Help for Anxiety
Chances are you’ve already heard of anxiety. I mean, everybody is anxious, right? It’s both a common emotion and a mental health issue.
We tend to think of anxiety-as-the-mental-health-issue as more extreme. This is the anxiety that you can’t manage, it impacts you in multiple areas of your life, and you can’t seem to pinpoint where it comes from.
You are just anxious. Always. And I am guessing you beat yourself up about it.
Don’t you just love it when people tell you, “Calm down!”
If I could calm down, I would!
Nobody really likes feeling this way, and it makes us more anxious when we realize we can’t control it.
The DSM-5(1) lists symptoms that include restlessness, feeling “on edge,” fatigue, trouble concentrating, irritability, your mind going blank, tension in your muscles, and trouble sleeping (which could mean falling asleep, staying asleep, or just unsatisfying sleep).
People often don’t recognize fatigue and irritability as anxiety and often look at sleep issues as some kind of medical problem. The anxietycentre.com lists literally hundreds of anxiety symptoms. Many of them are body symptoms that you may think of as more medical than psychological.
Some surprising indicators of anxiety include things like:
• excessive yawning
• clumsiness
• body aches
• nervous coughing
• allllll kinds of stomach issues
• trouble breathing,
• thoughts, songs, or images that seem stuck on a loop in your head
• feeling numb
• teeth grinding
• vision problems
I am not saying that if you have one of these problems it is definitely anxiety. If you looked at all of the physical symptoms on anxietycentre.com’s list and wrote them off as anxiety, you may have some serious physical health problems!
I am saying that anxiety can manifest in the body, and if it goes untreated, it can develop into health problems. So maybe check with your doctor and a counselor if you are experiencing symptoms that could be anxiety.
Anxiety is a broad category. The definition I gave above describes generalized anxiety disorder, but people experience specific types of anxiety, such as social anxiety or phobias.
The first step to working with anxiety is to figure out what triggers it.
Is it limited to certain situations?
Is it something that feels like a constant undercurrent in your life, but you feel it more prominently in certain situations?
Often, people who experience the “constant undercurrent” don’t recognize it as anxiety – it just feels like everyday life. They don’t usually realize there could be another way to move through life. It may even feel uncomfortable to think about life without constant anxiety. How will you be prepared if you don’t worry? What if you miss something?
Anxiety may have developed as a way to cope.
If you had to deal with unsafe people or situations often, then you developed a way of being hypervigilant in order to be ready for danger at every turn.
Keeping your body in that fight or flight state on a long-term basis develops into habit and automatic reactions.
Sometimes we grow up in families where anxiety seems to be the climate of the family. From a young age we learn to worry. We worry about the weather, about safety, about health, about whether we are bothering other people, about how we will pay the bills. Add in some difficult family dynamics (fighting parents, unemployment, illness, addiction) and the worry increases.
We lose the ability to prioritize what might actually be worth worrying about. Our bodies react by deciding we need to be always on alert for danger.
Working with this type of anxiety involves understanding the triggers and the undesired ways you tend to respond.
EMDR can be very effective in figuring out where the worry started for you and helping your brain reprocess the way it experienced those events so it can connect to more adaptive ways of functioning.
We also spend time getting to know the part of you that worries. We even express appreciation for the way it helped you cope. When we can recognize that this part of you has been working to protect you, it changes how you look at anxiety. And when this part of you knows that you have grown in your ability to cope, it can learn to step back.
We figure out strategies that will work for you so you can calm yourself in moments of anxiety. Sometimes it helps to distract yourself or take some kind of action. Other times you may need to get in a place where you can calm your body and let go of the anxiety. It all depends on the type of anxiety you are having and what works for you individually.
There is no cookie-cutter way to address all anxious situations.
We start exploring these strategies as we work on getting to the bottom of what initiated and maintains your anxiety. This is important so you can start practicing adaptive coping right away and start getting some relief. It’s also important because sometimes it feels difficult to bring up the deeper stuff.
Working on your anxiety can actually generate more anxiety at first.
It’s a bit like redecorating your bedroom.
You realize you hate that your bedroom is painted an activating bright red and you want to make changes. In order to do that, you have to take everything out of the room, tape the ceilings, put down drop cloths, get the supplies and do the work.
You know that eventually that room will be a peaceful, calming pale blue that soothes you, but you have to get through the process of creating it first. That process makes a mess and feels chaotic.
That mess spills out into the other rooms of the house while you are working on it.
Just like being ready to cope with that painting mess while keeping the end result in sight, in therapy we make sure you are equipped to deal with some mess and chaos while you are repainting your emotional environment.
Once we get you set up to do the work and get down to the root issue through EMDR or through talk therapy, then we empower you to live your life without your old anxious coping. We talk practically about how you tend to automatically react and how you want to be able to react. We brainstorm new responses to try and process how it goes when you test them out in your life between sessions.
There are practices you can put in place that help bring down your overall anxiety level.
One of these is deep breathing.
It seems so easy, right? We think something so simple can’t really make much of a difference, but if more people were regular deep-breathers, we would have less anxiety in the world!
Deep breathing
• Increases oxygen to the brain
• Connects you to your body
• Gives you something to concentrate on so you shift your attention from things that worry you
• Is a brain hack that puts you in control of your body response
Think about it. One way our bodies react to stress is by breathing more quickly. In true times of stress, this is adaptive and helps bring us to safety. When we feel anxious, we may be reacting to something non-life-threatening as if our lives are in danger. The pace of breathing picks up (and so does your heart rate).
Slowing your breathing down in those situations sends a message to the rest of your body that “We are OK. It can’t be life-threatening, or we would be breathing much faster!”
Deep breathing is not just for quick relief in one stressful moment.
Developing a regular practice of deep breathing, such as 10-20 minutes daily, can help you reduce your overall anxiety over time.
When you take deep breaths, you want to concentrate on breathing from all the way down in your belly. Your stomach should rise on the inhale (your shoulders should not). It may be helpful to focus on words as you breathe.
For example, think “peace” as you inhale, and “stress” as you exhale.
This helps you visualize taking in things that are good for you and letting go of things you do not want.
If you focus on letting your exhale be longer than your inhale, you will lower your heart-rate as well.
Although anxiety is a normal emotion, it does not have to be your normal state of being.
I am happy to help you get to the bottom of your anxiety and learn to move through your life in a way you don’t have to worry about!
References
(1) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (2013), p. 222
(2) https://www.anxietycentre.com
Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.
