SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
updated 5/31/11
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?
People aren’t good at calming down. People usually try to outsmart their anxieties, and it doesn’t work.
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”?
Many anxious people do not think of themselves as anxious. Anxiety can be “sneaky” — indeed, it’s a common human pattern to contain, control, hide and cope with our symptoms of anxiety — to hide them from others and from ourselves by minimizing and embodying their expression.
It’s actually unusual for the average anxious person to be obviously anxious. When people dismiss anxiety as a factor in their health, it’s because they don’t think of themselves as a “nervous person.” And you might not be. But you may well still suffer from anxiety.
Obvious or not, anxiety always involves a distinctive set of changes in your mind and body. Adrenalin and cortisol — the stress hormones — flow too freely and for too long, of course, with many adverse effects.
Your sense of self and your vitality and attention typically 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.” The head becomes relatively busy, as your brain switches to spin cycle and the eyes and ears scan more vigilantly for dangers — most of them imaginary.
We use muscular tension, stillness, and a lack of breath — like a rabbit freezing to avoid predator detection — to try to manage the churning and sinking sensations in the belly that come with worry.
These processes are so physical and habitual that they are 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?
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 positions it is difficult to keep your worry. For instance, it is almost impossible to worry intensely if you adopt a confident posture, draw your attention downward into your trunk, and restore vitality and movement and breath to the belly. This is called “grounding.”
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.
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.
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 grounding 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?
Todd Hargove of Better Movement:
It is usually quite obvious to people that changing their thoughts might be a good way to change their mood. For example, people might try to combat sadness or depression by “thinking happy thoughts.” Another possible approach would be to “move happy moves.”
“Move happy moves.” What a fun phrase. What fun advice.
In that article, Todd describes good new scientific evidence that adopting a confident posture has a direct impact on your mental state. So, when you are anxious or depressed, combat it instantly and effectively simply by standing like a master and commander. Do it like a drama class exercise: make it big and silly, have fun with it. (Subtle is good, too — depending on the circumstances.)
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.
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 great examples of efficient grounding exercises from qigong include:
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.
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:
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.)
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.
