Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal, albeit a not-so-pleasant part of life when experienced in excess and when it knocks our life out of balance. Anxiety does affect all of us in different ways and at different times in our lives. You are not alone, even though your symptoms may feel isolating and you may feel lonely as a result.

Stress is something that we also all experience, but unlike anxiety, stress will come and go as the external triggers creating the stress change; an ebb and flow effect. Sometimes stress becomes too much and we experience overwhelm and a sense of being unable to cope. Anxiety is much more pervasive and persists even after the stressors are adjusted or removed. Anxiety feels crippling and we tend to feel impacted in most, if not all areas of our lives and can sometimes feel like we can’t remember a time we weren’t feeling this way.

Anxiety can make you imagine that things in your life are much worse than how they really are. Often you may think you’re going mad, or that something is very wrong with you. The feelings that arise can feel terrifying and they can increase the anxiety and the negative cycle or feedback loop continues. It is important to remind yourself that your feelings are scary, but normal and that they are there as a physiological survival function that has existed in earliest man.

The symptoms you feel are a sort of ‘internal alarm system’ designed to protect you from the dangers surrounding you, however most times these dangers are not real threats and instead have become hypervigilant responses. Our alarm system has become over sensitive to perceived danger and that can feel very frightening.

This alarm system makes you feel hyper-alert by giving you a massive boost of adrenaline and other stress hormones and chemical messengers that increase the heart rate and the amount of oxygen going to your limbs to enable you to be better able to fight or flee from the perceived danger. The rapid shallow hyperventilating breathing that may feel out-of-your-control is there to oxygenate your limbs, get you moving away from the danger fast, or, fuel you to fight hard. All these bodily felt responses you feel happening are being triggered by the lowest part of your brain called an ‘Amygdala’  – this is what activates this “fight or flight or freeze, flop or fawn” response. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) response.

You may feel yourself becoming anxious as the body prepares it’s primal systems to start to respond and triggers the alarm system, you may feel the initial sensations as “butterflies in the stomach”, tingling, a tightness, or sense that all is not well, these are all sensations that many associate with anxiety.

Some people feel nausea, dizziness, light-headedness and a feeling of floating off. All of these are bodily felt responses to Anxiety.

Although all these symptoms and responses are frightening and very distressing to you there are interventions we can work through to help you to manage your symptoms and to explore in depth, if you choose what the anxiety is about and what it means for you.