Natural Anti Anxiety
The Paradox of Curing Anxiety
The conversation I have more than any other in my practice is about the anxious feelings people experience: the causes of it, the reasons it has, and remedies for it, or what I would call natural anti anxiety. In a world where information is more prevalent than ever before, we look outside for answers that are often within. In an age where we have begun to release attachments to shame around human sexuality and claim the intrinsic worth of individuals over institutions, we find ourselves swimming in the sea of new, exciting but uncertain territories and navigating freedoms not yet supported by strengths. For these reasons, and - as I’ll share a little further down - because of anxious emotions’ unique and important purpose for us as healthy thriving people, we are experiencing and talking about anxiety more than ever before.
The thing is, anxious feelings are a natural part of being a human – just as natural as the feelings of happiness, hurt, or anger. And all feelings are feedback loops in the body – reinforcing positive choices as interpreted by the nervous system and the awareness, or giving us the negative feedback needed to move automatically away from what could be harmful to us. Fear helps us shrink away from danger. Anger causes us to rise up to protect, attack, or defend. Pain and sadness cause us to retreat within, pull back, conserve, repair, and restore. And anxious feelings draw attention to dissonance – external and internal.
Anxious feelings - just like pain - are completely natural under certain conditions, and they share a lot of the characteristics of pain. On the spectrum of emotion, anxiousness is:
- an internal, partly subjective, unpleasant feeling which can sometimes produce visible or objective (measurable) effects in the person,
- caused by sometimes unconscious causes,
- striving to effect a positive response within the system, or to spur adjustments to the environment or behaviors
- by communicating a message through the body.
Yes there is diagnosed Anxiety; I call it anxiety with a big “A” to distinguish it from the mere feeling of anxiousness (kind of like being manic is different from being happy). Anxious experiences which can – and should – be diagnosed by a medical doctor (such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, and phobias) are severe manifestations of a natural physical phenomenon in the body. But for a lot of people, the daily experience of anxiety can be mild, variable, affectable, and contextual, albeit challenging. Many people I’ve met and worked with experience anxious feelings not in digital, but in analog… By this I mean these feelings can seem more like a fader control that’s adjustable and fluctuates than it is like a switch, on and off. In these cases, natural anti anxiety remedies are all a person is looking for.
The context and severity of anxious feelings can actually tell us a lot about the specific purpose or intention of the negative feelings being both created by and sensed by the body, but again, I’ll get to this later.
Besides the subjective negative experience someone has “feeling” anxiety, there are a lot of other reasons we want to curb recurring or persistent anxiousness. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a world renowned developmental biologist and author, and early observer of the science of epigenetics, illuminates the effects that negative emotions have at the cellular level which ripple through the entire organism. In my words: Our cells and our bodies can’t be in growth functions and protection functions at the same time; when under stress, the body pays a price in growth. In his words:
“By necessity, a system in growth is “open” to the environment in order to assimilate those elements that support its vitality and development. In contrast, systems in protection are “closed” to wall-off a toxic or threatening environment. Since an organism cannot be open and closed at the same time, it means it cannot be in growth and protection at the same time.” See his blog, “Think Beyond Your Genes”.
In his book The Biology of Belief, Dr. Lipton explains that the determinant of a cell’s growth/protection states is the perception mechanism of the cell. At the organism level, when we as well experience stress or fear (which is in many cases subjective to the individual’s interpretation), we put our entire hormone-producing system into stress! The long term physiological effects of being in chronic negative emotions such as fear, stress, or anxiety are illness, disease, and decay. As he shares in the same blog, according to the American Psychological Association, between 75 to 90% of all doctor office visits are directly due to stress. The effect of stress on physical health is prolifically documented in current scientific and medical literature.
Finally, another reason I find that I field questions about anxious feelings and natural anti anxiety so often, and why I am so passionate about the topic, is because of the profound amount of misinformation that exists that little “a” anxiety (or anxious feelings) is without purpose, and unresolvable. People want it gone, and yet don’t believe it can really be healed, but rather is something which will at best, be managed forever. I call this the Paradox of Misinformation about anxiety, and here’s why:
Not only CAN anxious feelings be resolved, the very reason they exist (their purpose) is to bring resolution to their causes. We’re just not hearing the frequencies they’re communicating in, or speaking their language.
