updated 6/09/09

Help for Anxiety

Anxiety doesn’t respond to logic and reason, so what does it respond to?

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE

Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

Often my clients and I start out working on back pain, and we end up talking about anxieties and self-doubts. It begins with an observation like this: “I hold a lot of tension in my back” or “This is always the worst when I’m under a lot of stress.” Anxiety is a root cause for an awful lot of back pain. It’s also just an annoying feature of the human condition. What can we do about it?

You can’t outsmart anxiety

People aren’t good at calming down. People usually try to outsmart their anxieties, and it doesn’t work.

We tell ourselves to “get over it,” and that really doesn’t work.
We apply logic and reason, telling ourselves that it doesn’t make sense to be so anxious, and that doesn’t work either.
We seek out the logic and reason of others, of friends with perspective and experts with authority, and that usually doesn’t work. We still worry, we still feel jittery.
We try to distract ourselves, and sometimes that sort of works — but only temporarily.
We try to sweat it out, and that may be the best solution that many people use. But can still be unsatisfying. It takes a good chunk of time and energy, and it doesn’t always work either.

Episodes of anxiety are an almost universal human problem. There are many flavours of it and triggers that start it, and the severity ranges from mild to life-threatening, but nearly everyone gets them. And, by nature, you just can’t think your way out of anxiety. It’s like telling a depressed person to “think positively” — if they could do that, they wouldn’t be depressed.

Thinking is generally what gets us anxious in the first place. You can’t fight fire with fire. Why not? Why are anxiety and worry so difficult to “get over”?

Anxiety has a physiological signature

Anxiety almost always involves a distinctive set of changes in your mind and body.

Namely, your sense of self and your vitality and attention shift upwards and away from the body in general and into the head. When you are stressed out and worrying hard, you are probably “in your head,” as opposed to being “in your body” or “comfortable in your skin.”

When you are anxious, you are “in your head”

Also, we use muscular tension, stillness and a lack of breath to try to control, contain or suppress the churning and sinking sensations in the belly that come with worry. The head becomes relatively busy, as your brain switches to spin cycle and the eyes and ears scan for danger.

This process is so physical and habitual that it is difficult or impossible to interrupt by force of will. Once it starts, most of us are doomed to a few hours of whirling thoughts, and the physical consequences: back pain or neck pain, a throbbing headache, or insomnia1 are all common embodiments of stress.

So what can you do?

Make it more difficult to worry

You cure anxiety by making it very difficult to remain anxious.

In practicing the martial art of aikido, you don’t throw a person with brute force, or even with clever leveraging (as in Judo) — you simply position yourself in such a way that your practice partner finds it difficult to keep his balance.

Similarly, in some position it is difficult to keep your worry. For instance, it is almost impossible to worry intensely if you draw your attention downwards, into the body, and restore vitality and movement and breath to the belly. This is called “grounding,” and it is concept that is well known throughout Asia, and to many Westerners as well.

A lack of grounding is the mind-body pattern at the heart of all anxiety. You can never “get over” anxiety without some kind of grounding.

Once you are grounded, you won’t necessarily stop worrying — however, it will be harder to worry, and logic and reason might start to have some influence again. Many other responses to anxiety become easier. Once you are grounded, then you have a shot at outsmarting your anxiety.

But you have to get grounded first.

Efficient grounding when it counts

Well-chosen, specific grounding exercises can be done in two minutes in the office washroom, right after that incredibly irritating meeting with your boss.

They can be done quickly in the middle of the night when you have insomnia and don’t have the will to do anything challenging. You don’t have to get up for an hour and do yoga, or run up and down the apartment building stairs.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know that grounding exercises can be this quick and relevant to a crisis — assuming they know what grounding is in the first place!

Grounding is associated with all those flaky eastern spiritual disciplines and calisthenics: yoga, taiqi, qigong, meditation and so on. Most people treat these things as slow and preventative medicine for stress, instead of a source of efficient and curative responses to episodes of anxiety.

