Anxiety In Your Body

You need to know how Anxiety works inside your own body’s brain, nervous system, blood pressure and hormones, to be able to take control of it

Things happen – out there – in here, in your body. It’s important and empowering to know the difference.

You cannot control things going on out there, but you can take control of things going on inside you – in here. You need to know what is going on – on the inside.

Psychology Today defines anxiety as “a state of defense, presided over by nerve circuits of fear, and activated by misperception or overestimation of threat from the environment, from the inner world of the body, or from the inner world of thought.”

Complex Organism – Complex Body Anxiety

Basically, you are a complex organism of flowing energies. Everything is connected. Your mind is only a part of your brain. In addition, your nervous system and your blood system carry messages and hormones that affect all the systems working inside you.

Feeling Edgy and Stressed

When some thing from out there gets inside – in here – you may have a sense of being overwhelmed. It may begin in your sensory system – you hear or see or read something shocking or devastating. It feels menacing. This activates the human habit energy in your mind: Be aware! Be ready for jeopardy!

This stimulates your body to get all fired up. Your heart rate goes up and blood pumps through your system. So, your stomach feels gretzy, your muscles feel twitchy, and you are aware of a tightness in your head.

Not the greatest of sensations – and YET… it means that your body is already working for you. Inside you, the complex systems are preparing you – protecting you.

How Your Brain Works with Anxiety in Your Body

• Amygdala

There is a little component in your brain, called the amygdala. It is there to receive and process information and send up a red flag if there is a risk or menace or danger.

• Real or Perceived Danger

In our world we are subject to instant and powerfully visual social media and news streams. The amygdala does not know if the danger is real or if it is only something you are watching on a screen. The information may not be a threat to you, but because of your shocked reaction, it springboards to threat-mode.

• Distress Signal

The amygdala sends out a distress signal, telling your brain: Be ready! Gear yourself up! Defend yourself! It is telling your brain that you are being threatened. Instantly, another part of your brain – the hypothalmus – transmits the alarm through both the nervous system and your hormones.

Your physical body is now in full stress mode, as your heart rate escalates and your blood pressure climbs. Your breath accelerates. You are positioned to be highly vigilant, watchful, wary.

• Hippocampus and Pre-frontal Cortex

Right about now, yet another part of your brain kicks in: your hippocampus. This is where your memory is stored. Your hippocampus scans all your former incidents and encounters. Then the pre-frontal cortex receives all that data, inspects it, sorts and organizes, deciphers and translates.

• Your Behavioral Response to Anxiety in Your Body

Within your pre-frontal cortex, your logical left-brain and your interpretive, imaginative right-brain converse back and forth. You are trying to put all the incoming information in context, a frame of reference that makes sense to you.

Now is the moment you respond. You decide.

Is the threat to you real? Or only your perception of reality? You can turn the volume up or down, magnify or reduce the threat you feel.

• Challenge

Herein lies your challenge. The drama of the event can be very alluring. Dramatizing events is what the news streams and social media do very well. You live in a world of drama.

But the drama in the relentless showing and sharing of crises and turmoil, only serve to amplify all your physical responses to a real threat. In this case your brain becomes anxious, thus it spikes your stress response in all the physical areas. All your body’s systems described above go into hyperdrive.

The little amygdala is in charge. The pre-frontal cortex, with all its clear rational thinking, is overwhelmed by constant distress signals of the amygdala, that runs and re-runs the emotional tape inside your brain. You are in a state of prolonged anxiety.

A Way Out of Anxiety in Your Body

The important and powerful thing to remember is that you are the one who decides. You choose. You do not have to live in a state of anxiety. Next week’s blog will discuss how you can choose to use your body’s systems to let go of anxiety… you know… with your

Light on!