Note: this content is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice, or as a substitute for the medical advice of a physician.
The first thing to acknowledge is that having anxiety isn’t your fault.
“There are parts of your body that are so ancient they predate human language, and they don’t respond to thought-based therapies. This is where anxiety often persists even when you’ve tried mindfulness training, affirmations, or other brain-based self-help practices. It’s not that these therapies don’t work at all, it’s that they can only affect so much of your biology.“ - Sukie Baxter
Anxiety can be very diverse in its expression. Certainly there is a normal level of anxiety for stressful situations (moving, a new job, a high pressure project, etc.). There are also experiences of anxiety that are ongoing, and not in proportion to the moment but rather an oppressive aspect of your daily life.
When we’ve experienced trauma, we’re more likely very aware of the causation of feelings of fear and anxiety, yet it can also be present when people aren’t even directly aware of the cause.
Understanding How The Mind Works
Our brains prioritize remembering fear as part of our survival. As I discuss in the Releasing Fear article (which I recommend you also read though), fear in itself is not a wrong thing and it’s a very natural part of our experience. In fact, our brains are programmed to prioritize remembering fear, in order to keep us “safe.” Here is where it gets tricky.
“Imagine that you spent an entire day enjoying the majestic beauty of a national park. You had a beautiful picnic, laughed, enjoyed the flowers in bloom. Then all of a sudden a bear charges your camp! Do you know what you remember from that day, and what your brain prioritizes as relevant information to the park? You don’t revel in remembering the morning stroll, the waterfall, the flowers, or the romantic picnic. You remember the terror. That is the way our brain works. Our brain says, “The park is dangerous!!” and we make different choices about what we do. For instance, we don’t return to the park.” - Paraphrased from the teaching of Odile Rault
The same is true for love, or for feeling safe in social settings. Our brain says, “Remember how that person broke our heart!!” Or, “Remember how we were bullied in school!”
WE MISS OUT ON LIVING, BECAUSE THE PAINFUL EXPERIENCE DOMINATES OUR MEMORY, GUIDES OUR EXPECTATIONS, AND DICTATES OUR FUTURE ACTIONS.
With anxiety in particular, there is an activated fight or flight part of your nervous system that doesn’t know how to shut off. There is a memory, or emotional pain, and probably also some locked in thought patterns that are also keeping us stuck in the experience. I think it’s important to discuss all of the underlying causes.
Moving Through Your Fear Through Human Design
In addition to traumatic life experiences, you actually are interacting with fear as part of your learning themes that present in your Human Design chart. Understanding that can help in a multitude of ways. Firstly, let's say we have a strong fear of rejection (present in gates 49 & 43) and that presents as social anxiety. Wouldn't it help to know, that it isn't because something is "wrong," with you. You experience that because you are learning about your own personal truth and power through navigating it. Self judgment only heightens anxiety, and amplifies the experience. When we understand more about our Human Design, we can more easily move through it because we're no longer personally defining ourselves by the fear. Likewise, it can be incredibly helpful to understand how you experience stress, emotions, and a multitude of other insights that can come through a chart reading.
Lifestyle and Diet
Your lifestyle will also play a role here, and you might have some habits that you use as an attempt to numb out the incredible discomfort, but which also may serve to make your anxiety worse. Alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, sugar, salt, can all play a role in elevating blood pressure.
It's worth noting that sometimes our bodies are trying to get our attention, because they want us to be happy. They don't want us holding onto fear, shame, trauma, or pain. And so these issues come up to be released.
Your conscious focus is impacting you, too.
So while we want to acknowledge that some fears and triggers are held in deeper parts of our consciousness, there can be additional components involved regarding how much we stay in our mind.
If we don't know how to think positively about ourselves, how to cultivate feelings of safety, how to focus towards joy, and how to process emotions, then the mind is a challenging place to be. But so much of it can be improved through simply connecting with your body. That means taking your focus out of the computer-primal brain, and literally getting into your body and feeling grounded.
Perhaps the most helpful thing to know is that there are physical movements that assist in regulating the fight or flight hormones.
