Like most of the world and many of you, I’ve struggled with bouts of anxiety my whole life, until I fully understood its roots. Shortly after gaining this understanding, I was able to overcome it.
Before I tell you how, it’s important that you understand the root cause of anxiety: stored ‘alarm’ in the body or nervous system dysfunction. This alarm or dysregulated physiology alters psychology (the way we think). Typically, the stronger the alarm, the more we think, and the more we think, the more we contribute to the alarm. This is why anxiety is a cycle that many spend a lifetime trying to overcome.
Here’s the deal though: even though it feels like anxiety is a mind problem, anxiety is not just an experience in the mind, it’s a ‘felt sense’ or physiological process that is happening in the body. The problem is that we don’t understand this, so we often go to the mind to try to fix what is happening in the body. This is exactly why so much of what you’ve done to try to cure your anxiety—counseling, talk therapy, brain retraining, etc.—hasn’t helped. You cannot cure a body-based problem in the mind.
When we attempt to fix our anxiety solely with our minds, our thoughts quickly spiral into overwhelming catastrophes, endless rumination, and a tangled web of ‘what ifs’ and worst-case scenarios. This mental vortex, which feels like ‘popcorn brain,’ not only exacerbates our anxiety but also traps us in a cycle and prevents us from healing it.
Here’s how I broke free from anxiety:
- I learned how to observe anxiety and recognize that it was happening in my body (not mind).
- Then, I learned how to ‘pause’ and remind myself: my mind (or my thinking) is trying to make sense of the feeling in my body—and I can interrupt this cycle by getting out of my head and back into my body, reminding myself that anxiety is a FEELING IN MY BODY (state of alarm). I learned to notice WHERE my anxiety was by sensing it IN my body. For example, I typically feel anxiety in my chest or throat.
- Next, I practiced ‘being with’ the felt sense of anxiety in my body without escaping to my mind and allow the experience to happen without ADDING to it by THINKING.
This is exactly how you break free from the cycle THAT IS ANXIETY! Although it’s simple, it’s not always easy and if it was, we would not be living in a world where roughly 97% of people struggle with anxiety on a regular basis.
