by Morgan Webert, Holistic Counsellor in Manly
If you’re experiencing anxiety the first thing you need to know is you’re not alone and there are solutions! According to Beyond Blue, anxiety is the most common mental health condition in Australia.
On average, one in four people will experience anxiety at some stage in their life and in a 12-month period, over two million Australians experience anxiety (1).
What is Anxiety?
Everyone to experiences stress and worry in the face of challenging events. Anxiety, however, tends to persist after the challenge or event has passed.
In other words, even after the stress passes the anxious feelings don’t and can occur without any clear or particular reason.
This can mean the nervous system is struggling to regulate and remains over active. And an overactive nervous system makes it hard to cope with the normal stressors of life.
This becomes a feedback loop. The anxious feelings make other small events feel more stressful. This causes more anxiety and further lowers resilience to normal stressors.
It’s not just in your mind, but also in your body.
Anxiety is characterised by an increased arousal in the autonomic nervous system — causing spikes in adrenaline and cortisol, increase in heart rate, breath rate, sleeplessness and physical tension.
An aroused nervous system means your body is on edge and ready to fight or flight.
That’s a great function when we need to actually fight or run, but when we can’t turn the arousal off, anxiety ensues and can feel torturous.
So how do you calm the nervous system and lower arousal?
Below you’ll find a few holistic and natural ways to calm the nervous system, lower arousal and reduce the anxiety response.
Holistic Antidotes to Anxiety:
- Deep Breathing. Deep breaths calm the nervous system and slow down heart rate. Focus on long exhales because each time you exhale the heart rate lowers. You can also slowly count to 3 on the inhale and 3 on the exhale to regulate the rate of your breath.
- Move Your Body. An overactive mind full of rumination and worry goes hand in hand with anxiety and often exacerbates it. Moving the body with exercise, walks, swimming or dancing brings us into the present and calms the nervous system. As a result, the prefrontal cortex gets switched on activating more rational thinking.
- Challenge Your Thoughts & Create Grounding Anchor Statements. Every thought we think produces a chemical reaction in our body. Fearful thoughts produce more the stress hormones, which can increase heart rate, breath rate and the sensations of anxiety.
Create a few anchoring statements that challenge your fearful thinking and help you focus on a perspective that grounds you. This will change your brain and body chemistry to help regulate the nervous system. Some of my favourites are, “This too shall pass.” “Everything is Figureoutable.” “Where there’s a will there is a way.” “I am safe.” “I am supported.” “I’ve got this.”