Tight chest, electricity in your limbs, nauseous feeling, shakiness, shortness of breath, tearful? Yup, anxiety sucks. I know what’s it’s like, because one of the things my mother was kind enough to pass down to me was an overactive threat response system. Some of us are just more sensitive, guys included! As most people are aware, anxiety is basically our name for an overactive sympathetic nervous system or “fight or flight” response. It includes the release of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. Designed to flood our system with energy and alertness to help us cope with the sort of acute stressors that were part of our evolutionary environment - snakes on the trail, violent attacks, short-term separation from our tribe - but most of us realize now that the sympathetic nervous system is maladaptive for a modern life that is low on acute risk but high on vague, ongoing, endemic stress. As early therapy pioneers like Freud and Fritz Perls realized, prolonged anxiety can also result from traumatic experiences, the prolonged suppression of emotions or compromised relationships that aren’t currently meeting our human needs for contact and support.
When a patient brings anxiety into the therapy room, our first task is to reduce it, through support, empathy, emotional expression, working with breath, and purposeful mindfulness of sensations in the body. Without regulating anxiety, not much therapeutic work will be done, because we will not feel a sense of basic safety - which is the foundation of successful psychotherapy. Over time, being more mindful of the feeling of anxiety in our body can help us “catch” and regulate it before it becomes overwhelming. Even better, employing coping skills proactively over a long period of time can make us more resistant to stress generally, while expanding our window of tolerance for negative emotions. This can support us on a journey of living with anxiety, listening to its “signal” - that there are important needs to be attended to - rather than avoidance or counterproductive numbing techniques.
Look at how a baby-breathes when relaxed: deep into the belly with hardly any involvement of the rib cage. Deep breathing stimulates digestion, slows the heartbeat and promotes a sense of capacious stability. Any breath technique that extends the out-breath significantly and activates the diaphragm will “reverse engineer” our nervous system out of “fight or flight” and towards “rest and digest” mode. Adding in elements of muscular tension and relaxation will compound the positive effects. One of my favorite techniques for working with anxiety is box breathing, or square breathing. It involves extending the breath and pausing between in and out breath. This is to be done every day, at least twice. It can also be done while driving (if you’re careful not to get too deprived of air). I don’t recommend doing it before sleep as it can be activating. For sleep, use gentle yoga, a “body-scan” meditation, or progressive muscle relaxation.
Let us know how you do with practicing these skills and reprogramming your nervous system!
If you need more help with anxiety than box breathing can give you, please reach out or make an appointment below.