Somatic Resources for Acute Anxiety

Sometimes anxiety can come on quickly.  It may feel big, overwhelming, deep, and intense.  Anxiety is the experience of a revved autonomic nervous system.  The nervous system evolved to respond to predators and ensure survival through mobilizing the impulses to fight, flee or freeze.  In modern times, with no lions to run from, the nervous system can become unbalanced by everyday stressors and startling events.  The energy the body creates to spring into action needs to be released, metabolized and discharged.  

You can help your body release un-used energy before it turns to tension.  Here are some specific skills and practices that can help manage acute anxiety and bring the nervous system back into balance.  A balanced autonomic nervous system brings about the experience of calm, clarity and control.  

Weight and pressure.  Put something heavy on your lap.  Use a heavy backpack, a pile of books, or anything else that has some weight to it.  This is particularly effective if you are experiencing shaking that feels uncomfortable or out of control.  You can also firmly squeeze your arms and press on your legs, or wrap up tightly in a blanket.  All of these things are grounding and counter the fast and high energy of anxiety. 

Take a breath.  Start with one or two if it feels like too much to take five or ten.  Try to make your breath deep and slow, but don’t force or strain.  Stay with deep breaths as long as feels comfortable.  After the acute anxiety has passed, notice impulses to breathe, sigh and yawn as your body continues to regulate. Know that sometimes deep breathing can actually increase feelings of anxiety.  Stop if this happens.  Trust yourself.  

Allow movement.  Movement is normal when you feel anxious.  Your body is trying to discharge energy.  Shakiness and restlessness can be uncomfortable and even scary.  Know that this your body’s way of trying come back to homeostasis and calm.  Allow it when it feels okay.  Help it subside when it doesn’t.  Stretch, walk around, pace.  Put things away, wash dishes.  Open and close your hands, roll your ankles, bend your knees.  Fidget.  Set aside judgement for a moment, and just notice and follow.  Holding back movements creates tension.  Allowing movement resolves it.  

Reach out.  Talking with someone who helps you feel safe can be a quick way to calm anxiety.  We are social creatures.  It is written in our biology.  We have the capacity to communicate on unconscious levels—nervous system to nervous system.  We naturally co-regulate with the people around is.  Connect with someone you trust, someone who can honestly tell you that although you don’t feel okay now, you will feel okay soon.  This will connect with the part inside of you that knows this too.  Strengthening this connection to the calmer parts of yourself will help you be gentle and calm with yourself as well.  

Notice moments of calm. As your system begins to calm down, take a moment to notice what it feels like.  Check in with the quality of your thoughts.  Is there slowing?  More space?  Check in with your body and notice if your heartbeat and breath have begun to settle.  You might notices that you feel more “in” your body.  See if you can sense into your hips and sit-bones or feel your feet on the ground.  Honor and celebrate the shifts.  It can feel risky to bring awareness to your experience and to try to change it.  It is hard work, and work worth doing.  You might notice that the feelings of anxiety come back.  This is normal.  It can help to notice it happening.  This is you learning to ride the waves.

Somatic Resources for Anxiety and Life Transitions

Anxiety is a common experience during life transitions.  Transitions often go hand-in-hand with stressors—increased external demands, tension in relationships and uncertainty.  These stressors can lead to waves of anxiety, which may feel overwhelming at times. Stress management can reduce anxiety, increase feelings of being grounded and focused, and generally smooth transitions. 

Stress management involves regulating the nervous system.  Regulating means bringing the two branches of the autonomic nervous system into balance.  These two branches are responsible for survival (fight, flight, freeze), and social engagement (rest and digest).  A healthy nervous system responds congruently with the environment, and the person is able to mobilize in the face of danger and then return to rest once the danger has passed.  

A variety of life experiences can jangle or damage the nervous system.  Often the fight, flight, freeze side of the equation gets revved up and stays revved up.  Fight, flight and freeze responses are mobilized when there is no need to run, fight or hide. The body doesn’t know the difference between something that doesn't pose a physical threat, such as a disagreement or a bounced check, and something that does, such as being chased by a lion.  A set of responses that is adaptive and useful when escaping sharp teeth is anything but helpful when trying to navigate relationships or problem solve.  This mismatch is the physiological experience of anxiety.

On the other hand, A healthy, self-regulating nervous system is the physiological basis for the experience of ease.  Thus, healing and supporting the nervous system is the process for decreasing anxiety.  Somatic resources do just that.  Somatic resources are tools and practices that engage the body and work directly with the nervous system.  They include, broadly, breath, movement and awareness.  The following suggestions incorporate each of these.

Walking is a somatic resource that is available to many of us almost anywhere.  It deepens the breath and increases circulation.  It engages large muscles, evoking a sense of grounding.  The rhythm of footsteps can be soothing, and often walking creates physical distance from the stressor.  Moving the body can take you of your head and away from repetitive thoughts. Try walking around the block when you feel stuck on a project or have just had a stressful interaction.  Notice how you feel before, during and after the walk.  Take it a step (ha!) further, and integrate walking into your weekly or daily routine. Consider walking in nature as often as possible, at least a few times a month. Wherever you are, pay attention to how your inner state, and especially anxiety levels, shift before, during and after the walk. 

