Anxiety

To feel anxious is to feel alive and is a necessary part of our alert system. For many of us however, this becomes our fixed state, and this is a problem. We come to fear this feeling and if we don’t learn to confront it and manage it, this feeling controls our lives through avoidance, control, and restrictions. It obsesses us and drives our choices.

Anxiety is a normal reaction to our environment, emanating from our nervous system. This neural highway interacts with the world around us, assessing safety to enable connection or protection. This means we either engage with life or withdraw from it. Sadly, if anxiety has become our default, we cannot be open and engage, we are stuck in a protective mode. It is a humbling realisation that our feelings of anxiety are simply beautiful, natural responses designed to help us, gone awry.

The good news is we can learn to understand this sensitive alert system and to do this we must learn to notice how our bodies communicate safety or threat and instead of relying on control or avoidance, we learn to give our system what it needs to feel safe once more.

Only through this learning, can we meet the daily challenges and steer ourselves in a way which allows sensitive attunement and compassionate response in harmony with our bodies healthy defence and protect system.