Anxiety, much like all of our emotions, needs its own place at the table. Anxiety can be adaptive and protective – it’s a highly necessary emotion for our survival. The problem becomes when anxiety takes up too much space and integrates into every facet of our lives. It curls up and lives in the corners of our mind and makes us doubt our experiences, our safety, our thoughts. When anxiety is given too loud of a voice, it is debilitating. Anxiety is seeping into all of these places in an unwelcome manner for a reason though – it is trying to communicate something to us.

Anxiety looks different at all ages; the anxiety we experience auditioning for 5th grade band versus traveling overseas versus moving are all very different, and all tell us very different things. Auditioning may tell us how much we care about being in the band, traveling may tell us how much we care about our safety and the excitement in getting to a location, moving may tell us if we are making the right decision or that we are afraid of our precious objects being treated gently. Anxiety partners with anger much in the way that it is one of our greatest protectors – when anxiety takes over our lives and makes us feel the worst we’ve ever felt, that’s our brains trying to control everything to create a semblance of safety; that’s our anxiety trying to keep us alive. Now, obviously, this becomes an issue when we are perfectly safe and no longer need to operate from a place of survival.

‍ ‍What treating anxiety looks like: letting go of control and understanding regulating the nervous system. Like I discussed above, our anxiety is often related to a dysregulated nervous system; e.g., our brains trying to keep us alive. I’m not going to lie to you – there is no possible “cure” for anxiety. At the end of the day, we need our anxiety – it’s an evolutionary trait and it’s just another emotion that we can never make fully disappear. At the same time, we can work to regulate and ground when we feel the anxiety overtaking us, we can process and work on accepting what is in and outside of our control (as one of the biggest feeders of anxiety is latching onto external control), and we can give anxiety a place to live, where we understand what it is trying to communicate to us while simultaneously understanding that we are safe.

            Anxiety is such a doozy to experience and it truly is integrated into every part of our experiences. If you’d like to explore further together, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.