Your anxiety is in your BODY

I might sound obsessed about the nervous system, but that's for a reason. 

A dysregulated nervous system is the root cause of the majority of ailments and pain. Yes, you heard me right. MAJORITY of them. And anxiety – so common nowadays- is simply another word to describe that dysregulation. 

Let me explain it in the simplest way possible.

The nervous system works with the hormonal system to prepare your body for potential danger. That's a good thing! It's your survival strategy. The HPA axis, a team of one part of the brain and two glands, stimulates you to take action. I'll spare you the names. 

You don't think or imagine danger. You SENSE it. Your senses and the nervous system will pick up signals from the environment to raise the warning. Such as a loud bang that gives you a startle.

Whenever your nervous system detects a real or perceived threat, it triggers a fear reflex. As the name suggests, this is NOT A CONSCIOUS process. Logically analysing whether something is safe would take too much time. When the fear reflex gets triggered, the complex hormonal-neurotransmitter machinery of the HPA axis gets to work. 

Just as a side note, a trigger could be ANYTHING. But that's a topic for another post.

When you sense the danger, you might feel hot, sweat, your heart beats faster, and your blood pressure increases. You breathe faster. Your vision is limited to only what you see in front of you. The digestive system switches off. Digesting your dinner isn't a priority if you might not survive the next few minutes. The same goes for the immune system. Your resilience to bacteria doesn't matter if – according to your nervous system- you could die any second. Sadly, your body doesn't distinguish between sending an important email and running away from a predator.

The effects of the cascade of hormones released into the bloodstream could be momentary. A healthy, resilient nervous system would go through the activation and then deactivate in minutes or hours after the event. But sometimes, the effects of fear response in your body could linger on for years. Causing a long list of diseases.

The immune system goes down when you feel stress response. You might have experienced it yourself. For example, when a cold sore has popped up on your lip just before an important work meeting. Sometimes it’s just the opposite. Your immune system becomes hyper-vigilant, and it considers yourself as a threat. That's how auto-immune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, develop. Any inflammatory disorders (such as IBS or Crohn's) have the same origin.

I didn't know about it when I had asthma attacks. I didn't understand the link between irregular periods and staying 24/7 in the fight-and-flight response. Bah, I didn't know I was constantly in the stress response! But coming out of it wasn't miraculous. Thanks to Yoga which I discovered at the age of 23, I learned to occasionally move to rest and restore mode of the nervous system.

Let me repeat: chronic illness develops because you get stuck in the fight and flight or freeze response. If you want to heal, you HAVE TO come out of the stress response. Any healing is possible only in the rest/digest/connect mode of the nervous system.

It's important to understand that anxiety and fear express and reside in your body. You literally store all your current emotions and memories in your body. This is called somatic memory. You have little chance to talk yourself logically to calmness just because your 'logical' brain doesn't control the HPA axis or the fear reflex.

Simply 'calming yourself down' with slower breaths might not be enough. Often, it could work like a band-aid. It looks like a solution, but it doesn't heal your wound. It's better to let the stress response die out on its own. If you suppress the fear response before the nervous system has a chance to deactivate, the response will get stored in your BODY. And show up, sometime down the line, as chronic pain, acid reflux, or even cancer. 

Forget the word embarrassing. I finally understood it's better to have a good cry after a horrific encounter with the tax office than to walk away with spasms in the stomach or grinding the teeth.

Conclusion? You can't cope with your fear and anxiety by pretending it's not there. Regardless of your coping strategy, they will still affect the body. 

But isn't anxiety the effect of simply worrying too much? - you might still wonder. 

The worrying thoughts act as an amplifier. They constantly stoke the fire of anxiety, keeping your body in the fear reflex response. That's why diving from the level of thoughts into the body and its relation with the environment saves you from the vicious circle of anxiety.

Bad news: you have to stay with discomfort to become more resilient to stress in the long term.

Regulating the nervous system requires befriending your body. You have to stay with the sensations and emotions you used to suppress. It means you need to trust your gut feeling, your intuition. All of that takes time and patience. And requires self-acceptance.

Life of a Somatic Yoga teacher might sound very peaceful but in the past year I had ample opportunities to test the techniques I teach. I moved to a new country and started expanding my online business. I had so many first-times and f**-ups that I can't keep track. But my body is well, and my sleep is sound. And my only meltdown was that 10-minute long sobbing scene in front of the stone-faced guards at the Barcelona tax office. Clearly, that was what I needed!