How Anxiety Works in the Body

How Anxiety Works in the Body

The purpose of us feeling anxiety in our bodies is so that we will ‘DO SOMETHING’ to try to eliminate the event, situation or thing that we are worried about.  This is a primitive and basic survival instinct that we still have deeply embedded in our brains.  The problem is…we don’t need to run away from saber tooth tigers anymore!  

 However, instead of having the idea of “I need to get rid of this feeling” we need to change it to “whatever is happening right at this moment, I CAN HANDLE that.”   

 What we need to do is learn about anxiety and how it works in our bodies and then break anxiety down into small pieces, and take it step by step.  It may start with learning about how anxiety works and feels in our bodies; the sensations we get from anxiety. Starting with what happens in our brain and body when we are anxious. Then we need to learn what we can do with those sensations to lessen them and our anxiety.  Then we work on our anxious thoughts and work to change the dialogue we have in our heads about anxiety.  Essentially we break anxiety down into small chewable bites.  This is in order to give you some success.  

The following resource includes types of anxiety and ways to work through it.