08. The Body

Your centre is located in your body. Rather than finding a solution to your anxiety in your head, it is better to find it in your body. This is what we discussed in the core idea of the cognitive approach.

We don’t go with anything in our head but we come back to our centre. Five means to finding your center in your body are breathing, massage, posture, exercise and nutrition.

You can change your mind through your body. The beauty of that for someone with anxiety is that you don’t have to “think” your way out of the problem. You only have to act.

Breathing

If you’re stressed out, having an anxiety attack or just stuck up in your head, there’s a simple solution. Look at your breathing.

You will find that your breathing moves up higher into your chest when you are stressed. Relaxed breathing is from your stomach. If you can come back to your centre, you can also take a couple of deep breaths and change your breathing. Try to use abdominal breathing from your middle.

Because you can take these breaths and slow down your breathing, you can also change your mind. By changing your breathing, you are taking charge and being assertive. You are affecting an influence on those negative thoughts.

Massage

Your body holds onto tension and negative thoughts mean that you’ll have a lot of tension in your body. A very simple way to release the tension is just to do some self-massage. If you can press on the places in your body that hold the tension, such as your neck, surrounding areas and shoulders, you’ll release this. Often you’ll also hold tension in your calf muscles as well.

Massage will release it and give your mind a chance to remember how it felt before the tension. If your body is relaxed, your mind will be calm. This is something that you can do at any time so that you can be more aware of where you hold onto the tension in your body. Do not underestimate the power of just releasing the tension!

Posture

There’s a link between how we hold ourselves and how we feel.

Confident people show it in a posture and how they move around. Someone who’s really slumped will tend to have negative thoughts. This doesn’t mean you have to walk around with your chest sticking out and feeling confident all day long.

There is a strong link between how we feel and the tension that we carry in our backs.

The vertebrae in your back contract if you hold tension all day long and maintain a sedentary lifestyle. If you’re constricted, you only add anxiety and tension.

Stretch your whole body out instead of being constricted and small. Make yourself large and fill up that space!

If you think about it, you’re sending this message on many levels that you are either small and constricted or expanding and growing.

One simple technique is the Alexander technique which can be done in only 5 or 10 minutes while lying down.

It stretches all the vertebrae out and makes you feel lighter. As soon as you do this, it affects your thoughts and it affects what’s happening in your mind.

Exercise

Rather than the excessive exercise routines that are often suggested, anxiety prone people are often better off finding simpler routines.

In a state of anxiety, you’re already quite depleted of energy and doing too much can have a negative effect on your body, causing fatigue.

I advocate movement rather than exercise. Movement affects how you feel. This is especially true if you have a body which is collecting tension. Being on the move releases the tension and moves your energy around.

The best thing to do is walking. Walking is easy on the body and you can walk in such a way that you’re centred. You can be aware of your centre and walk briskly so you raise your heart rate.

This is good for you because it has an effect on the neurotransmitters in your brain. You raise your pulse rate and you breathe more heavily so, when you finish, your breathing becomes lower. It changes your focus and you get out of your head. Walking is a well-known remedy for a nervous mind.

Nutrition

In order to keep nutrition really simple, there is one truth you can focus on. Too much sugar affects your mood. This is not about cutting out sugar altogether. It’s just about cutting back.

Eating a balanced diet and cutting back on sugar can have a dramatic effect on your anxiety. In a state of anxiety, you can deplete yourself of certain nutrients and you may find that there are certain things that you need more of.

I normally give an extensive programme of nutrition to people who request it but I’ve found that taking a multi-vitamin or multi-mineral may give you the things that you need in the nervous state that you’re in. By doing this, and cutting back on sugar, it can drastically change how you feel.

The number one best supplement that I’ve come across is 5HTP which is really like a natural form of Prozac. 5HTP is a natural amino acid so you find it in many of your foods.

It raises your serotonin levels and improves your mood. A lack of serotonin can give you this anxiety-related depression. You may well find that you need much, much more of it than you first thought.

Look into the amounts of 5HTP in your foods and consider changing your diet to improve the level of 5 HTP. It may improve your mood drastically.

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