From Stress-y to Sexy – The #1 Way to Bed Anxiety. Hint: It’s in your rhythm baby!

Sighing, panting, gasping...yawning.

Our breathing changes as our thoughts, feelings and behaviour change.  As we become worried, excited, elated, depressed or aroused, our breathing becomes shorter, jerkier, longer, deeper, shallower or smoother. What if the reverse were true? What if our breathing could change our thoughts, feelings and behaviour? What if breathing the right way meant more personal excellence and less anxiety and anger?  

Anxiety shows up in many ways from the more well-known symptoms like tight chest and throat, sweating, increased heart rate, nausea to the less obvious such as memory loss, insomnia and many others. It’s part of life, and yet for some of us it has too much of a hold.

The Kama Sutra of breathing…. backed by neuroscience!

I have taken this material from Dr Alan Watkins’ Ted Talk on You Tube called ‘How To Be Brilliant Every Day’. It's important to view part 1 and 2. I’ve used it with clients who have found it very helpful. Some are sceptical about breathing exercises to reduce anxiety. They say that in the middle of an anxiety attack the last thing they remember is breathing techniques. Others say that the usual breathing exercises prescribed make them more anxious because they worry about getting the technique right. Some others have tried breathing techniques and doubt they work as they have simply not found them effective. So why not give it a twirl? What have you go to lose?

My Lips Don’t lie

Firstly, Dr Watkins explains the neuroscience behind the technique which may help convince you. Secondly, the technique is easy to follow and you can download a free App in order to do so. Lastly, breathing exercises are most effective when done regularly, even if only 3 minutes three times per day. In this way, the baseline level of anxiety is kept lower which means an anxiety attack is less likely. The exercises thus act in a preventative way. So, it’s not really fair to write off breathing until you have tried doing it regularly.

Coherent breathing is useful not just to reduce anxiety but to increase any type of performance be it sports, business, academic performance, relationship, sexual. He explains that It’s not our thoughts that affect our feelings but our feelings that affect our thoughts. That’s why, when someone tells you not to worry when you are anxious, it’s like trying to use a garden hose to put out a raging forest fire.

Wild thing, you make my heart sing

Let’s imagine we have different layers. The bottom layer is our physiology. This is our heart beating, breathing, gut peristalsis etc. It is experienced as a stream of data.  Next level up are our emotions. E-motions are energy in motion, the energy of our physiology. Next layer up are our feelings. Feelings are the awareness in our minds of our emotions. Lastly come our thoughts.

When our physiology is out of whack we lobotomise ourselves. When our reptilian brain senses a threat, it goes into fight, flight or freeze. This is great when there is a real threat but the trouble is, our body gets it wrong. If we’ve suffered some kind of trauma in the past, our body can react as if we are in threat and go into a full-blown anxiety attack when we are tucked up in bed watching Netflix with a cup of cocoa.

In order to achieve brilliance every day we need to be able to tune in to the emotions and control them.

How do we do that?

Keep my heart rate coherent, baby.

The more the distance between each heart beat varies over time, the more incoherent our thinking and behaviour becomes.  We start to produce more cortisol which is associated with anxiety, anger and frustration.

Steady on…and breathe

 We need to aim for stable variance by taking rhythmic breaths. Within a minute our frontal lobes start working better and we become more perceptive, insightful and good at problem solving. This is where coherent differs from yoga or other breathing exercises which may focus on deep breathing or belly breathing. Here it doesn’t matter how deep or large the breathing. It doesn’t even matter what the ratio is. All that matters is that you breathe:

·      rhythmically

·      smoothly

·      focusing on your heart

It doesn’t matter how fast you are doing it, so long as you are doing it rhythmically. Dr Watkins says the reason to focus on the heart area is that not only does it get you out of your head but the heart is also the locus of passion, excitement and motivation so these get promoted.

That’s it, you've got it! ;)

Breathe

Rhythmically and

Evenly

Through the

Heart

Everyday

If you want an app to help with it then go to:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coherent-breathing-assistant/id1121704122?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rrr.macoherencecardiaque&hl=en_GB

Getting Grounded

I mentioned in my previous article on social anxiety that it was important to get as grounded as possible. When we feel anxious we tend to breathe more quickly and less fully. As a result we can become heady and have physical symptoms such as feeling dizzy, spaced out or numb. Consequently we no longer feel balanced and find it difficult to get in touch with other more supportive states that counter the anxious thoughts for example excitement, curiosity or confidence. Grounding involves being more in our bodies and less in our heads.

I’m not saying that it’s as easy as getting grounded to beat anxiety. Many of my clients have, out of their awareness, chosen precisely not to feel grounded. Feeling one’s body can bring up uncomfortable emotions. Emotions originate in the body and are linked to physical sensations for example a sinking heart and disappointment, a tight chest and anxiety, a fluttering in the stomach and excitement. An individual who has experienced trauma may have ‘escaped’ to their mind or disassociated in order to avoid the harrowing experience and accompanying anxiety. This then becomes a habitual pattern.

