Living with anxiety can mute your experience of life. You are living in survival mode -alive but not living. Surviving but not thriving.

Life has lost it's vibrancy. Pleasure from food, sex, relationships is dulled. Your energy is zapped as you focus on getting through each moment without feeling like you are going to melt down, break down or spontaneously combust.

You are energy.

Energy can not always be seen or measured but we know how it makes us feel. You are basically a mass of vibrating cells that is creating, emitting & exchanging the currency of energy. Incredibly only 0.00001% of our cells is matter.

When we feel anxious or are suffering from an anxiety disorder, the flow of our energy has been interrupted & chaos is created. We are no longer 'in flow'. This disruption to the healthy flow energy can create a block within the body & create an environment for disease to exist and develop.

Picture a blockage in a waste pipe and the flow of water cannot pass through to clear the block & you get the idea.

 

To you, this might show up as

 

Anxiety is classed as a mental conditions which means what's going on in your mind is having an effect on your body.

Your thoughts are creating physical sensations in the body. With Anxiety, these thoughts are usually worries or predictions about future events with predicted disastrous outcomes or past trauma. The thought's create an emotion. Emotions are energy in motion. The physically body responds to the emotion by contracting & activating the fight/flight/freeze response.

Unless this emotion is fully & consciously processed, it continues to live inside body.

 

 

Problem is these days, there are many situations in which the arousal for the sympathetic nervous system is activated but fewer opportunities to process & release emotions. 

For example, you have a near miss accident in a car, adrenaline surges through your body but you can’t react in a primal way of fight, flight or freeze, you have to continue your journey and be sedentary until your journey has ended. Most likely you will not have time to stop and process what happened as you carry on with your day & the memory of the event is cleared from your mind so that you can carry on but is now held within the body.

Modern day living tends to cause this effect multiple times throughout the day with work pressure, frantic family life, environmental crises & global health pandemics. The chronic stress day after day builds up & has an accumulative effect.

This overload eventually halts the body in its instinctive fight or flight response, causing the traumatic energy to be stored in the surrounding muscles, organs and connective tissue. Whenever we store trauma in our tissue, our brain disconnects from that part of the body to block the experience, preventing the recall of the traumatic memory. Any area of our body that our brain is disconnected from won’t be able stay healthy or heal itself. The predictable effect of stored trauma is degeneration and disease.

So, you hold onto negative emotions in your cellular memory which can cause physical and psychological distress.

If this goes untreated it's unlikely to disappear. Infact, studies show that some possible long-term effects of anxiety on the body include: heart problems like increase risk of heart disease. autoimmune diseases due to lowered immune system. gastrointestinal disorders including irritable bowel syndrome, depression & PTSD that could possibly lead to suicide.

 

Okay, so you feel stuck. Now what? How do we unblock the pipes & create a healthy flow?

Activation of the stress system is an important component of an organism’s ability to survive challenges to physical safety and maintenance of internal homeostasis and includes activation of endocrine, immune, metabolic, and behavioral systems .

 

Anxiety recovery

Tip 1: Get moving

Anxiety disrupts your body’s natural equilibrium, freezing you in a state of hyperarousal and fear. As well as burning off adrenaline and releasing endorphins, exercise and movement can actually help repair your nervous system by raising the vibration cells, creating energy aka heat that burns it off.

Exercise that is rhythmic and engages both your arms and legs—such as walking, running, swimming, dancing or even roller skating—works best.

Tip 2: Add a mindfulness element. Instead of focusing on your thoughts or distracting yourself while you exercise, really focus on your body and how it feels as you move. Notice the sensation of your feet hitting the ground, for example, or the rhythm of your breathing, or the feeling of wind on your skin. Rock climbing, boxing, weight training, or martial arts can make this easier—after all, you need to focus on your body movements during these activities in order to avoid injury.

 

Tip 3; Have a good cry

Emotional tears flush stress hormones and other toxins out of our system. Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain.

Find a safe & quiet space, allow yourself time & release those tears. Let the body really release with a full body cry, moving the shoulders, shaking the body & even hitting a wall or pillow if it your body wants to express itself more fully.

Think a still glass sitting filled with water- stored emotion. If the glass is gently moved the glass the contents vibrate, if it is tipped over then contents released.

You will feel better afterwards.

So feel free to LET IT GO!

Tip 4; Yoga

The use of pranayama (breathwork), asana (yoga postures) and relaxation are essential to releasing energy blocks and tension from the physical body. To free yourself from holding on to pain & anxiety you must allow your life force or prana to travel freely within your body.

Yoga can help as you are safely moving body, affecting vibrations of cell & influencing energy.

 

As challenging as it may be to trust the process, we cannot separate the mind from the body so it is imperative that we work on both when it comes to complete wellness.

 

Ready to shift your anxiety? Join us inside our online membership in a 7 day free trial with The Holistic Health Circle , a space for you to release anxiety & shine a light on the version of you that is healthy, happy & anxiety free.

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