Tag: worry

Posted on

Why Should I Feel My Feelings?

People are prickly about their feelings. Understandably. We have so many of them all the time, and so few of them are allowed out in polite society. Often it’s not just “a feeling,” it’s what I lovingly refer to as “a bucket of feelings” all piled on top of each other–challenging to tease out where they’re all coming from and why.

There’s a lot of reasons why clients show up to therapy having great difficulty either identifying what they are feeling, having very little language with which to discuss their inner experience, or frequently, being possessed of great powerful feelings and the paradoxical inability to show them on their faces or in their body language.

The work of therapy is in part the work of putting our minds, bodies, and hearts back together, in relationship with each other, so we can feel whole. So, why, besides being a good therapy client, should you feel your feelings?

Feelings are our early alarm system–feelings appear in our body long before our minds recognize the situation and what it is doing to us. We feel injustice through anger, concern for ourselves and others through worry, uncertainty about safety through fear, connection through love, grief through sadness, and we feel these things very rapidly in our bodies though often we have been socialized to ignore all the signs, the sweat, the heaviness, the beating heart. Our feelings connect our bodies, our minds, and our hearts–they are the connecting highway.

The point of feeling feelings isn’t to act on feeling, but to understand the source, how our feelings illuminate our needs and our hopes and longings. Once we know our longings, we start to know ourselves, and once we know ourselves, we can make choices that allow us to change our lives in the direction of our dreams.

So, that’s why I’m going to ask you how you feel, if we ever meet, and I’m going to ask you to do body scans, so you can learn over time where your feelings show up in your body, so when your body shakes you, you hear and listen.

Posted on

Managing Anxiety by Respecting Your Nervous System

Here are things to try if you are feeling anxious. It’s important to notice, as you learn these interventions, how anxious you are so you can calibrate the intervention to your degree and type of anxiety.

Small amount of anxiety= Breathing intervention 
If you’re feeling a little anxious, try slowing down your breathing on purpose. This looks like taking a deep breath in through the nose for a count of four, drawing your breath in and letting your belly poof out, then pausing (holding your breath for a couple seconds), then very slowly breathing out through your mouth, pretending you’re breathing through a small straw. (This is a basic mindfulness technique.) Breathing works, but only if you do it in the early phases of getting more anxious. You should aim to breathe for at least three minutes in a row. Use a timer.

Negative thoughts making you anxious=Cognitive Restructuring(CR)
In this scenario, you need to use Cognitive Behavior Techniques to help you rewrite your negative thoughts effectively, so that every time a very negative thought creeps up, you can answer it back with a more positive spin. This too takes practice (and likely won’t help if your anxiety has gotten pretty intense.) Here’s a good quick overview of CR on Psychology Today. Here’s a longer Positive Psychology article covering all the ways humans typically self-sabotage with negative thoughts and several steps you can take.

Slightly larger amount of anxiety=Change setting and go for a walk outside
If you’ve tried breathing and your anxiety isn’t budging, and your anxiety isn’t particularly related to any negative thoughts, try taking a break and going for a quick walk around the block. Walking has been proven to improve people’s moods.

Really anxious=Fight or Flight! (You need to move!)
Next time you have a major surge of anxiety, or a panic attack, remove yourself to safety (if you can) and allow your body to be active. Safety might mean a single stall bathroom in your office building, or going outdoors so you can do jumping jacks, run, jump in place, or whatever movement brings you some form of relief. Follow your nervous system! It knows what it needs. If you’re stuck indoors or in a car, at the very least allow your legs to bounce up and down to release your energy. Your body has mobilized to act, so honor your body’s needs, and give it some safe, healthy action, so the nervous system can return to a resting state.

Basically, the nervous system only has four states: Flight, Fight (both part of the Sympathetic Nervous System–and not within our control) or Freeze (Parasympathetic Nervous System, Dorsal Vagal Complex–not within our control) or be Social (Parasympathetic Nervous System, Ventral Vagal Complex–can be influenced somewhat), let’s work with them!

We tell children to go run and play and spend some energy. I don’t know why we don’t say the same to adults. Same body.