This month Six Seconds EQ Café’s have focused on Unwinding Anxiety. If like me, you are on the journey of noticing your feelings and paying attention to their messages it can be helpful to have a quick reference guide or cheat sheet when anxiety starts to take hold. This article contains my personal go-to strategies I put into action the second I notice that growing sensation of “bodily disquiet, a sense that something is wrong” creeping up on me (Sarah Peyton, 2021). If I can catch my anxiety before it develops into what Brene Brown (2021) describes as a feeling of “escalating loss of control, worst case scenario thinking” then I am better placed to attend to what the anxiety is drawing my attention to in a calmer and more balanced way. Here are the basics I return to again and again. Having these strategies at my fingertips means I’m prepared in advance with techniques to lower my anxiety when it appears. The Basics Slow Down, Breathe, Ground Yourself
Name It to Tame It Giving language to experience calms our brains. The clearer we can be with ourselves about what is upsetting us, the emotion we are feeling the calmer we will feel. This may sound overly simple to be helpful but the proof as they say is in the pudding. This strategy is backed up by Neuroscience. At the end of the day, you will only know if it works if you start to practice this naming of your emotional experience in your everyday life. Naming it with precision is important In the naming of your emotional experience, precision is important. The magic happens when you can precisely name the emotion you are experiencing. When you get the precise name right, it soothes and regulates the emotional alarm you are feeling, and your body will begin to relax (Sarah Petyon). I have found that it takes practice to get the precision right. And I know it immediately when I hit on just the right word, I can feel the relaxation wash over me. Like most things, it takes practice. So even if you can’t quite land on the right word for the emotions you are experiencing, rest assured that “merely looking for them is useful because it creates distance and perspective” (Hillary Jacobs Hendel). Noticing body sensations to feel calmer and more balanced When our body’s sensations are within our awareness, our brains have an easier time sorting things out and tapping into the biological wisdom they contain that communicates what’s important to us and to those around us. As we do this, we begin to “feel calmer and more balanced and our courage and self-confidence grow” (Hillary Jacobs Hendel). Important Reminders
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“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” “A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.” “Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.” “One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.” “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” |
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.” “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.” “Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.” |
"If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is the door.” “Within us is the potential to be fleshed out again as the creature we once were. Within us are the bones to change ourselves and our world. Within us is the breath and our truths and our longings – together they are the song, the creation hymn we have been yearning to sing.” “I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” |
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