When we deem something has no value, we discard it. In the case of anxiety, little “a”, it has intrinsic value as it’s a feedback loop in the body bearing vital information. As touched on above, that’s why it’s unpleasant: to bring our attention to unconscious problems or issues. And it’s why anxious feelings don’t let up until the unconscious causes are resolved – they’re trying to protect us from threat of danger. Anxious feelings are bearing information about something that needs to change within the self or the environment in order for perceived threats to be neutralized, in order for us to slip back into healthy “growth” states of being. When we ignore these messenger feelings, problems get worse, not better.
Everything happening “automatically” in the body (which is really to say, whatever our body has automated for us) has an intended benefit to the organism. In some way that task or function has been associated with survival. Everything your body has automated for you has been relegated to the control of your subconscious mind and/or autonomic nervous system. Things like heart rate, blood flow, hormone excretion – they don’t get signed off on by your conscious mind before happening, and we don’t automate functions of destruction unless they’ve been interpreted as useful, important, or vital to the body.
So here’s the thing, anxiety might be the only clue you have about “what the problem is” that’s causing the anxiousness. You can decide it doesn’t matter, but the body won’t let us forget if we’ve ignored something important.
The anxiousness is the little green sapling emerging from the frozen ground, letting you know there was a seed down there. Follow the sapling down and you’ll find the roots, because they’re connected to each other! One causes the other. In this analogy, the seed is usually an opportunity for growth, change, expansion, or greater happiness, but because we start out being unaware of the what the cause is, and it feels unpleasant, most people fear it, fight it, and want to make it stop.
You might say, “Mandy, I don’t care if there’s a seed in the ground or not.” Or you might be thinking, “My life is just fine, I don’t need change, growth, or greater happiness, so I’d really just like ignore this, numb it, or shut it up so I can go back to what I was doing.” And you may be right, but another part of you disagrees! And whether you need a change, or whether you just need to bring a confused part of yourself back into accord with the rest of the machine of you that’s all working perfectly well, the resolution approach when it comes to natural anti anxiety is still the same:
Hear, understand, and acknowledge the message that the feeling is trying to communicate to you.
With subconscious information, we listen by using the language of your subconscious itself: in a word, imagery.
By this point, you might be starting to notice that our seeking for a natural anti anxiety remedy is more a misnomer than anything. Understanding the nature and purpose of feelings can allow us to make peace with the emotions that are created by us, for us, to hear, heed and take action. A response that’s tremendously more helpful than ignoring unpleasant feelings, and that we can do right away with this understanding, would be to receive the information of the feeling and explore it with curiosity briefly, recognizing that a feeling will arise and subside, but that it’s inherently fluid and transient. The longer we resist emotions such as sadness, frustration, and anxiousness, they can and usually will snowball into more extreme negative experiences, because unattended problems grow.
No one out there is going to come in and rescue you from the feeling of anxiousness, and for me personally, it’s the best news I ever received. We can mask it, fight it, analyze it, plea with it, ignore it, cope with it, the list goes on, but these efforts only kick the can of your comfort down the road. This is because it isn’t unnatural, or a disorder to feel anxiety – it’s completely natural and important. Knowing this empowers us to respond to anxiousness with equanimity, dignity, and respect skillfully by listening within, and enables us to return to a natural resting state of peace, happiness, and harmony within our own bodies.
Let’s talk some specifics now. Anxious feelings’ purpose is to bring attention to the need for harmony where there is dissonance, and how I think of it, this dissonance can take two forms:
- one or multiple conflicts between internal beliefs or needs,
- or conflict between our inner world and our outer choices or environment.
