Managing Anxiety through Body Awareness
What is anxiety?
Can you remember a moment when your heart started racing, your hands got sweaty and your stomach sank? What about lying awake in the middle of the night with your thoughts just circling? Or shutting down to avoid a situation? Or just a sense of dread? These are just a few of the ways anxiety might show up.
Anxiety is the body’s natural response to stress which often includes a fear of the unknown. It affects our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviours. It’s an adaptive response which wants to protect us from danger - whether real or imagined. Learning how to effectively navigate the feelings of anxiety when they arise is important to resilience and wellbeing. One powerful tool for managing anxiety is body awareness.
Body Responses to Anxiety
Each body is unique in its response to anxiety. Some possibilities are tight shoulders, stomach ache, clenched jaw, headache, shallow breathing or even holding in breath.
These sensations provide us valuable information about how we are feeling. Whether we feel safe and connected or stressed, fearful and anxious. In fact, you could say that much of the anxiety response is part of the body indicating that it doesn’t feel safe and connected. With anxiety, it can be that the alarm system is so finely tuned that it goes off in response to thoughts, beliefs or when there isn't significant danger around. Once the alarm goes off, it’s a sign that it’s time to focus on doing things that send the body and mind signs of safety and connection. Remember, it’s not just about being safe, it’s about feeling safe.
It’s quite common to live disconnected from our bodies for many reasons. We may ignore it when it tells us it’s tired, not understand what it’s trying to tell us or numb it with food, alcohol or other substances. With anxiety, we might become quite focused on getting rid of unpleasant sensations or completely absorbed in the worrying thoughts. Both of these behaviours are more likely to increase anxiety.
We can’t benefit from the wisdom of the body so long as we are either completely unaware of what the body is telling us or acutely aware and trying to make it stop. If we are able to become aware of our own body's response to anxiety, we can notice when anxiety is present, and learn how to best calm our bodies.
3 steps for working with anxiety through the body
In my work as a holistic somatic coach and yoga therapist, I’ve found the following few steps to be extra supportive when working with anxiety.
First, we want to become curious and kindly check-in and connect to the body to gather information about what is happening. The good news is that by bringing awareness to the responses themselves you can contribute to an internal sense of safety and connection and begin to interrupt the pattern of anxiety.
You can start by bringing the attention to your feet and the sensation of contact with the ground or you could use a body scan. We offer a free body scan practice or this shorter centering practice on Insight Timer that you could try. Once learned, you can do a body scan in just a moment or you can take as long as an hour.
Second, you can meet your body with kindness. After we have gathered the information from our bodies via the body scan, we are ready to meet our body with what it needs. By offering the body kindness and shifting to a more resourceful position, you increase the signals of safety and connection and the body begins to communicate to the brain that maybe things aren’t quite so bad after all.
Intentionally stop and take notice of a particular area of your body. Is there something that you can do in that moment to release a little tension? (For me, I know that my shoulders hold tension, so I choose to stop and notice my shoulders. Are they tense? How are they positioned? Can I adjust them to feel a bit more relaxed?)
You might place a hand on your heart or your belly for a moment and offer a kind word to yourself.
Third, you can take this a step further and use the breath to regulate your body and mind even more. Two useful practices are:
Lengthen the exhale. Exhale fully. Breathe in gently and deeply through the nose and then gently allow the breath to flow out between pursed lips. Do this for a few minutes.
Another useful practice is slowing down the breath and breathing with an inhale and exhale of equal lengths. We have a free downloadable guided practice for you to try if you’d like.
Each can be beneficial in the middle of a moment of anxiety. At the same time they are generative practices thanks to the wonders of neuroplasticity. In other words, the more you do them when you feel good and when you feel anxious, the more value you will experience as you practice a new way of meeting your body and experience. To support you in reducing anxiety long-term, you might take up a couple of these practices for daily use.
These are just a few of the useful embodiment practices that you can use to stay connected to the body and leverage its wisdom in meeting the feelings of anxiety in ways that help you arrive at a more resourced state. In future articles, we will discuss other cognitive and lifestyle strategies you can explore to help you manage anxiety.