Exercises To Relieve Stress and Anxiety:
These exercises seem to have amazing feedback and I would love to hear from more people if this really helps you. Millions of people have tried these simple exercises, and I’m aware of what they’re based on and the systems they are re-regulating. Sukie Baxter‘s work has become incredibly popular (here is another simple movement of her’s to try. This movement is also slow, and really re-connecting you to your body).
Okay, so so you might be new to “energetic healing,” and might not think it’s your thing. But in one way or another all of these exercises listed are based on our acupressure points; this is what Donna Eden’s work is based on also. It’s like doing acupuncture through conscious touch instead of needles. I find these exercises to be very powerful, especially this one - "Taking Down The Flame." It may be a poor video, but this is truly an incredibly powerful movement and the one I recommend when you're feeling really triggered. This impacts the “Triple Warmer,” energetic circuit (which is an acupuncture term for your “fight or flight” pathways). I can’t recommend this enough.
Nick Ortner is an incredibly powerful facilitator and here is a simple 7 minute video on trying this technique. Again, these exercises are based on acupressure points, but tapping is pretty mainstream now, and completely accessible for you to practice on yourself. A HUGE component of this work is reminding your body that you are safe, and you are accepted (you are providing this acceptance for yourself!). That is what moves energy. If you’re really triggered, I would recommend the Take Down The Flame exercise listed above, but as a practice tapping really works.
4. ACUPUNCTURE
Acupuncture is based on the emotional grid our bodies are run by. There are literally highways that our emotions (and hormones) travel down, and some of the most notable ones have to do with fight or flight. What happens in acupuncture is that they’ll relieve emotional highways that have too much energy, and they’ll strengthen emotional highways that have too little. Like all of the above practices, it serves best as a way for us to clear our minds, but it isn’t the whole solution.
We are still driving our emotions through our focus, so we really want to address both the physical change (clearing out old emotional energy) with a mindset change (that shifts our perspective, which in turn facilitates positive emotions).
A COUPLE OTHER SUGGESTIONS TO EXPLORE WITH A LICENSED PROFESSIONAL (RESOURCES FOR TRAUMA):
Intensive therapy combined with MDMA
This approach has had incredibly successful clinical trials. There are continuing trials (that you could sign up for), and an expected FDA approval in 2023 (that was delayed, because they're still discovering how to combine therapy with emotional release in drugs.
“PTSD is a difficult nut to crack—one main reason being that traumas become stuck,” explains Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of the study. “But with MDMA, things that had really crystallized become more flexible, and this gives you the chance to (release the heightened levels of fear and pain).” From the article “MDMA Shows New Promise for Trauma, but the Drug Alone Is Not a Cure”
As this article notes, it’s important to address the painful memories through therapy as well as the drug. What the drug does, is take down the incredibly intense emotion away from the PTSD causing incident(s), which THEN allows the therapy to address the change in perspective, and the processing of emotions. The FDA approval has been delayed, because isolating MDMA treatment without facilitating emotional processing, does not ensure healing.
Somatic Coaching
Somatic coaching helps people reconnect to their bodies and get out of the triggered part of the mind. When we’re able to build awareness muscles that help us move emotional energy, then we’re more adept at shifting it and navigating our experiences. See what you’re inspired by, teachers, tools, and people that feel supportive to you.
MEDICATION
Medication is not a part of my personal experience, but I want to honor that there are potential benefits here.
I must first acknowledge that are portions of the mental health world that don’t acknowledge "gosh that was a hard experience, it is normal to feel sad," let alone offer tools on how to process emotions in healthy ways. When we only say, “here’s a pill,” it can often serve to sweep a problem under the carpet, not to solve it. BUT, it’s equally important to acknowledge that medication can help (though I would only recommend it in combination with therapy, and I still believe in the immense value of the physical support listed above). There are medication success stories out there, and I want to offer every aspect of support to you dear reader.
