Services Anxiety
Our Approach
Nature of Anxiety
Do you feel stressed and unsettled in ways that make it impossible to relax or focus? Or maybe you understand that anxiety interferes with your life, but you don’t know how to control it. You realize your fears are not rational, but they feel true and you don’t understand what to do. Perhaps you feel restless or “edginess” or somehow keyed up in a way that generally feels like it works against you. Maybe you sometimes feel irritable or easily get angry in ways that others find confusing. Or you end up tossing and turning in bed with worried thoughts you can’t get out of your head.
Anxiety can be disabling and destructive in ways that it interferes with a person’s sense of satisfaction and regulation. There often rippling effects on a person’s self-esteem, sense of control, and ability to perform on specific tasks that they have been proficient in or have mastered. Anxiety also can affect a person’s ability to relate or connect to others. The nature of anxiety often creates a negative loop where the person feels anxiety that interferes with performance which in turn creates a sense of shame or inadequacy.
Recovering from anxiety
Learning how to tune into your body can be a method of opening doors into your mind-body experience. By checking in with your body when you feel tension, it begins to offer new information beyond the conscious mind and therefore gives different and new understanding. This mind-body awareness can be informative in how we use mindfulness. People also find it useful to understand their triggers and gradually move from understanding what gave them a shock of stress after-the-fact to learning how to anticipate triggers to either avoid those triggers or learn the nature and meaning of the triggers.
Sometimes those triggers we find unbearable or matters we cannot tolerate need to be understood more clearly as to how they relate to our beliefs or feelings about any particular matter. At times people find their beliefs are developed to control the world and realize that instead of controlling the matter, the matter is somehow controlling us. Learning a tool of deeper acceptance or radical acceptance begins to change our experience.
It can also help to understand the origins of the anxiety that may or may not be related to earlier trauma. In either case, it is important to develop kindness and compassion towards ourselves in ways that may go contrary to what we learned earlier in life that we have to be hard on ourselves.
For some people, anxiety can bring about the need to control or judge one’s self or others. At times people see others withdrawing in ways that bring up more anxiety and shame that develops into a painful cycle. Understanding the internal experience of anxiety that results in control can lead to changes if the person recognizes the need for self-compassion.
Each of these approaches has important strengths for different reasons because they work for many people experiencing anxiety but none of them work for each person seeking relief. Using breathing and awareness to help slow down and calm the built-up anxiety is my primary approach. This requires some time to develop the mind-body attunement that allows for the body to learn to relax. This approach involves a belief that when we resist the struggle we are increasing our suffering and when we accept our struggle we decrease our suffering and anxiety.