Fear comes in many forms, ranging from normal nervousness about a tough decision, college exam, or sporting event; to excessive personal worry and paranoia related to someone’s opinion of us; to vigilant concern about real or perceived social threats; to a paralyzing inability to leave the comfort zone of home. All forms of anxiety that bring people to therapy for treatment are causing some amount of physical, social, and emotional distress, and to some extent negatively impacting health, work, and relationships.
It’s tempting to try to approach anxiety with rational self-talk, e.g., “Why am I anxious? Where is this coming from? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine. I’ve got to stop worrying! I’ve got to calm down!” But when anxiety is questioned or challenged while it’s on the rise, it intensifies. It’s also common to bring attention to the breath as a means to diffuse anxiety, but unless you are already well trained in breath work, deepening or lengthening the breath when anxious can lead to light-headedness and again, intensified anxiety.
Well-meaning mental and physical attempts to “hurry up and calm down” while experiencing shortness or shallowness of breath, racing thoughts, increased heart rate, sweating, and/or dizziness will only exacerbate those symptoms. For highly anxious people there is, for all intents and purposes, a bear in the room, and convincing oneself to calm down when there’s a real or perceived bear in the room doesn’t make very much sense given the hard-wired evolutionary drive to survive!
With devoted time, training, and practice, the anxious person can learn to relax the body before the hyper thinking mind of survival gets too tight a grip on the situation and makes things worse. The anxious mind will right itself when given the container of a calm body, becoming rational and able to discover for itself that there is likely no bear in the room. There may be a very hard situation to face, but the personal discovery that there is no imminent danger to fight or flee or freeze in response to is crucial. With that discovery, constructive thinking, discussion, and insight can occur around what’s causing the anxiety, i.e., the perceived bear of difficulty that can and must be met and navigated.
Self-regulation is a well known approach to calming one's body at the earliest signs of anxiety so that one's mind can stay accurately attuned and open to present experience. With courageous presence of body and mind in difficult situations, rather than attempts to control or suppress the uncomfortable aspects of fear, one can navigate any present moment. I’ve developed a simple 90-second self-regulation practice that clients find effective at mitigating anxiety, making it workable and even useful, on the spot. As self-regulation is mastered, courage, reason, and confidence displace reactivity. The results: a more relaxed body, a more patient mind, and more skillful interactions with others.