I’ve found that the inner conflicts causing folks anxiety are mostly unconscious, whereas the dissonance between inner and outer worlds can be known or unknown. In the case of the latter, the realities of inner and outer might all be known, but the dissonance itself is what is unconscious. The unconscious nature of its cause is truly one of the greatest problems with anxiety. I’ll explain.
With other negative emotions (such as sadness, anger, fear), causes can be more obvious, and we can either let the emotion pass through us and simply subside, or do something to change/relieve the situation. Likewise, with pain, when we know the cause, we can usually create some comfort or relief. When the cause of pain is unknown however, the pain remains, and its intensity can be amplified by the mind though worry and fixation.
Similarly with anxiety, the not knowing keeps us seeking to know… If we knew the causes, we’d be quick to choose a new strategy, make a new decision, release the pressure value. But when we use conscious processes like logic to try and find and resolve unconscious problems, it simply doesn’t work. The cause of anxiety is not known to our conscious minds – not available to our conscious minds to choose better, so until we find the way to hear the subtle language and message, the anxiety remains.
Consequently, for anyone seeking natural anti anxiety relief, one of the most natural methods imaginable is to simply make the unconscious conscious is by listening in the language of the subconscious! As touched on briefly above, imagery is to the subconscious what verbal language, logic and math are to the conscious mind. It’s actually one of our first capabilities as humans to perceive imagery; it’s innate to each of us from the earliest stages of mental and cognitive development.
How may you access imagery? By simply relaxing your critical mind and letting analysis take a rest, you will already be accessing subtle subconscious information. Everyone receives it slightly differently, so I want to give you a bit of information, and tell you here’s how you’ll recognize it:
There may be imagery such as internal images or pictures. These can also be more like movies than pictures, and/or be accompanied by sounds or feelings. Emotion is subconscious information as well. Body sensations can present (weight, pressure, warmth, tingling, awareness, energy, etc). Memories and inner dialogues are all subconscious information, too. How do you interpret them? Well, for starters, DON’T! Just listen.
Subconscious information presents itself to us easily when we create space for it – filling up the awareness as soon as more conscious, critical faculties are resting, just as spontaneously as dreams come in sleep. By intentionally accessing waking relaxation of critical thought (altered state of consciousness, non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC), trance, hypnosis, alpha brain waves, all names for the same thing), we can listen to, perceive and become aware of subconscious information at any time.
That’s why doing transformative imagery work in hypnosis for anxiety , working in NOSC, doing breathwork, and other somatic practices are so effective in releasing anxiety – we access the state of awareness where emotion resides. You have to make contact with something before you can change it. In this way we can discover it’s positive intention for us, receive the information, process the feelings and release the anxious impulses – for good. It’s not complex, lengthy, difficult, or esoteric. Hopefully by now you are starting to get a sense of why this matters when it comes to releasing anxious feelings for good.
“But what does the information I get mean, Mandy? What do I do with it? How do I make the anxiety stop!” This is where I’m going to invite you to slow down a littl Take a couple deep breaths, and relax into the fact that trying to fix things and steer with information you might be receiving for the first time in your life is part of the problem! The first step – the first FEW steps actually – is just going to entail listening, sitting with, and sending acceptance to whatever comes up for you. Think of it like getting the lay of the land, taking the temperature, or learning the ropes of connecting with your own subconscious. What’s contained within your subconscious determines and creates your reactions and reflexes, including the anxiousness you’re working with. So get comfortable with the discovery process because no one can do this listening work but you.
Another natural anti anxiety method to making the unconscious cause conscious is to do some reflection about what the experience of anxiety is keeping you from, and what logic it has. Doing some open ended journaling around the topic could be another means of discovery (my recommendation, start with 3x high quality 10-min sessions of resting self judgment, saving analysis for later, and putting pen to paper). My guess is that you’ll learn something.
These assignments are some of the very ones that I give to my 1:1 clients, and they create beautiful shifts without taking tons of time. My hope is that by understanding more about the nature of anxiety and its own mechanisms, you can use the same mechanisms to flip an unpleasant experience on its head and claim the fulfillment of the life that’s waiting on you.