Anxiety Is in Your Body, Not Your Mind

Let's go back to 60,000 years. Assume you're a Neanderthal out for a walk in the countryside. Suddenly, you hear a tiger in the surrounding bushes. Your entire body begins to respond in a nanosecond. Your heart beats faster, your breathing becomes shallower, your eyes dilate, and your body begins to produce adrenaline.

All in your body is in good working order; you're ready to face the tiger. There's only one minor snag. It wasn't a wolf, either. It was a prehistoric weasel of a small size. Your body is now ready for fight-or-flight mode, your heart is pounding, and you're high on adrenaline... yet there's no risk.

This is how the body reacts to anxiety. With social media, traffic, politics, Covid-19, money, childcare, climate change, work stress, and family drama replacing the (nonexistent) tiger in the bushes, it's easy to see why anxiety is the most prevalent mental illness in America, affecting nearly 20% of the population. Modern humans are simply a bunch of frightened Neanderthals who are still in fight-or-flight mode.

According to Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, author of Widen The Window: Training The Body and Brain to Thrive Through Stress and Recover from Trauma, anxiety is an instinct in our bodies that says, "I'm not safe right now." “It's automatic, lightning fast, and completely unconscious.”

Your Conscious Brain vs. Your Survival Brain

Stanley distinguishes between the thinking brain, which includes our neocortex and is responsible for decision-making, reasoning, ethics, conscious memory, and learning, and the survival brain, which includes our limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum and is responsible for our basic survival, feelings, unconscious memory, and stress arousal.

According to Stanley, neuroception, an unconscious mechanism of rapidly searching the internal and external world for protection and risk, is one of the survival brain's most critical functions. When danger is detected, the survival brain activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing the release of particular hormones that cause physical stimuli linked to our heart, breathing, and digestion. “Whatever is going on in the survival brain has massive reverberations across our body,” Stanley says.

“These reactions are not voluntary,” says Stephen Porges, PhD, a psychologist and the author of the Polyvagal Theory, in an interview with PsychAlive. Our nervous system picks up information in the world on a neurobiological basis, not a cognitive level.”

Importantly, the thinking brain is the last to notice that something is wrong when we're trapped in a defensive answer. “The thought brain isn't what determines whether we're anxious, threatened, or challenged, whether we'll turn stress on, or whether we'll turn emotions on,” Stanley says. “The survival brain is responsible for stress arousal and emotions.”

So, if you want to monitor your anxiety, your body would be the most precise guide, not your thoughts.

The Trap of Talk Therapy

Unlike our ancient forefathers (who, according to Stanley, may have dealt with anxiety by panting, trembling, or running like a dog and letting the cortisol work its way through their system), modern anxiety sufferers turn to their trusted companion, the thought brain. She says, "Most people recognise fear through their thoughts and most people identify with their thinking brain."

The problem is that our thought brain is the very worst tool for the job when it comes to controlling our nervous system after a stress response (read: anxiety). That's because, according to Porges, we sometimes don't know what caused a physical reaction even after being aware of it. This realisation was a major turning point for Stanley, a veteran living with PTSD. “Stress and anxiety recovery is a survival brain job.”

We live in a cerebral society, which means we're better prepared to deal with problems that need logic and reasoning — think moral dilemmas — and less equipped to deal with problems where cognitive reasoning can exacerbate them. Although it might seem that having a "fight or flight" response in response to being late for brunch is an overreaction, you are physiologically experiencing it while stuck in traffic. We attempt to convince our nervous system to cooperate by using our thinking brain to determine whether the problem is "worth" being anxious about. “In those moments, our mind becomes detached from our body,” Stanley says. Your thinking brain determines that you have nothing to be concerned about, so you go about your days convincing yourself that all is good despite experiencing anxiety-related physical symptoms all over your body. Worse, even after your thought brain has assured you that all is good, it can begin to blame and shame you for remaining nervous.