Grounding exercises can be quick and relevant to a crisis

Even people who are devoted practitioners in the preventative spirit will get paralyzed when anxiety strikes, forgetting everything they ever learned about yoga. It’s easy enough to do calming and grounding exercises when you are already calm. The challenge is doing them when you are not!

To cure anxiety, you need to do efficient groundings exercises as a direct response to anxiety. An hour of yoga is not efficient. Neither is a run on the sea wall, or a game of squash, or sitting meditation.

What is?

The abdominal lift

Yoga, taiqi, qigong, meditation are all full of exercises that can be done individually with great effect, if one has a clear, specific goal such as “efficient grounding when freaked out.” Here is the single best example, in my opinion, effective for most people, most of the time:

The abdominal lift is a classic yogic exercise, best known as a longevity exercise for its stimulating effect on the internal organs. It is also a powerful abdominal strengthener (including the rarely exercised transversus abdominis), is vital for mastering many breathing techniques, and makes all other breathing exercises easier.

Stand with your upper body supported on your knees.
Take at least three, oxygenating deep breaths to prepare yourself for the first lift.
When you feel you have oxygenated sufficiently, blow all of your air out. Completely flush your lungs, and then hold your breath.
Suck your belly in hard against your spine. Particularly focus on your low belly, below the navel. Hold the position and your breath for several seconds (go as long as you can), and then relax the belly — before breathing again (if you try to breath first and then relax, it can hurt a bit).
Resume breathing.

One abdominal lift takes about one minute, and three of them is a good dose of grounding, although I recommend five for tough cases.

After an abdominal lift, the physiological pattern of anxiety has not just been disturbed but reversed, and now you are ready to “get over it.”

Other examples

Other great examples efficient grounding exercises from qigong include:

Lightning bolts: Leap into the air with a big breath, and as you come crashing and stamping down, blow out hard and flick your arms and hands straight downwards, as though throwing lightning bolts into the ground. Ten of these, followed by some stillness, is wonderfully grounding.
Crane Spreads Wings: Stand with your feet together, hands folded across your chest, hunched over. Breathe in and “spread your wings” — not just spreading your arms, but leaning back a little as well, opening way up, chin high, a strong line of tension through the chest and the belly. Close up again. Repeat several times.

And it’s not just the eastern spiritual disciplines that can be mined for useful grounding exercises. The anxiety pattern can also be broken by exercises drawn from many western traditions, such as Reichian body work or cognitive therapy. Here are two more examples:

Mental Propaganga: Worrying is a mental rut. Cognitive therapy suggests building new pathways with specific, deliberate mental alternatives. Write down a positive set of thoughts that are a specific alternative to the worrying pattern. Read them out loud in your head five times. (Why is this a grounding exercise? Because your mind and body are one system. It doesn’t matter whether you change the anxiety pattern in the head or the body first, just so long as you change it.)
Round Breathing: Twenty-five fast, deep clear breaths, without pausing at the top or the bottom, can ground you more completely — bring you back into your body — than most people will feel after any amount of meditation. This is hyperventaliation, yes, and you may feel dizzy and that’s fine. For much more information, see The Art of Bioenergetic Breathing.

The examples I’ve offered you here are the tip of the iceberg, but you now possess the essential principles: anything you can come up with that interferes with the mental and physical patterns of anxiety will make it difficult to stay there.

Notes

Knutson et al. Archives of Internal Medicine. 2009. Reduced sleep duration and quality are associated with elevated blood pressure, according to researchers with the CARDIA study. They used wrist activity monitors to monitor associations between sleep behaviors and BP among more than 500 adults in their 30s and 40s, finding that shorter sleep duration and poorer sleep maintenance were each associated with increased systolic and diastolic BP. The authors say the sleep-BP link is supported by previous research and “laboratory evidence of increased sympathetic nervous activity as a likely mechanism underlying the increase in BP after sleep loss.” Return to text.