Deep breaths are tried and true.  The breath tightens in the “fight, flight, freeze” state.  Shifting your breath lets your body know that there’s no physical threat, no need to mobilize.  Start by noticing how you are breathing.  If you’re feeling anxious, your breath is probably shallow, and it may be fast or uneven.  It may feel like you’re not breathing at all.  Often, just noticing this type of breathing naturally brings a deeper breath.  Keep paying attention.  Notice where the breath flows, and where it is a little tighter.  Try not to judge how you are breathing, since judgment can increase anxiety.  Now, gently deepen your breath.   Play with noticing the natural pauses between inhale and exhale.  Play with extending the out-breath.  Notice, deepen, play.  Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.  

Move in awareness.  Yoga, dance, martial arts, sports and exercise all provide spaces where the focus is on movement and the body.  Awareness of movement necessarily includes awareness of breath.  This sort of focus on the body and breath can bring you out of your head.  With your focus elsewhere, you can take a break from the constricted thought patterns that often accompany anxiety.  Before starting your movement practice, take a quick inventory of how you feel.  Track any shifts during the practice.  And then just in again when you are done. Extend your awareness into how you move throughout the day, and notice how that impacts your experience and mood.  

Positive relationships are another somatic resource.  As social creatures, we interact on many levels, including nervous system to nervous system.  In these (largely unconscious) interactions we co-regulate.  A calm body can help a less calm body settle.  Without trying, we can “borrow” the nervous system of another person to help bring our own nervous system back into regulation.  We can be settled and soothed.  This is a resource, and we can tap into it by intentionally connecting with people who help us feel safe.  We can support our body’s natural capacity for accessing this kind of resource by paying attention to it happening.  Notice deep breaths that happen during supportive conversations.  Notice the sense of relief you feel when you sense that someone is hearing you.  Taking time to take this kind of experience in helps your system re-learn that these feelings of spaciousness, calm and safety are possible.  

Five Things to Love About Attachment

Most of my clients, indeed most people who have any meaningful contact with me, have heard me talk about attachment theory.  Attachment theory studies how people (and other mammals) bond and connect.  Focusing on early relationships between infants and their caregivers, attachment theory looks at how we are shaped in relationship through the lifespan.  By studying the “attachment system” that exists between two people, attachment theory looks at what things lead to a “secure attachment”—a felt sense of security and safety within a relationship.  

While much of attachment theory looks at interactions between caregivers and infants/children, attachment systems also exist between teachers and students, between friends, between intimate partners, and between therapist and clients.  One goal of therapy is to create an experience of secure attachment—that is, safety— between the therapist and client, using a lot of the same components that create a secure attachment between a caregiver and infant/child.  Over time, the secure feeling in the therapy room generalizes into a sense of feeling safer in everyday life.  This sense of safety may be particularly important during periods of anxiety and transition when uncertainty can give way to feelings of being unsafe.   

My understanding of attachment is a huge resource for me.  It reminds me of my innate capacity to connect and is something I find elegantly beautiful.  It helps me feel grounded and connected, and makes me feel good!  Here are five things I love about attachment theory:

1.  The ability to create a sense of safety in others is in our bodies.

So many of our body systems participate in the process of attachment, often outside of our immediate consciousness.  For instance, the presence of an adult heartbeat helps regulate a newborn’s heartbeat.  A regulated heartbeat creates an internal sense of safety for the newborn. Throughout the lifespan, our bodies continue to resonate with and co-regulate one another.  A calm body can help an anxious body become more calm.  I love this fact about attachment because it helps me remember that one of the best things I can do for someone is keep my own body regulated and feeling safe because that feeling can be contagious.  

2.  Secure attachment feels good.

We’re social creatures, and as such have evolved to look out for one another.  We are also creatures that are motivated by “rewards” such as feeling good.  If something makes us feel good, we keep doing it.  Attachment behavior—forming relationships, caring for young, helping others—keeps us close and protects us as a species.  It also leads to positive feelings of warmth, connection, expansiveness, flow and so on.  I love this fact about attachment for the simple reason that I enjoy feeling good!

3.  Rupture and repair builds trust.

Attachment theory tells us that mistakes and misses in relationship help strengthen the relationship.  This is also referred to as rupture and repair.  A rupture in a relationship can take the form of a disagreement, an oversight, or even just a moment of awkwardness.  While uncomfortable or painful, the rupture provides the relationship the opportunity to come back together.  Trust builds when both people in the relationship learn that they can go away and come back again. 

4. The ability to connect exists throughout the lifespan.

We are shaped by our relationships, and have the capacity to attach, until the day we die.  I love this fact about attachment because it means that there is always the capacity to develop a sense of security, even if that is not what we experienced as children. 

5. Attachment theory explains so much!

Attachment theory looks at how our patterns of relating begin in our earliest experiences.  Looking at our earliest strategies for making connection with caregivers can offer insight into other important past and present day relationships.  Such awareness is a fundamental step in shifting patterns that no longer feel good.