Anxiety & Worry
3 articles
What Anxiety Actually Is, and Why Telling Yourself to Calm Down Doesn't Work
The instruction to calm down is one of the least useful things you can offer an anxious person. Including yourself. I say this not to be contrary, but because understanding why it doesn't work gets you much closer to what does. And what it comes down to is this: anxiety is not a thought. It's a bodily state. And you cannot think your way out of a body state.
More in Anxiety & Worry
Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn: Your Complete Guide to the Nervous System's Survival States
Something happens, a tense message, a raised voice in the next room, a silence from someone who usually replies quickly, and your body responds before you've finished processing it.
Anxiety in the Body: How to Feel It Without Being Overwhelmed
Understanding where anxiety lives in your body, and learning to work with it there, is a different and often more effective approach than trying to address it at the level of thought. Because by the time anxiety shows up as thought, it's already been present in the body for a while. The thought is often the last thing to arrive.