Musician and broadway singer Sara Bareilles was on Fresh Air yesterday (May 18th, 2023) and spoke about her struggles with anxiety. She takes medication in combination with therapy, and has triggers still (stemming from experiences with bullying and body dysmorphia) but she shared that the medication really helps her “in terms of quality of life and capacity to hold uncomfortable feelings, it’s a much better way to walk through the world.” I recommend listening to that interview to hear more about her journey, and the specific medication solution she has found. (Check out the Fresh Air podcast here.)
Thoughts From My Own Experience
My Dad suffered from severe social anxiety. He was a very intelligent man who had trouble relating to others, communicating, and was a veteran that also dealt with survivor guilt. He struggled with anxiety his whole life, but particularly in the continuing failure of his relationships, and what he perceived as an inability to follow his passion. It was a cycle of living in anger, isolation, and fear.
I wish in his life, he had had the support of being able to reconnect to his body, and regain balance and the feeling of safety (by using the exercises above). I wish he could have understood his energetic experiences instead of feeling so disconnected. I wish he could have felt like he had the safe space to not only discuss his childhood but also to move through feelings of isolation and guilt. I wish he could have experienced peace (inwardly), and a connection to himself that surpassed any outside relationship (he deserved that). I wish he could have shifted his own experience of being critical and judgmental (which had been taught to him by his mother) and practiced compassion and forgiveness internally. I wish he could have learned relationship communication tools (such as Dr. John Gray) and not have felt like such a failure, or put so much pressure on himself. I wish he could have shifted his perspective onto new adventures, and not a continual repetition of the past. I wish he had support, in inwardly cultivating happiness.
He was an agnostic (and while there’s nothing wrong with whatever you believe) he just felt that life had no meaning. He didn’t feel connected to purpose, or to his heart. He felt repeatedly mistreated by the women in his life, and he kept those patterns ongoing. A distrust for the world, holding onto pain and fear, and not knowing how to communicate or look for the positive – it’s not that that was who he was, those were things that he was taught and cyclical experiences he didn’t know how to change.
Sometimes we have a lot of momentum towards the patterns in our lives. Our computer brains will repeat what they have seen until we find a way to shift our consciousness beyond that. Sometimes we are experiencing ego deaths, where the way we’ve defined our identity is in a great state of change. It’s brave to go inward, and sometimes people have trouble disassociating from a perspective in their mind. (Please see the article Releasing Fear.). We’ll over-identify with one aspect such as our internal judge, or sadness, or fear, and we can let it rule our lives until we understand how to shift it.
More than anything, I wish my Dad could have connected with feelings of safety and self acceptance. For my father, those emotions couldn’t come from a pill. Those are feelings that we can provide ourselves with – we just have to know how to navigate and process emotional energy (there are tools listed here) and we need to embrace new perspectives.
We have to have compassion for ourselves as well.
We have to change our mindset
One of the dominant thoughts my Dad had was, “I don’t relate to others.” Underneath that, was “I am not accepted. I am not loved. I am not enough. I am not successful. I am not succeeding. I am not respected. I am not safe. I am not free.” All of those thoughts were born in his youth, and learning themes he did not know how to move through.
He felt utterly powerless, because he had done a lot of “work,” to change his experience. But some therapy is based on discussing the past but not changing perspective. I don’t even think my Dad felt safe discussing things with his psychiatrist, but I know he was unable to feel connected to a different set of core beliefs. So much of that was anchored in by this anxiety that ruled his life. There have been such advances in understanding how to navigate fear, and I hope to contribute to that conversation.
It is important to process and navigate the emotional aspects of our experiences, as well as to have positive expectations that stem from an internal sense of self acceptance and worthiness. Beliefs that “life is meaningless,” or “I am unsuccessful,” or “I am not accepted,” are so cyclically isolating and need to be shifted in order to enjoy our lives.
Many people struggle with changing their perspective. The death of my father was really what gave birth to my work. What is our power over how we feel? What is our power in creating? How can we create differently?
I hope you feel empowered to explore resources that support you.
May you have great support on your journey, and great compassion for yourself. You are loved. You ARE love. You are supported.