How to Calm Your Anxiety.

Resolving anxious feelings for good using your nervous system self-regulation.

September is a month when we return to our daily lives and our daily stresses. It’s the time of the year when anxiety can arise after summer holidays and the last quarter of the year, fast approaching.?

Do you find yourself juggling a lot? Is anxiety your driving force forward??

When we are used to being motivated by our anxiety, it will impact how we feel and our capacity to stay focused and grounded. Our physical health challenges start to crop up like digestive problems, immunity, fatigue, weight issues, poor sleep, over-eating and sugar-cravings, and imposter syndrome.

Our bodies and minds aren’t built for chronic states of anxiety. We will adapt to it, but with our health, energy, weight and how we feel about ourselves and life will take a toll, eventually.?

If this is how you feel, you are not alone!

In this article you will learn three things:

1. What anxiety actually is (cue: it’s not a mental health problem!)
2. What mistakes we make when it comes to addressing anxiety (so you know what doesn't help)
3. How we can resolve anxiety for good without spinning in over-thinking or forcing your body into stillness that only backfires with, guess what... more anxiety!

Did you know that highly intelligent people are more prone to anxious states than ‘normal’ people? (whatever normal is anyway!) It’s because being highly-intelligent stems from having a nervous system pattern of hyper-sensitivity and hyper-vigilance.?

That’s where I come in - I help high-achieving women who are highly intelligent and sensitive master their health and well-being in midlife, heal from chronic stress and build emotional, mental and physical resilience.?

So let’s address our three points in order:

1. What anxiety actually is

(cue: it’s not a mental health problem!)

Anxiety isn’t a mental health problem - mental symptoms are normal with anxiety but anxiety is a survival mechanism - it’s a function of your nervous system, not a mental issue.?

Anxiety is a function of the sympathetic activation of fight or flight in your nervous system and its role is to tell you that there is danger looming and you need to fight or flee.

In this sense, anxiety is a really important signal and it keeps you alive. So anxiety itself isn’t the problem.?

The problem is that most of us have this state activated all the time as a result not of physical danger but as a result of perceived psychological threat. One other problem is that we get stuck in anxious states and do not down-regulate our nervous systems.?

It is vital that we know how to come back from the sympathetic activation and into the social engagement state of presence, and the rest and digest mechanism in the body, if we want to enjoy healthy relationships, self-assert in healthy ways, feel good about ourselves, and have a healthy functioning body and mind.?

2. What mistakes we make when it comes to addressing anxiety

(so you know what to avoid doing)

Treating anxiety as a mental health condition or some kind of thought error problem is a mistake in so many approaches to healing, including our conventional medicine.?

This doesn't get to the core of the source of anxiety and that is our physiology.?

Anxiety isn’t in our head, it is present in our body’s muscular tension patterns, and habituated movement patterns that manifest as our habits, thoughts, beliefs and stories, and actions and behaviours.?

Because our nervous system is 80% afferent - this means that 80% of the neural signals between the brain and the body go from the body to the brain, and not the other way around, we need to work directly with the nervous system and the body to shift out of states of anxiety.

Here are some of the mistakes that we can make with anxiety:

• ‘Know what you are dealing with’ - the advice is to think about what’s causing you anxiety.

Well, the problem with that is that without awareness of your nervous system, you are going to end up in your head - overthinking - which is a symptom of anxiety and overthinking only causes more anxiety, it doesn’t help you regulate.

• ‘Keep busy’ - the advice here is to distract yourself.

Anxiety already is a way that your nervous system distracts you to avoid the problem rather than deal with it because there is a lack of capacity in the nervous system for being in the here and now - so this isn’t going to help much either and it only perpetuates the patterns of anxiety.

• ‘Practice mindfulness and meditation’ - typically the advice here is to calm your mind and sit in stillness and silence.

When your nervous system is in sympathetic activation of anxiety, perceiving threats everywhere, the last thing your body wants to do is to sit still or think more positive thoughts because there is a proverbial tiger sitting on your shoulders and the signal is - run or fight or you get eaten! You won’t be able to sit still to meditate.?

When your nervous system is stuck in the state of freeze, shutdown or fawn - your nervous system wants to be still naturally as this is the state of immobilisation - so sitting still in meditation isn't going to be helpful. If we want to repattern our responses, we often need to go the opposite way from what our nervous system is wanting to do. Caveat: Sometimes it's helpful to go into the pattern to allow the body to release stored stress. We have to learn to follow our body's responses to feel the release or tension as a result of the movement, action, behaviour we are taking.

What else have you tried that hasn’t worked or you weren’t able to follow to calm anxiety?

3. How we can resolve anxiety for good

(without spinning in over-thinking or forcing your body into stillness that only backfires with, guess what... more anxiety!)

What we really need are methods to shake up your nervous system out of danger mode and back into safe and happy and connected place - the social engagement state.

(assuming you are not in actual physical danger of course!)

This doesn't happen at the thought level - it happens in your physiology - your autonomic nervous system (ANS) to be precise. Our vagus nerve is part of our ANS and helps your body to deal with stress. And so we can use the body and movement to resolve anxiety.

Here is what I teach my clients to practice to regulate their states and resolve anxiety.

Embodiment and somatic practices - directly working with the nervous system.

Eye orienting practice is a very safe way to begin to regulate and work with your nervous system, indoors or outside.

You’re moving away from your screens and looking around the room or the outside space and slowing your eye movement down, noticing how your eyes are moving, noticing what you are drawn to look at, what objects, shapes, colours and textures you want to land on and explore, what sounds you are hearing at the same time and just noticing your breath going in and out of your lungs at the same time.?

You are not looking to change your breathing, you’re just observing what you notice.?

This is a simple way that you can begin to interrupt the pattern of anxiousness in your nervous system as it helps your body to come to the present moment awareness. Your body cannot experience anxiety in the present moment. That is biologically impossible.?

This sounds like a very simple practice but one of the hardest things for high-achievers to do is to be in the present moment because anxious behaviours feel so familiar. Even 30 seconds of this is sending signals of safety to your brain that’s interrupting your usual pattern of anxiety.

30 seconds of present eye-orienting will do more for your nervous system than trying to sit still for 30-minutes in meditation in a disembodied way because your nervous system is fidgety and your mind is everywhere but here, or you're in overwhelm and shut down and all you want to do is to be still. ?

Let me know your thoughts on what you’ve just learnt in this article, I’m curious to know how you get on with the practice.

If you have any questions, comment below, drop me an email at [email protected] or send me a private message on LinkedIn.?

To your best health & well-being,

Katarina

PS. If this is really resonating with you and you’d like to learn more, find out about my 1:1 programme and working with me here .