Managing your anxiety and mental wellness holistically does not mean you won't feel bad at times. The full emotional spectrum will remain within you- there is no bypass to the depth of human experience. Anxiety won't go away overnight. And, it may never go away completely.

What will change is that anxiety and stress will begin to affect you less.

What will change is that you begin to be in a space to choose consciously how much you allow anxiety and stress to affect you.

The foundation for holistic management of anxiety is awareness- you begin to notice what your anxiety feels like as it's happening, when it is happening, and where it is coming from.

Awareness is powerful because it creates space. It injects a whisper of objectivity; a wider view of an experience, interaction, or situation. We often practice this skill in hindsight, but creating awareness in the moment- while it is occurring- is much more significant for learning and creating desirable outcomes. Once we begin to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, we can begin to outline a path through the woods based on conscious choice of how we desire to experience the trees. Without awareness, you're just barreling through at the mercy of chance, blaming the forest (or yourself) for every unsavory event and encounter.

There are three questions you can begin asking yourself regularly to develop the discipline of awareness:

1. What am I feeling, physically?
2. What emotions am I experiencing?
3. What thoughts am I having?

Developing the discipline of awareness not only helps identify and objectify your anxiety, but also helps you to hone in on happiness, joy, peacefulness, and anything else you would like to experience more of in your life. Journaling throughout this process will help cement your insights so you can leverage them for lighter living.

The second foundational discipline for holistic anxiety management and mental wellness is acceptance. This can be a difficult step for individuals struggling with anxiety. As a planner and a do-er, It took me a long time to really understand acceptance and begin practicing it successfully. Furthermore, as a mom, and an educator, I have operated under a "set yourself up for success" and "optimal efficiency" standpoint, which felt in complete opposition to acceptance. It doesn't have to be, but I was approaching these strategies from a space of avoidance- I planned so as to avoid potential negative outcomes.

Acceptance is a state of being more than an action. It's a subtle inner switch that has significant and profound effects on anxiety and experience in the present moment.

The first step to achieving an acceptance mindset is acknowledging that the thing- whatever it is- is happening. Like a hat tip, you're not planning any action around it, forming any opinions on it, or even making any decisions about its presence in the moment. Just a quick, neutral acknowledgment.

It just is, and it's there. And you're there. That's all.

It's like stopping the needle of the record player mid-song to experience the silence. Cocooning yourself in the present moment, allowing all of your cells to absorb its richness. Or like putting on 3D glasses in a theater- suddenly the image emerges in front of you and your experience of that moment is changed forever.

You're stopping the mental and emotional tape, mid-sentence. Savoring the silence, suspending all judgment, expectation, and action.

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Acceptance, at its very core, is gaining control of your internal experience by relinquishing control of your external experience. Why does this work?

Because instead of hunkering down while your emotions tailspin from a trigger, or clutching sweaty palms as your anxiety flies through the roof, you are stopping the record mid-chorus and allowing yourself some inner peace and quiet. You are allowing yourself a moment- and some space- to not decide, to not act, to not judge.

What does it mean to release control? What does that look like? This is a particularly difficult concept if you struggle with anxiety. Anxiety is, in essence, fear about a potential outcome or experience. We desire a non-anxious outcome or experience. We tend to try and avoid stress when we can help it. 

First, you need to tell yourself that everything is ok. Not ok as in assigning value or judgment to a set of circumstances, you are simply acknowledging the experience of "what is." Get your thoughts and emotions out of the way of this experience. Let it move through you. Because it will. If you don't latch on to the negativity, then the negativity won't latch on to you. Detach your emotions from the experience, seeing the forest for the trees- as if this was simply a collective experience of sensations.

Acceptance allows us not only to understand an experience on a deeper level but to not let it limit us in the ways it might have in the past.

By accepting that everything is ok, you begin to build inner strength and efficacy that you'll handle whatever comes up when it occurs. Not with any particular outcome in mind, just that you will handle the experience itself and be ok in that moment. This is your journey.

Another thing that is not easy to hear but important to understand is that sometimes, things just happen. The universe is completely objective in the way it unfolds (which in all of its unfolding over billions of years has absolutely nothing to do with you). Acknowledging that things don't always "make sense" and sometimes "aren't fair" can help you release judgment and stay in the present moment.

This is not to say we are powerless over outside events or how our life unfolds. For those factors which we can positively impact, there are strategies that we can implement to guide toward a more rewarding or fulfilling outcome. The important thing to note here is the choice of staying in the present moment and seeing the moment as valuable in and of itself- while keeping an intrinsic-based intention and growth mindset- will alter potential future outcomes in the favor and intention of this mindset. This is called "mastery orientation," and creates far greater success than a purely outcome-based goal mindset. By not being concerned about specific outcomes, you improve the outcomes you receive.

As you're working on developing the practice of acceptance, don't be surprised if you end up in an "awareness-acceptance loop." This is common.

Your brain is going to want to operate within its familiar pathways, with mental and emotional chatter as its default narration. Humans have more than 6,000 thoughts every single day. There is absolutely a mental narration occurring within your daily experience, and it is mostly on autopilot and triggered by stimuli you encounter throughout the day. How many of these are judgments? Expectations? Fear? Hope? Love? Joy? Without awareness, you can't know. One thing you can be certain of is that it is happening, and it's dictating your quality of life.

Your body is releasing chemicals based on these thoughts all day long- rooted in our DNA from a time when such quick thinking and heightened emotional response often meant the difference between life and death. Some of our brains have gone into overdrive. We can ratchet it back, and retrain our brains and bodies to respond from a space of conscious choice rather than emotional reaction. 

I wish I could tell you this was a quick fix or simple mindset shift, but it's more like peeling back the layers of an onion. Each level of awareness and acceptance reveals new insight and familiarity with yourself, your inner strength, and the unwavering light you have within you. It's work. But it's rewarding work and the richness you experience will be astounding. The outcome occurs within the search for the answer. 

When the hard things come up or when you're in the throes of heightened anxiety and feeling like you're completely stuck and suffocating- this is the path to freedom. Awareness. Acceptance. Try it, right now, while you're reading this article. It's available to everyone, everywhere, at any time.

There are 8 more disciplines for holistic mental wellness, but these two have the most fundamental effect on managing anxiety and stress. No matter what you're building, you begin with the foundation. 

And when your record player starts up again? It probably will, especially at first. Simply become aware of the noise, and stop it again. This is the loop. Every time you do this, it gets a little bit easier and you're able to accept a little bit more. 

These concepts can help you reach your highest potential, not in output but in experience. All we have is the present moment in endless succession, unable to tell when one moment ends and another begins. Each one of us, shining gleams of conscious light nestled in our own little centers of the universe.