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Anxiety is an emotion everyone experiences.

While we often can't prevent or change the things that make us feel anxious, we can learn how to deal with them.

Anxiety is a feeling of unease about the future. It gives us an emotionally charged sense that something bad could happen but hasn't yet.

Anxiety can take physical, behavioural, and psychological forms. The latter can affect what and how we think and is what we know of as 'worry'.

The core component of worry is the intolerance of uncertainty. While stress often relates to a threat right now, worry is more future-oriented, or abstract, in nature.

Many of our worries stem from the unanswered question of 'what if?' Unlike immediate stressors, the answer to a worrying thought is often simply not available, such as how our kids will turn out or if we will have enough money for retirement.

Perceived threats often remain unresolved. As a result, our bodies and minds are unable to dial-down the stress response that accompanies the thought.

For some people, anxiety - the emotion - can then become anxiety - the illness, and start to affect daily functioning.

However, for everyday anxiety, it is possible to relate differently to anxious thoughts, by understanding them instead of avoiding them.

Feeling anxious about the future is totally normal. Not all feelings of anxiety or worry are signs of illness, rather that we are human.

Many of us develop an understandable urge to get rid of these thoughts, because they are often unpleasant to experience.

Yet rather than trying to eliminate anxiety entirely, we can learn to attend to the messages it is trying to send us, while finding strategies not to let it rule our lives.

It is perfectly possible to lead a productive, happy and fulfilling life, while still experiencing plenty of worrying thoughts and feelings of apprehension. Some anxiety is both motivating and essential, even though it is an uncomfortable feeling.

We can learn to think of anxiety as being useful or not useful, rather than being simply good or bad. Feelings of anxiety can prove to be useful when they prompt us to pay a bill or to reach out to a friend, for example.

However, there are also less useful situations where anxiety can seem to dominate our daily experience. These are often the long-term 'what-ifs' about things like climate change, our finances, or whether we feel like we belong.

When these future unknowns threaten to overwhelm us, a useful strategy can be to focus on what is in our control right now as a way of dealing with them more skilfully.

Given that some degree of anxiety and worry Is inevitable, what can we do when it threatens to become all-consuming?

First, we need to understand and accept that we will feel anxious from time to time. Worrying about the future is completely compatible with living a normal and healthy life.

There will never be a time when you don't feel anxious, so there is no point trying to get rid of it entirely. We can, however, manage the volume on our anxious thoughts and feelings.

Second, when we start to feel overwhelmed, we can find ways to interrupt anxious feelings by 'being still' or 'present.'

Tuning into our other senses, such as what we can see, smell, touch or feel helps us to re-centre ourselves in the present.

The ability to redirect our attention at will from our troubling thoughts to a safe ‘present' physical sensation is one of the core skills that we develop through mindfulness or focused breathing.

Finally, we can also learn to become more tolerant of uncertainty about the future.

If you find yourself anxious in a new situation, ask yourself: "What is familiar about this?” that you can pay attention to. For long-term worries, focus on what you can do now to impact the situation.

Reflect: Try to distance yourself from repetitive anxious thoughts. For example, instead of saying, "I am going to mess up that presentation next week," get into the habit of saying instead "I am having the thought that I am going to mess up that presentation." A certainty becomes instead only a possibility.

Plan: incorporate more time-blocks into your schedule that allow you to actively 'lose yourself in the present moment,' what researchers call flow states. Examples include playing musical instruments, making things with your hands, or solving puzzles. Watching TV doesn’t count!

Act: One approach to managing anxious thoughts and 'being present' is called the '5-4-3-2-1 technique’. First, focus on the feeling of your breathing. Then consider 5 things you see. 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. See if you feel more relaxed and less caught up in your thoughts.