What to do When Anxiety Strikes

If you're sometimes overcome by uncomfortable sensations such as anxiety or intense stress, and find that it stays with you for a really long time, I hope you'll love this post.

I'm going to talk about one aspect of how to create safety in your body rather than dissociating by scrolling through your feed, focusing on everything you need to get done, shopping, or diving headfirst into a bag of chips.

(Bonus: you can also use this process with your clients!)

First of all, of course you want to dissociate when you’re feeling uncomfortable sensations like anxiety or intense stress! They suck.

Secondly, you might find yourself dissociating before you even know you’re dissociating, because it’s not something we consciously choose to do. It’s a self-protective act.

We could tackle this sort of dissociative behavior in a number of wonderful somatic, mind-body ways.

Except, those won’t work long-term, no matter how lovely they are.

Before anything can really work, you’ll need to give yourself full compassion for dissociating.

We’re usually really hard on ourselves for getting stuck in mindless behaviors that don’t really seem to help. For example, have you ever berated yourself for ending up headfirst in a bag of chips?

Right?

It’s important to watch for the sneaky goal to never, ever dissociate and purchase random things off of your social media feed. (Hey, it seemed so necessary at the time…lol!) Or eat an entire bag of chips. Or overwork. Or whatever your favorite dissociative behavior is.

We will all engage in dissociative behavior. It’s just a natural protection from those uncomfortable sensations.

The trick is to simply make this a conscious act more and more.

For example, let’s say you notice yourself heading to the pantry for the chips. Or, you know this is your normal chips o’clock time of day.

Just insert this tiny little tidbit of awareness. Say to yourself, “I am heading to the pantry for my dissociation time! I wonder what I’m feeling!”

You might notice what the emotion is, and that’s great. Maybe you won’t. Either way, there’s no failure here. You’re just becoming conscious that this is a protective dissociation moment for you.

Then, after you’ve tried that for a few days, you can set a little boundary for yourself. You can choose to spend two minutes feeling that emotion before you dissociate. Then, allow the dissociation as needed.

Over time, you’ll gently unwind the pattern because now it’s conscious!

This works so much better than going straight at it, because that freaks out your unconscious protection mechanisms that are trying to keep you safe. They’ll just double down!

The important key here is to realize that anxiety and stress are just indicating that you have emotions hanging around in your body and psyche. You might have true fear, anger, sadness, grief, shame, guilt, or any other emotion. Anxiety and stress are like cover emotions that prevent us from the real discomfort underneath.

It feels safer to say, “I feel stressed” rather than, “I feel grief around my child growing older and my role in his life is changing,” or “I feel angry around my spouse not responding to my overtures for connection last night.”

Our unconscious mind plays these little safety tricks all the time, so the more conscious you become, the easier it is to dig a layer down into the real emotions and actually process them.

And, if you’re facing a chronic illness or stress-induced illness, this process will also help your body feel better because it won’t be carrying such a heavy stress load and it won’t be storing unfelt emotional energy as tension and the fight/flight response.

Gently, gently, you’ll shift your dissociative patterns. You know you’re really making big shifts when you choose to sit down and feel an emotion fully, all the while knowing that you can veer off to Netlifx or a novel anytime for a healthy break from processing emotions before they get overwhelming.

Helping you gain confidence in your ability to work with these emotions and helping you to do this work with clients is what I do in my Mind-Body Magic Life Coach Training Program. I also teach you all of the somatic mind-body focused coaching tools in my Mind-Body Magic Method.

You’ll get to nerd out with me on all the mind-body connection science and the spiritual consciousness processes, and we’ll amp up your confidence with additional support in trusting your inner wisdom and even your angels and guides at your back, if you want.

You’ll have all the tools I created for healing mind-body pain syndromes and escaping stress-based illness, both for you and your clients. You can add these tools into your current coaching practice or train as a coach with me from the ground up!

You can learn more about this program and others here.