However even those of us with no trauma that live in cities are often ungrounded due to our environment. Many of us work in offices surrounded by electronic equipment and the latest technology, spending large amounts of time interacting digitally, being constantly bombarded with news feeds, text messages, television, You Tube, emails, Twitter etc.

So getting grounded is important for all and yet it can be unfamiliar and challenging. For this reason approaching getting grounded with compassion and curiosity rather than with an, ‘I must get grounded’ attitude works best. Here is one exercise to try.

Belly breathing

In a private space, place your hand so it is gently covering your belly. Start by taking a normal breath in and then breathing out normally (not trying to do anything to the breath like extend it or deepen it). When you come to the end of the out-breath and are ready to breath in again, pause for five seconds without breathing. As you pause, push your lower belly out as far as it can go as if you had just eaten a meal that had made you feel bloated (this in itself can be difficult for those who are not comfortable with their body image). After five seconds relax your belly and breathe in. You will notice that you breathe in more deeply as you want to get more oxygen in after holding the breath. Continue doing this for three minutes and building up to ten minutes. Ideally you would do this twice a day. Clients sometimes report having tried breathing when they are feeling anxious and finding that it does nothing at all to help them in that moment. However the best way to benefit from these types of breathing exercises is to do them regularly as a way to keep general anxiety levels down. In that way we are less likely to get into a highly anxious state.

And the science shows that breathing exercises really do work. The reason being that anxiety has a direct effect on our physiology. As I am sure you are all familiar, when we are anxious our flight or flight system kicks in., our sympathetic nervous system. Our adrenal glands, located above our kidneys, start to produce more adrenaline and noradrenaline. Our heart rate increases and we experience physical symptoms of anxiety such as sweating or dizziness, amongst others. By belly breathing we activate the hypothalamus that transmits neurohormones, which cause the body to relax. Deep breathing also directly affects the kidney and adrenal area, also promoting relaxations. Deep breathing therefore activates the mechanisms that cause the body to slow down and relax, the parasympathetic nervous system. So why not give it a try? Set yourself a 30-day challenge of just three minutes a day and notice how much grounded you feel. It is also a useful exercise to do before a big moment such as a job interview or first date as it helps to counter the nervousness that can get in the way of performing your best. I’d be interested to hear what your experience with it is so drop me a line and let me know.

3 Steps to Beating Social Anxiety

I have many clients and potential clients approaching me, wanting to resolve their social anxiety. They describe difficulties in certain social situations, feeling unable to interact with others without experiencing heightened self-consciousness, uncomfortable feelings and accompanying physical symptoms. These can include feeling nervous, stammering, wanting to run away and be alone, sweating, dizziness, feeling numb and palpitations, amongst many others.

Social anxiety is the inner voice that tells us, whilst we are in, or are contemplating being in a social situation, that we are not good enough, not interesting enough, that others are judging us negatively. It can be accompanied by shyness however we can have social anxiety without being shy. This critical inner voice can become so insistent and powerful that it builds a wall between the other/s and us, and we are no longer fully present and available to engage freely with them. Rather than focussing on the interaction we become fixed on our critical voice, which is disapproving of our behaviour. We start to feel a whole host of emotions including anxiety. As a result we feel more and more ungrounded until we are overwhelmed and the only option is to flee.

Social anxiety can lead to avoiding or struggling in certain social situations. These vary according to the individual. Some avoid one-to-one relationships, others avoid group scenarios, for some it manifests at work and stops them applying for roles with more responsibility or a higher profile which includes public speaking.

Why is it? The socially anxious individual considers themselves deficient in certain social situations. Therefore the basic self-belief is, ‘I’m not good enough’. At the heart of this issue is non self-acceptance. Ultimately the key to change is to be in better relationship to oneself: self-acceptance.  This is a theme that is widely talked touted in spiritual and self-help books. I imagine that it is certainly not new to the reader.  But what does that mean? It sounds so simple and yet seems so difficult for many of us to truly understand or put into practice.

Firstly it can help to consider and become more aware of how it is that we have such a harsh relationship with ourselves. I sometimes invite clients to advise an imaginary friend who shares the same social anxiety issues that they have. They speak to their ‘friend’ in a much gentler and more forgiving way than they do to themselves.

In Gestalt therapy we talk about ‘introjects’. These are beliefs that we have taken to be true due to hearing them voiced by our carers when we were too young to analyse them objectively and then perhaps reject them.  ‘You bad girl’ could be one such belief. ‘You ugly thing’ could be another. These are extreme examples however these parental messages can also be implicit. A parent ignoring us when we are angry in order to teach us a lesson, a parent who becomes anxious when we act vivaciously. We deduce from these situations that what we did was ‘not ok’. As a child the next step from that is that “I am not ok’. Children also often pick up these messages about themselves when parents separate or when the family is undergoing huge stress and transition or when a parent becomes less available due to sickness, depression or addictions, amongst other things.

