THE MYTH BUSTING TRUTH ABOUT ANXIETY

We live in an Age of Anxiety, but it’s not the anxiety you think.

It’s not just the sweaty palms before a presentation or the gnawing worry about your bills.

It’s a deep, existential dread—one we’ve wallpapered over with motivational quotes and mindfulness apps.

We’ve turned our suffering into a market, selling sanitised, bite-sized wisdom that promises relief but leaves us chasing our own tails.?

The problem isn’t that we’re anxious. It’s that we’re numb to why we’re anxious.

We’ve got every reason to be nervous.

The COVID pandemic supercharged the condition, with GPs and psychologists reporting a spike in patients seeking help for anxious feelings.

And while researchers emphasise the complexity of the anxiety jigsaw puzzle — which can lead to diagnoses including generalised anxiety disorder?or obsessive-compulsive disorder —?there are three key areas where cutting edge research is ushering in a new way forward.

No longer is anxiety viewed as a?random condition, as sudden and uncontrollable as the symptoms it can cause.?

Instead, genetics, diet and knowledge of?how?traumatic life events can affect brain structure and development are forging promising new approaches to understanding what causes anxiety, and how to treat it.

Meantime, we’ve built a world that demands more from us than any human psyche was designed to handle.

We’re wired for survival, but instead of dangers lurking in the dark, we’ve got the ceaseless onslaught of deadlines, notifications, and digital judgment.

We’re told we’re the most connected generation, but deep down we’re the loneliest. Why? Because we’ve severed our connection to the very thing that anchors us: ourselves.

We’re feeding the anxiety machine because it’s profitable.

We’re told the cure lies outside of us: the next wellness hack, the next mindfulness trend, the next overseas island holiday, the hinterland retreat.

But it’s all a Band-Aid over a wound that won’t heal.

Our collective anxiety isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of a culture that’s designed to keep us unfulfilled.

It’s the discomfort of living out of alignment with who we are, and most of us are terrified to even look at it.

We can’t think our way out of anxiety.

BREAKTHROUGH: Here’s the hard truth: anxiety isn’t your enemy. It’s your ally, your gut punching you awake, screaming that you are off course.

We’ve been conditioned to view it as a weakness, but it’s the strongest, rawest signal your body can send you.

The unease we feel is the gap between who we are and who we could be, if we just stopped numbing out and started tuning in.

This age isn’t asking us to fix our anxiety.

It’s daring us to confront it, to dive into its depths and find the truth we’ve been avoiding.

The path forward isn’t some sanitized five-step program; it’s a DEEP-SEATED “self-reckoning” with us.

It’s about unlearning the noise and reclaiming our inner technology—the inner GPS we’ve ignored in favour of external validation.

You want freedom? Stop running from your anxiety. Start listening to it.

Pay attention to your Vagus Nerve.

The self-help industries have had a love affair with “mindset hacks” for years, but here’s what it’s been missing: your vagus nerve.

This isn’t about new-age breathing exercises or positivity slogans—it’s physiology, plain and simple. In the scramble to “fix” anxiety, most of us forgot that our bodies might hold the key all along.

The vagus nerve performs a variety of different roles in the body, but one of its most important roles is as the major nerve for the parasympathetic system – aka the ‘rest and digest system’, responsible for slowing the body down after a period of alertness or stress.

When we experience anxiety, our sympathetic system is activated. We need to be alert to the threat in front of us and ready to act so most organs are on ‘go’ – another popular name for this system is the fight-or-flight system.

What helps you to lower your arousal and feel safe again is the parasympathetic system, and that’s where the vagus nerve comes in.

The vagus nerve is connected to the heart and can regulate its activity, so in a way the parasympathetic system uses the vagus nerve to tell the heart to slow down and thus calm you down. This helps you achieve a state of relaxation and less, if no, anxiety.

In summary: The vagus nerve runs deep, both literally and figuratively. It’s the control center for the autonomic nervous system, modulating the stress response like a dial, not a switch.

The nerve’s role is simple: decide if you’re going to panic or power through.

So, it’s no surprise more people are tuning into it—because when you stimulate the vagus nerve with something as basic as deep, steady breathing, you’re not just calming your mind, you’re signalling your body to ease up on the stress chemicals.

SOME GOOD NEWS

The good news is that there are ways to work through your lack of emotional and mental equilibrium, and often catastrophic thinking patterns.

It is crucial to learn and understand how to adapt to the environment and circumstances you encounter.

For example, when our ancestors walked barefoot on uneven natural surfaces, their feet were constantly twisted, turned, and challenged.

So was the brain, as it had to predict every step-in order to maintain balance and minimise impact during locomotion.

Inherently we were meant to walk around on natural surfaces with varying textures, densities, and gradients. This required a tremendous amount of brain work to keep us balanced on two feet!

So why not let your feet make you come alive in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, your spirit shudders and says... “look out world…he's/she’s awake!! and on their way.”

One small barrier to gaining that feeling is that our FEET HAVE BECOME SILENT due to today’s modern lifestyle (especially urban) which is taking place mostly on flat hard surfaces or in shoes.

Neurologists often talk about proprioceptive noise, meaning sensory input or stimulation which has massively decreased.

Did you realise that we aren’t designed to walk constantly on surfaces (such as bitumen and concrete or even flat wooden floors), and as our world becomes increasingly urbanised, this has been causing us major issues?

This is a rather recent development in human history. Together with a reduction in physical weight bearing activities this has led to a serious UNDER STIMULATION of our feet.

So yes, it’s true: Our feet have fallen SILENT. And our coping skills too. We are mute and anxiety therefore grows louder by the day.

In walking out on your anxiety, you will call upon your Physiological, Neurological. Biological, Psychological mind and body resources.

REMEMBER TO BREATHE

All of us can use a little “come up for air” time to disconnect from life at the moment.?

Breathing is one of the fastest ways to engage the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system which helps us calm down and avoid the “fight or flight” reactions that come from the sympathetic section of our nervous system.

Physiological sigh technique:

There's a pattern of breathing called the physiological sigh that involves two inhales, followed by a long exhale that, at least to my awareness, is the fastest way to calm yourself down.

?Inhale through your nose very deeply, and then after inhaling as deeply as you can, you're going to try and sneak in a little bit more air on a second, inhale also through your nose.

And then after you do that, you're going to do a long exhale to the point where your lungs are empty.

Just one to three of those physiological sighs can bring you from a state of intense anxiety and stress to being very, very calm.

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