Anxiety is a feeling that arises when we experience stress and worry.  In essence, it’s a fight or flight response towards something we want to get away from. 

A little on the neurobiology of stress: 

Fear triggers a response in the amygdala which sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, this activates the sympathetic nervous system by sending signals through the autonomic nerves to the adrenal glands. These glands respond by releasing adrenaline in the blood stream. 

What we feel in our body is an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, breathing becomes faster and heavier, more nutrients and oxygen flood the major muscles to help us move faster.  As blood flow is redirected, hands and feet can feel cold and clammy. Our face might be flushed from the rush of hormones and blood. 

Pain can be compromised when the sympathetic nervous system is triggered, its common to feel pain and injuries once we’re back to safety and have a chance to calm down. 

Pupils dilate to take in more light, so we can see better. Senses also become heightened and we become tense looking out for and listening to anything that might be dangerous, our bodies react by being tense or trembling, this is a way we can release excess energy stored in the muscles, 

Loose bladder and bowels is another physical symptom we can experience during intense stress, a body can move faster with empty bowels. 

All these response mechanisms are very useful during an acute crisis, when we’re trying to escape a lion chasing us in the jungle. An acute crisis that needs to be dealt with, yet when we live in chronic states of fear and have a similar stress response toward our job, our boss or a situation that severely distresses us, this  becomes a problem. Health problems, such as suppressed inmune response,  irritable bowel syndrome, sleep problems, irritability, over eating, under-eating, addictive behaviour to self sooth start to become common coping patterns.

 During sustained stress the amygdala proceses emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, hence hijacking frontocortical function, basically we lose our ability to think logically and rationally when we’re under constant stress. Some cognitive behavioural approaches can be very help full to break these circuits and strengthen the frontal área of the brain, we can regain emotional control over situations which previously triggered us into anxiety or plain panic.  

Another less known symptom of anxiety …

Freezing is another response to fear, a freeze response can occur when we’re under threat and become immobilised. Imagine a scenario where we have our boss yelling and we find ourselves unable to respond, we feel glued to the spot and can even start feeling detached perhaps even dissociate, some describe this as watching from the outside. This is what a freeze response towards stress looks like. This state can linger for ages even after the yelling has stopped. We might find ourselves sitting at our desk numb and unable to speak or think coherently. To make things worse we might berate ourselves for not reacting. 

We can also feel

• Unable to think straight 
• Very lethargic and tired
• Unable to make decisiones 
• Unable to move, feel numb 
• The need to be alone 
• The need to think about trivial things to avoid thinking about what just happened 
• Giving up on ourselves. 

I believe strongly in the intricate nature of how our mental health is also linked to our gut health, after personally experiencing irritable bowel due to anxiety and having doctors sending me home with pills that didn’t address the issue I learnt how and why I needed to look into and manage my emotional states.  I learned what  type of nutritional changes I needed to make to heal my suffering bowel. I was lucky because I happened to be studying nutrition and had the necessary knowledge to understand how to change my eating habits, however this only helped partially.  If I hadn’t dealt with the underlying causes I wouldn’t have recovered. The problem was I had normalised anxiety for a long time, I believed it was normal to feel like the way I did because I believed chronic stress was part of life. Once I connected deeper within myself and realised I  underlying emotional issues I started addressing them and understanding them. I made important external changes and also came to terms that I had to let go and stop trying to control everything. It was a slow but rewarding process.  As my gut health improved I felt better and understood how intertwined my mental wellbeing was with my physical health. For better or worse they go hand in hand, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ the classic latín quote says it all. 

Anxiety can be manifestad anywhere in the body, either in the form of headaches, neck pain, belly aches etc. I focus holistically on the body, body and mind. Somatic psychology is the best way to ‘talk’ to the body and understand what it’s trying to tell us.

On a side note, not all stress is bad, in fact we need a certain threshold of tension to get going and make things happen, the problem lies when we go beyond our capacity, ones stress is another’s play, we all respond differently. 

What a first session for anxiety relief looks like 

First we’re going to identify sensations in the body and focus on the different areas they manifest, sometimes we suffer anxiety and don’t even know how to describe it, therefore describing the sensations in the body can be very useful.  

 Explaining in words what each sensation is trying to tell us is quite useful, in a sense they become less abstract, for example anxiety might manifest as pressure in the chest or pressure in the stomach. Tightness or throat discomfort can be linked to need to express something that’s been swallowed for too long. The body literally expresses and manifests unexpressed emotions. What is not expressed is repressed, the body does its job by manifesting these unspoken messages.  

As we work on these two simple exercises more information and deeper insights will appear. Surrounding emotions will also be brought to light and help identify the root cause of anxiety, with the right strategies anxiety can be managed and wellbeing can be restored. 

Also…

 I tend to use physical interventions for patients who come to therapy with a headache or some physical ailment that can be alleviated with direct body work. This is usually after a few session and it enhances what we’ve already covered in therapy. Yet I also use an inverted approach for patients who struggle with verbal therapy and can’t  express how they’re feeling or why they’re even in therapy. In these cases, direct body work can be helpful, acupressure or craneo sacral  therapeutic interventions can release blocks and bring one ‘back into their body’, not only is it deeply relaxing but it also allows a better understanding of what is going on with ourselves at a much deeper level. 

On a final note..

Anxiety is fear based and its normally the feeling of not being able to deal with something that’s happening in our life or is about to happen. Repeating negative thought patterns is addictive, we lay down neural pathways that become more and more ingrained and harder to change. Sometimes fear based thoughts have become so insidious we’re not aware of them, they just become part of our daily thinking process, a habit. It’s what we’ve become use to. Initial breaking or changing these neural imprints, require conscious and focused attention, we need to be aware of these mental assaults and change them for new constructive messages, (jumping straight into positivism doesn’t always work) until new supportive thoughts take over and become automatic. In a way we want to transform problems into projects and regain empowering cognitive thought processes which enable us to deal with current life situations instead of feeling overwhelmed and swamped.