms to help you get back on track. Let’s take a look at some ways you can cope with PTSD.
1. Practice Deep Breathing
Anxiety is one of the most common PTSD symptoms in women, and a great way to combat it is with deep breathing exercises. Breathing deeply can help slow down your racing heart and calm your nerves.
One of the reasons why this happens is that short breaths can increase anxiety and stress. Since many people don’t breathe out of their full diaphragm, breathing becomes one easy way to cope with chronic PTSD symptoms.
To get the hang of deep breathing, you can try practicing breathing exercises. The more you do them, the easier it will be for you to train your body to breathe properly.
2. Focus on Relaxing Your Muscles
One of the physical symptoms of PTSD includes muscle tightness. When your fight or flight response kicks in and you begin feeling a wave of PTSD coming on, you can focus on relaxing your muscles.
Many experts recommend practicing progressive muscle relaxation. This technique alternates between flexing and relaxing muscle groups in the body. The rhythm helps to relax you and alleviate symptoms of PTSD.
If you’re confused about how to do this, you can practice tensing your muscles up as tight as you can and then releasing the tension. The effect is that when you relax your muscles, you allow them to relax completely.
3. Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a great practice even if you don’t have PTSD. If you struggle with PTSD and anxiety-related symptoms, you may find that using mindfulness is helpful.
Mindfulness is a practice that’s been around for hundreds of years. However, it’s recently gained popularity in helping patients who struggle with depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.
What is mindfulness, you ask? Mindfulness is simply the practice of being aware of the moment that you’re in. When you practice mindfulness, you clear your thoughts and allow yourself to just be in the present moment.
4. Self-Monitoring
If you like mindfulness and want more ways of being aware of yourself and your feelings, self-monitoring might be beneficial for you. This is a technique that helps you focus on your symptoms and raise awareness of them.
The reason why this works is that most of us go through our daily lives without thinking too much about what goes on around us. When we practice self-monitoring, we begin to connect our feelings with what’s happening.
Once we figure out what the connections are between our PTSD symptoms and our environment, it’s easier to address our feelings. The better you get at self-monitoring, the easier it will be for you to recognize and handle triggers.
5. Get Social Support
There’s tons of research to back up the fact that social support can hugely impact people suffering from PTSD. When you have the support of someone that you trust, it’s easier for you to get over the negative emotions associated with this disorder.
While you can easily get PTSD support from friends and family, it’s sometimes a good idea to enlist the help of a professional. A professional will have strategies that can help you manage your PTSD symptoms.
6. Practice Self-Soothing
If you start to feel PTSD attack symptoms coming on, you can try practicing self-soothing techniques. Self-soothing is a way of focusing on reducing anxiety and stress in your life.
There are tons of different ways that you can practice self-soothing. Some people enjoy getting a massage. Others like practicing yoga.
Find what it is that you enjoy doing and make it a habit to help reduce anxiety.
You can also practice speaking to yourself kindly. Remind yourself that it’s going to be okay and that you will get through this episode.
7. Try Journaling Your Thoughts
Journaling, sometimes called expressive writing, is another great way to cope with PTSD symptoms. Just by taking the time to talk through what you’re feeling and write it down, you can relax.
Creative writing has been studied in connection with improving health. It has been linked to better psychological and physical health.
Individuals with PTSD may find even more benefits from journaling. For example, you may improve your coping methods and reduce the onset of PTSD symptoms.
8. Distract Yourself
If you’re feeling truly overwhelmed by your emotions, sometimes all you need to do is distract yourself. You can use purposeful distraction methods to help you cope with your strong PTSD symptoms.
The way to do this is to find something that takes your attention off of your emotions. This could be by coloring, by listening to relaxing music, or by using any other distraction technique.
Whatever it is that you choose to distract yourself with, it’s a great way to allow your symptoms to lessen. This helps you start to relax and overcome your PTSD episode.
9. Consider Behavioral Activation
When you start to feel anxious about a certain situation, it’s not uncommon to simply avoid whatever it is that’s making you anxious. While that can help anxiety in the short run, it can be detrimental in the long run.
A better way to deal with anxiety is to boost your activity level to combat anxiety. This helps reduce anxiety and stress from the onset, making it easier for you to stand strong in anxiety-inducing situations.
Use These Coping Methods for Severe PTSD Symptoms
These helpful coping methods can be good ways to overcome severe PTSD symptoms. Using one or more of these strategies could put you back on track for living a healthy and rewarding life.
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