How to Shift Out of Anxiety for You and Your Coaching Clients

If you (and/or your clients) frequently experience a lot of anxiety, this can be shifted by using what I call the “What am I Feeling Now Tool.”

This is quite different from using breathwork or deep breathing to calm anxiety.

In this post I'll explain what this tool is about and why it works - as well as what the breathwork approach is missing.

We can think of anxiety as a message from our mind-body system. It’s letting us know that something is out of alignment, and it’s powerful to get curious about what that might be before we go straight into trying to shift out of the anxiety.

The problem with shifting out of the anxiety before we’ve had a chance to decode the message from our mind-body system is that we may end up with temporary relief. The anxiety may dissipate right now, but return later to remind us that we haven’t fully decoded the message.

I’ve found that anxiety is like a byproduct of other emotions that haven’t yet been felt because they were suppressed in the body. They’re still hovering underneath the surface of our awareness, so the anxiety starts to mount, letting us know that there’s energy stored in our nervous system.

We feel this as extra adrenaline in our bodies, because the nervous system is activated into a fight/flight response whenever there are stored emotions. You can think of emotions as energy in motion, quite literally. When the energy doesn’t move, because it’s suppressed, it creates activation in the nervous system and tension in the body and the psyche.

Anxiety is like the low-level hum of the nervous system as we go about our day. We’re on high alert and the nervous system is telling us about that extra adrenaline through sensations that we call anxiety.

For example, you might notice a fluttering in your chest, or a tight sensation in your ribcage. You might find it hard to sit still and relax. You might feel the urge to get up and clean the kitchen or move your body in some other way.

Maybe it feels like it’s hard to concentrate. Maybe you feel a little short of breath. Or, maybe it’s like you don’t quite fit in your own skin.

This is how the body communicates that the nervous system is activated and anxiety is present, and the sensory experience will be unique to each and every one of us. It helps to start noticing what you feel in your body when anxiety shows up so that you can catch on quickly to its presence.

Let’s say you’re feeling anxiety and you’re not sure what’s going on. You’ve felt unsettled all day, and it’s been hard to concentrate. When you stop and check in, you discover that you’re actually really afraid your spouse will lose his job due to company cutbacks.

The fear was lurking in your subconscious, not quite at the surface, because you’re trying really hard not to manifest that reality or “go there” mentally. (This is a common trick we unconsciously try when we’re really afraid of something.)

When you use the “What am I Feeling Now Tool,” you’re noticing that the anxiety is present, realizing your nervous system is activated, and then you’re able to be aware that other emotions are underneath that anxiety, asking to be felt.

That’s why this tool is so effective at shifting anxiety; it takes away the reason for it to be present in the first place.

Once you feel the deeper emotions underneath the anxiety, the anxiety can leave, because it’s message has been delivered. (What to do with the deeper emotions is a topic for another post, but you’ll definitely want to start with being aware of the sensations of those emotions, just like you did with the anxiety.)

For example, maybe you notice you’ve been feeling anxious all day and even though it’s the weekend, you just can’t relax. You really want to be able to settle in and read a book or watch a movie, but right now it’s not really possible to relax your mind.

Using this tool, you find that, unbeknownst to you, you’re actually really angry at your mom/spouse/friend who said that thing to you yesterday. It’s been festering and you’re also a little hurt that they would actually say that to you!

Because it was painful, your mind automatically suppressed the emotion and you pretended to be ok during the conversation. Now, you realize that you have these two emotions, anger and hurt, sitting in your body and mind.

You can see that if you were to approach the anxiety with breathwork before using the “What am I Feeling Now” tool, you might miss the awareness that you have those other emotions and the issues connected to them. You wouldn’t be able to then release the emotional energy and take the actions you need to take to handle the issues.

Breathwork or deep breathing can definitely shift the nervous system, and it has its place in somatic mind-body work. But, using it to shift anxiety often results in temporary relief only because of the emotional energy asking to be felt underneath the anxiety.

I always imagine anxiety to be like the cheese on top of a lasanga. It’s obvious because it’s the top layer, but once you slice into the lasagna, you find all the other layers there. In our metaphorical emotional lasagna, you could have fear, anger, and sadness (or more) all underneath that cheese.

Helping you to work with anxiety and emotions in a way that allows the nervous system to release fight/flight and relax into regulation so you can enjoy your downtime (and help your clients do the same) is a huge part of what I do in my Mind-Body Magic Life Coach Training Program.

In the program, you learn how to approach emotions in a way that’s not overwhelming to your mind so that it’s not as scary, vulnerable, or uncomfortable to be present with strong emotions. You and your clients won’t have to worry about expressing emotions reactively or communicating them in ways that aren’t effective, because you’ll have my set of tools for working with emotions.

You’ll learn my Mind-Body Magic Method (which includes the tool I shared here in this post and twelve other tools) for coaching yourself and your clients with a mind-body-spirit focus to get to the root of issues (you can see in this post how that can work) and effectively shift them.

With this method, you can coach clients through chronic pain, anxiety, stress, relationship issues, and much more and efficiently help your clients heal those issues.

You can learn more about this program and others here.