If you're anything like me, you've spent decades (and the equivalent of a down payment) in talk therapy contemplating all the reasons you're nervous. Not only did all the talking do nothing to relieve anxiety, but it may have have exacerbated it. “Our survival brain tries to keep us healthy, but when we ignore our bodies and their cues because we're so wrapped up in our thinking brain's stories and thoughts,” Stanley explains, “the survival brain perceives it as much more threatening.” “Like a toddler, it will tantrum louder and louder before the message is received. That's why it turns into such a vicious cycle.”

Consider Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is one of the most popular types of talk therapy. “CBT helps you become conscious of incorrect or negative thoughts so you can see difficult circumstances more clearly and react to them in a more successful way,” according to the Mayo Clinic. Isn't that fantastic? While this type of analysis can be extremely beneficial when coping with family problems or figuring out an ethical dilemma, when it comes to fear, which isn't triggered by the thinking brain, it focuses on the thought (“I thought there was a tiger!”) rather than the physical reaction that followed, and even caused, the thought ("My heart is pounding and I'm pumped up on adrenaline; I need some tools to help me relax").

“We don't want to be conscious of and experience the discomfort in our bodies because anxiety causes discomfort in our bodies. Instead, we'd like to try to fix it by giving it this external object,” Stanley explains. However, if the external object did not trigger the anxiety, then removing it would not make the anxiety go away.

Anxiety treatment from the ground up

Although talk therapy and medication are still the most common treatments for chronic anxiety, there are other options that focus on the body. Although these modalities are still considered "alternative," an increased interest in "brain science" and neurobiology, as well as ongoing studies on mindfulness and mind-body relations, is moving our psychological perception away from concentrating solely on the mind and toward seeing the brain and body as a unified entity.

According to Pat Ogden, PhD, the founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, closing the loop that was initiated when your body first went through a stress response is part of the challenge. Ogden gives the example of a Black client who is regularly detained by the police for no reason. When this happened, the man became enraged and his body tightened up, indicating a “fight” response. Ogden assisted him in identifying and acting out the physical de-escalation his body required in order to return to a controlled state, in this case getting to strike out and protect himself in the privacy of a therapy session. “We want to finish the impulse in mindfulness so that his brain is integrated and it is no longer stored in his body,” Ogden says.

Part of the drawback of talk therapy, according to Ogden, is that anxiety is often associated with a dysregulated response linked to an unconscious memory, which is then wrongly pinned on a current experience or feeling. “It has little to do with the current content,” Ogden says.

Stanley focuses on mindfulness strategies in his mind fitness training course to help people develop resilience. While it's become cliché to advise someone suffering from anxiety to take ten deep breaths, her course has benefited thousands of people, including active-duty military personnel. Studies funded by the Department of Defense showed that Stanley’s method significantly helped improve cognitive performance during stress, lower perceived stress levels, increase regulation, and foster a faster return to baseline after stress arousal. “The military has a lot of experience with stressful circumstances, and they've conditioned themselves to activate the survival brain, but they don't always know how to turn it off,” Stanley explains. Stanley's approach dramatically improved cognitive performance under stress, lower perceived stress levels, increase regulation, and promote a faster return to baseline after stress arousal, according to studies sponsored by the Department of Defense.

When your body is under stress, the first thing you can do is become conscious of things that make your survival brain feel healthy, such as what you see and hear. “Bringing attention to where our body is in touch with our surroundings is one of the best ways to make the survival brain feel grounded,” Stanley says. She recommends concentrating on the interaction between your feet and the floor, or the contact between your body and your chair. The survival brain initiates the recovery process as soon as it senses groundedness and safety.

Obviously, attempting to breathe deeply or be conscious when you're experiencing extreme anxiety is almost impossible. What you need to do in those conditions is get the adrenaline and cortisol out of your system. Stanley recommends jumping rope or going up and down the stairs. Repeat the mindfulness exercise after 10 minutes.

Is talk therapy or trying to think objectively about your anxiety helpful? Without a doubt. But only after the body has been stabilised, according to Stanley: “After we have helped our survival brain feel secure and healthy, we can focus on our thoughts.” Otherwise, our tension and emotions continue to skew our cognitive response.”

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