“A calm body creates a calm mind”- Gayatri Devi
I once read a story about a woman who adopted a stray dog that she found wandering the highway. He was a sweet mutt, good with kids, well-behaved, and he didn’t make messes in the house.
The only downside was that every time they got into the car, he would get worked up into a tizzy. He would run back and forth in the back seat, frantically panting and whining with anxiety. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he would then throw up all over the back seat. This happened every time they got into the car.
You can imagine the dog owner was about at her wits’ end. In desperation, she decided to take the dog to a trainer and ask for help. The trainer taught the woman to teach the dog to be calm by having the dog lay down in the car. She explained that when the dog’s body is in a calm position, it sends messages to the brain that he is safe and triggers him to relax.
The woman started working with the dog every day, putting him in the car, gently making him lay down, and before long he stopped throwing up in her car. Problem solved!
In previous sections in this course, we learned that our emotional reactions are much deeper than our thoughts. They show up in the body and are powered by the fight/flight/freeze response in our limbic system.
Now we are going to talk about how to soothe anxiety in your nervous system through the skill of self-regulation. Basically, this means calming down your nervous system and creating the physiological response of feeling safe when we are actually safe.
Is it possible to have an anxiety disorder or PTSD if your body is calm? I’ve worked with many professional trauma educators who say that you cannot have PTSD or anxiety disorders in a relaxed body.
Anxiety and PTSD are the outward symptoms of having your nervous system stuck in high alert, when your amygdala is sending the message that you’re in danger and triggering that fight/flight/freeze response. This is why anxiety is something you feel in your stomach and PTSD locks you into hypervigilance, jumping at the slightest threat — because your nervous system is stuck in that sympathetic response.
People often feel helpless to change their stress response, and it can feel impossible because this FFF response is an autonomic reaction. However, we have more influence than we realize.
For example, when stressed, our muscles get tense without us consciously thinking about it. However, we can control our muscles when we think about it. Another example is when we feel nervous, our breathing gets shorter and shallower. But if we consciously take a deep breath, we can slow down our breathing. These are two autonomic reactions that we can influence.
We can change how stressed our body feels by doing simple techniques. The coolest thing about this is that not only does your brain send messages to your body about whether to be stressed or calm, but your body also sends messages to your brain about whether to be stressed or calm. So when we choose to breathe deeply or slowly, we choose to turn on that parasympathetic response which fosters calm.
In this section I’m going to teach you a half dozen ways to regulate your nervous system and turn on that parasympathetic response. When you practice this, you can transform your nervous system from being dominated by the stress response to being dominated by the rest-and-digest response.
“I would just like to thank you for your amazing content and online courses. Thanks to your help I am no longer homebound by crippling panic and anxiety. I went out today into a busy town and was happy, I feel safe and liberated. I have shared all my progress with my doctor and she is ecstatic about my progress and will be recommending your courses to other patients struggling with mental health. I am medication free and happy for the first time in my life. The changes are long lasting and I now can get myself out of a low without going further down the rabbit hole.”
When you slow it down, that takes us to the next set of skills, which is calming your bodily anxiety during an anxiety attack.
Anxiety isn’t just in your head; it’s in your body. And when you’re super upset, your body is the key to resolving anxiety. So let’s do something with your senses.
There are a lot of options here, but the goal is to get back into your body in a slow way to reconnect with your body. So I’m going to give you a bunch of options. Here are a couple you can try to find out which ones work for you.
Now, in this post I’m just going to very briefly mention these skills, but you can learn them in depth with my free course Grounding Skills for Stress and Anxiety, where I teach about 20 ways to turn on the body’s calming parasympathetic response and reduce stress and soothe anxiety. So if you want to learn more about that, check out the link in the description.
So back to grounding with our senses.
You could try washing your face or hands in cold water. This triggers the dive reflex, where your body slows its heart rate and breathing as if to conserve energy while underwater. You could also try to hold an ice cube or use a cold washcloth on your forehead or neck. You could also try washing your hands or face in really hot water.
So as I give you a bunch of these tools to calm your body, you don’t have to do them all. It’s just about trying them and finding what works for you.
Next thing you could try is patting your legs bilaterally. So that means one and then the other. This can help you get back into your senses. Literally, your sensations in your body can send a message to your brain that you are safe. Your body has a built-in anti-anxiety response when you show it that you’re actually safe, and it’ll kick in. This is the parasympathetic response.
The next skill is tapping. This is also known as the emotional freedom technique. So you gently tap seven times in each of these areas: forehead, upper lip, chin, throat, right under your arm, and on your palm.
Next thing you could try is going for a walk. It’s helpful if you can do this outside, but if not, any kind of movement may help you clear your mind. And if you can get outside, that sensory experience of cold or hot air, of fresh air, of different smells, that can help your body reset too.
You can try a self-hug, just kind of squeezing yourself gently. And try deep breathing, which is slow breaths in through the nose and out through the nose.
You can make sure that when you’re breathing, you’re breathing with your belly. So you can put your hand on your stomach and make sure it moves up and down as you breathe in and out.
You can also try slow breathing — breathing in for five seconds and out for five seconds.
You can try yawning.
You can try any taste or smell, like an essential oil or a breath mint or a warhead, which is a really sour candy. Another thing about sour candies is that they release the saliva in your mouth, and when that saliva releases, that’s also a parasympathetic response.
Another thing you could try is leaning into what you’re feeling and exaggerating the sensations you’re having. So for example, if you’re feeling jittery legs, jiggle your legs extra hard for a minute. Let yourself lean into that feeling.
You could try stretching. Just stretch out all of your muscles. That can help you come back to your senses. And so can grounding with the five senses. This is a pretty well-known exercise where you name five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.
You can also try progressive muscle relaxation. This is a systematic way to tense and relax muscle groups to gain this conscious ability to relax.
And remind yourself that you are safe, that you can handle having feelings. Remind yourself that you’re not in any physical danger at this moment.
Now, if you are in physical danger, you should leave or take some action to escape. But if not, use some positive self-talk. Say, “This feeling will pass.” Or you could say, “This emotion is uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous. I can get through this.” Or you can say, “This is anxiety. It’s not a heart attack.”
It also helps to challenge negative thinking, black-and-white thinking or catastrophizing. You’re not allowed to say, “Everything is awful.” You’re not allowed to say that everything is terrible or hopeless or helpless or horrible.
You are allowed to acknowledge the things that are difficult. You can describe your emotions or your situation. But don’t label it as bad or terrible or awful.
Now, again, if calming yourself down doesn’t work, or if it makes you feel worse, then you need to try the roll-with-it method, where you completely drop the struggle against emotions. You lean in and you say, “Bring it on, anxiety. Bring it on, panic. You can’t hurt me,” and you let the anxiety flow and move on.
And you can learn more about this technique in my other videos.
