Breaking Free from Anxiety: A Somatic Approach
Manage Anxiety by Learning Self-Regulation Techniques with Somatic Therapy.
Anxiety is often felt as a deeply physical experience. For many women, the overwhelming rush of worry, fear, or dread carries with it very real physiological sensations. Including a racing heart you can hear in your ears, tight muscles that give you headaches and shoulder pain, shallow breathing that makes you dizzy, and digestive upsets that give you nausea or tummy gripes.
Somatic therapy, with its focus on the mind-body connection, offers a powerful way to manage anxiety by tuning into these bodily experiences. Giving you practical tools for self-regulation.
Understanding Anxiety Through the Body
Traditional approaches to anxiety often centre on thoughts and feelings, which are of course important. However, anxiety originates within the nervous system through what we call neuroception. Our body is constantly scanning our environment for cues of safety or danger. Around 80% of the information we receive on our surroundings and the people we are interacting with come up from the body to the brain.
When triggered, the sympathetic nervous system activates the body's fight, flight, or active freeze response, flooding our body with adrenaline and cortisol. This heightened state prepares the body to respond to danger and is a natural and normal response. But in chronic anxiety, it remains activated unnecessarily. Think of it like leaving your car idling on the driveway instead of switching the engine off when you get home from an outing. You can see then why being in a constant state of low level activation leads to exhaustion, tension, and distress.
Somatic therapy brings awareness to this physiological sensation of distress that accompanies anxiety. It helps you to notice these sensations without judgement. And the particular events, people and places that induce this stress response. By understanding when you’re experiencing sympathetic activation, and the interoceptive signals your body is giving you, you can develop more control over your emotional experience.
How Somatic Therapy Addresses Physiological Symptoms
Body Awareness and Mindfulness: Somatic therapy encourages you to observe physical symptoms like tightness in the chest, shallow breathing, or trembling and the situations they occur within. By developing this present-moment awareness, anxiety symptoms can, over time, become less overwhelming and more manageable. We can develop acceptance and compassion for our response through understanding why this activation is occurring.
Nervous System Regulation: Learning techniques like grounding, breath work, and gentle movement directly influences the autonomic nervous system. For example, slow, long exhalations stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting calm and reducing the fight-or-flight response. This gives us an actual tool to use to bring us back to ourselves when we are feeling the grip of anxiety.
Releasing Tension: Trauma and chronic anxiety often cause the body to hold onto tension. Somatic therapy can incorporate exercises and touch-based methods to help release this stored tension, promoting relaxation and restoring a sense of safety in the body.
Self-Regulation Techniques Taught in Somatic Therapy
An essential part of somatic therapy is teaching self-regulation strategies that clients can use independently whenever anxiety arises:
Breath Regulation: Learning to control breath rhythm and depth slows the heart rate and reduce hypervigilance.
Grounding Exercises: A technique that connects the physical environment, such as feeling their feet on the floor or noticing textures, to help anchor you in the present moment.
Movement Practices: Gentle yoga, stretching, or shaking movements can discharge nervous system energy that contributes to anxiety.
Tracking Sensations: You can learn to map your anxiety sensations in the body, which empowers you to intervene earlier before you get overwhelmed by sudden waves of anxiety.
Internal Family Systems Integration: By combining somatic awareness with therapies like Internal Family Systems, I help you recognise and comfort parts of yourself that hold anxiety, promoting internal harmony.
The Transformative Impact of Somatic Therapy on Anxiety
By addressing anxiety at the physiological level, somatic therapy helps break the cycle of fear of physical arousal that fuels chronic anxiety. This embodied approach enables you to reclaim your nervous system’s natural ability to self-soothe and regulate, rather than being at its mercy. We work together to overcome the fear of being anxious.
Clients tell me that they feel calmer, more grounded, and more capable of responding to anxiety-provoking situations with greater ease. Somatic therapy isn’t just about managing symptoms—it’s about healing the whole person by recognising that mind and body are inextricably linked.
If you find anxiety affects your life daily and traditional methods haven't quite delivered the relief you seek, exploring somatic therapy might be a transformative next step. Learning to listen and respond compassionately to your body's signals can bring profound healing and renewed resilience.
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