While everyone feels anxious at times, feeling generalized or social anxiety can be debilitating. When we get caught in an anxious state, our nervous system registers that we’re under threat and responds accordingly. Adrenaline sends information to all the systems of the body, increasing our heart rate, slowing digestion, and preparing the muscles to fight or flee. If we stay stuck in this state, we may experience issues such as chronic tension, indigestion, insomnia or nightmares.
If you’ve ever woken up in the middle of the night worrying, you know that it’s pretty difficult to talk yourself out of anxious thoughts. Perhaps you told yourself to “stop worrying and go to sleep!” but the thoughts kept on repeating themselves anyway. Reasoning with ourselves about our fears usually doesn’t help us to calm down, because anxiety is a physical state that takes over the more logical parts of the brain. When we are in an anxious state, our brain finds things to worry about. While we can’t argue our way out of anxiety, we can use body-oriented techniques to calm down our nervous system. Once it is more manageable, we can use mindfulness to uncover the feelings and beliefs fueling our anxiety, and we can allow those beliefs to transform as we take in new information.
If you would like to learn how body-oriented psychotherapy can help you with anxiety, contact me here: mindfulness-based therapy