The Key to Reducing Anxiety

In my last blog post, I asked you to really pay attention to your anxiety, to investigate it with some of these questions:

• Where does your anxiety usually start? With thoughts or body feelings?
• How does it physically feel?
• What are your go-to topics of worry, or the main situations that cause you worry?
• Are your thoughts racing or do you get lost in a disaster fantasy?
• Are you aware of how the anxious thoughts and physical feelings interact to escalate the anxiety?

For some, the main symptom is racing thoughts, or thoughts that just won't stop worrying about something. As soon as one worry is out of the way, another replaces it. This is cognitive anxiety .

For others, panic seems to hit out of the blue. Their heart races, pulse increases, palms sweat, stomach is upset, etc. This is anxiety that is experienced somatically, in the body.

For many, there is awareness of both and how they intersect. Increasing the awareness of how these two elements contribute to each other will help you figure out how to interrupt the cycle.

The key to reducing anxiety is to interrupt the cycle of physical and mental symptoms and practice over and over.

This sentence has two key parts: interrupting the cycle, and practicing over and over.

The main point to keep in mind about practicing is that the techniques used to interrupt the cycle will need to be practiced with effort. You will be rewiring your brain - creating new grooves for information flow. This takes time and practice, but the result is worth it!

OK, so how to interrupt the cycle? I regularly work with my clients to find ways that work specifically for them and their type of anxiety. Over time, I will suggest tools and techniques for you to try. Some may work, some may not. If they work even a tiny bit, keep practicing them. These techniques often initially feel like a drop in a huge bucket of anxiety. But over time, drops do fill buckets.

Today's suggestion (cognitive & somatic): Take a large, deep breath. Push your stomach out as you breath in to the count of five. Pull your stomach in as you breath out to a count of five. Do this five times. Use the breath to create distance from your anxiety. Recognize that your body is responding as if you are not safe, and yet you are safe. Slowing your breathing is telling your body you actually are safe in this moment. Reinforce this by looking around yourself and seeing that you are actually safe at this moment.

And if you are reading this on your computer while sitting in the middle of the highway, call me, we have other things to talk about :)

#1 Step Toward Reducing Anxiety and Increasing Joy

The first step to reducing anxiety and increasing joy is to understand anxiety. Not get rid of it, or ignore it, or change it. But to understand it.

Once understood, anxiety can more easily be managed and reduced. And it is nearly impossible to increase joy in your life if anxiety is in the way. So understanding anxiety is also a first step in increasing joy.

So, what needs to be understood about anxiety?

1) Anxiety is anticipatory.

It is about something that might happen, not that is happening now.

Yet your body responds as if it were already happening.

If you imagine an upsetting or scary event, your body releases the same internal chemicals that would be released if the event were indeed happening: adrenaline, cortisol, etc.

Your flight, fight, freeze mechanism is activated. Your pulse rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, your palms might get cold or sweaty, you might feel nauseous or have butterflies in the stomach, your muscles tighten. Your body is preparing to fight or flee.

Yet there is nothing in the present moment which you need to fight or flee, so your physical reaction has no release.

Which leads to the second thing we need to understand about anxiety:

2) Anxiety has physical and mental components that exacerbate each other.

The anxious body feelings described above, which result from thinking anxious thoughts, actually increase the anxious thoughts, which start spinning even faster. The increased thoughts in turn increase the physiological reaction, and the cycle continues and gets worse and worse.

For some people, anxious feelings start the cycle. The body first feels anxious and on edge and the mind tries to figure out why, so it comes up with things to worry about. Then those worrisome thoughts increase the physiological anxiety, and the same cycle ensues.

So, I can hear you thinking, "How does understanding this help me to reduce anxiety?"

Once you understand this cycle and become aware of how the cycle works for you, you can figure out the easiest area for you to target to stop the escalation.

I'll tackle the issue of exactly how to do that in my next blog post. In the meantime, I encourage you to approach your anxiety with more curiosity. How is this cycle working in your mind and body? Where does the anxiety start? How does it physically feel? What are your go-to topics of worry, or the main situations that cause you worry?

All of these items hold the key to taming your anxiety. It may seem curious that I am initially asking you to think more about your anxiety, but, truly, the investigation can lead to more peace in your life.