A word about anxiety.
There is a part of your brain that is very old. It’s known as the lizard brain, because it’s old enough to have been part of the brain before humans were humans, when we were still reptilian, but it’s really called the amygdala. It’s role is to detect fear and to fire up your fight/flight/freeze response so that you can escape that fear.
It’s a very useful part of your brain and it’s why you are reading this today: your ancestors survived and here you are.
The trouble with the amygdala is that it is not verbal. Let me explain: if you are feeling sad, you can talk to yourself to bring yourself comfort. If you are tired, you know how to soothe yourself and that you need an early night.
But you can’t talk to your lizard brain in this way, because it doesn’t have the capacity for language.
So when you are afraid, when anxiety feels like it is taking over your world, your way of life, when it has hijacked your sleeping patterns and your breath, when you feel that you have been overwhelmed by it. When these awful feelings come, talking to yourself doesn’t really work. You’re trying to apply your rational brain to a part of you that isn’t rational.
There is a more effective way and it is very simple. The way is to make your body feel safe and thereby calm the nervous system.
This happens through your breath (if you breathe deeply, your body receives signals that you are safe and the amygdala calms it’s stress reponse). It happens through feeling your body with techniques such as tapping, or yoga, where you bring yourself out of your thinking, spiralling brain and back into your body. It happens through doing exercise, which releases stress hormones and creates a calmer physical state. It happens through stimulating your vagus nerve, that part of your nervous system responsible for feelings of calm.
If life hasn’t felt safe to you, for whatever reason, then it is likely that you have forgotten how to inspire the side of your nervous system that makes you feel calm and at peace. But there are simple techniques at hand to help you.
Life is often challenging, seldom easy and full of things that throw us off. It is not possible to create a life in which nothing makes you afraid. You may have tried and you may have noticed that this has the effect of making your life very small as you seek to withdraw from anything that arouses that fearful state within you.
The trick here is to learn how to make your body a safe place in which to live. The aim is that you can feel the fears you have and rather than fight them, and face them from within a body that is calm, its breath undisturbed.
The Long Covid practice on my website (free) is a great place to start: the gentle rocking movements and attention to linking movement and breath create a soothing practice that calms your system. The Viloma 2 pranayama practice in the Yogi’s Library (also free) might help too. Breath without movement doesn’t work for everybody though - if you have experienced panic attacks linked to a feeling of not being able to breathe, then beginning with the more physical practices of yoga might feel like a safer place to start your journey into peace.
It’s a different way of thinking about your anxiety. Instead of hating it, fighting it, arguing with it and rejecting that part of yourself, you embrace yourself, learn how to make your body a safe, calm, strong place in which to live and allow those anxious feelings to be ok, to be a normal part of your life expereince right now, but not to highjack your entire system so that life feels sad and dangerous.
Sarah x