Once we have increased our understanding of the origins of the critical voice then we can start to become more aware of it in our daily life. When we catch our critical voice calling us ‘fat’, ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ we observe it. We don’t give ourselves a hard time about it, that’s just being critical about our critical voice (which defeats the purpose!). According to the foundational text of Gestalt therapy theory ‘awareness is like the glow of a coal which comes from its own combustion’ (PHG, 1951:75) i.e. awareness alone is enough to cause change. Therefore simply by noticing our critical voice and how insidious it is, we are already setting in motion a change. After a period of of simply increasing awareness, we can move on to challenging the critical voice. If it accuses you of being lazy how might you reframe that? How would you respond to a friend that described himself or herself as lazy for not preparing for a job interview? You would probably look for other explanations. Maybe their fear of getting things wrong has got in the way of job preparation. Or maybe they don’t really want the job and doing the interview because they think they should, that it’s the kind of job they ought to be doing rather than a job they enjoy. Or perhaps they simply do not have the time as they are also working full-time, running a household and looking after two young children. I invite you to try and speak to yourself from that place of compassion, looking for the good in you rather than what is not good enough. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen every time or even at all to begin with. However it is the first step towards building a better relationship with yourself. And remember, if you do catch yourself repeatedly slipping up then that does not matter at all, just don’t give yourself a hard time about it!

A second way to tackle social anxiety is to become aware of how we ‘project’ our critical voice on to others. Projection is a natural phenomenon common to most of us. It simply means ‘‘a process of disowning an aspect of myself which is then co-created as a relational experience’ (Joyce and Sills, 2010, p115)’ It comes in handy for appreciating the arts such as a painting or a piece of music. It is also necessary for empathy. Through projection we can step into the others’ experience and imagine how they are feeling based on how we might feel in a similar circumstance. However projection is less helpful when we imagine that others are criticising us the way we criticise ourselves. Clients often say, ‘well that’s terrible that I project onto others’. They start to become critical of themselves. I always react with ‘ouch’ when I hear them say that. Firstly I explain that projection occurs at a subconscious level therefore we are not aware that we are projecting. Secondly, giving oneself a hard time about a natural mechanism is simply allowing the critical voice to stamp all over us again. An awareness experiment I suggest instead is a tried and tested Gestalt technique called ‘I notice, I imagine, I feel’. I ask my client to look at an image or if they are up to it, myself and to state what they notice. The aim is to simply state what is noticed such as ‘I notice brown hair’, ‘I notice a leather jacket’, ‘I notice lines on the forehead’. Often individuals doing this exercise say things like ‘I notice she looks happy’ or, ‘I notice she seems strict’, and I point out that this is no longer noticing but imagining. I then ask them as a second step to go with their imagination and say what they notice and imagine. For example ‘I notice the sleeping cat and I imagine it is dreaming’, or ‘I notice the lines in his forehead and I imagine he is angry’. The last step of the exercise is to state the feeling that occurs. For example, ‘I notice the lines in his forehead and I imagine he is angry and I feel worried’. Here we can clearly see how it is easy to imagine all kinds of things about the other based on what we notice, our subjective reality. Individuals who suffer from social anxiety will often imagine that others are viewing them negatively and this experiment is helpful for becoming aware of the projection process and challenging those assumptions.

A third way to beat social anxiety is to feel as grounded as possible. What does grounded mean ask some of my clients. That is a good question in itself and can mean different things to different people. What does it mean to you? There is definitely a link with having a sense of one’s body. The opposite of grounded is feeling light-headed, spaced out, insubstantial. When we are feeling anxious, tight chested and breathless then we are not grounded. When we feel dizzy or have numb or tingling fingers that can accompany anxiety then we are not grounded.  When we are grounded we feel calm and we are often in touch with the feeling of our feet in contact with the ground. Our toes may feel warm and tingly. When we are grounded we breathe lower down in our bellies. When we are grounded we feel balanced.  Some exercises to get grounded include belly breathing, shaking, and body awareness mindfulness exercises, amongst others. I will describe these more in another article.

Conclusion

Just as I have had many clients approach me wanting to resolve their social anxiety, I have had many clients leave therapy with their social anxiety a ‘non-issue’.  Of course there is no magic wand and I am not saying that all it takes is to read and engage with this article.  Each person has their own story with their own particular circumstances that have led to social anxiety. Nevertheless in my experience at the core of social anxiety is always the inability to accept oneself. I’m not saying it is an easy task to change this and it can take time. Often the support of a therapist is necessary. However as we start our journey we find lots of other hidden treasures along the way.

Joyce, P. & Sills, C. (2010). Skills in Gestalt Counselling & Psychotherapy. London: Sage.

Perls. F, Hefferline, R, Goodman, P, (2009). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. London: Souvenir Press Ltd.