Passing states of worry, unease, edginess, and even fear are so commonly experienced that we might call them an ordinary part of life.
When life situations are uncertain, as they so often are, and we’re not completely sure what we may ourselves may be called upon to do in order to resolve them, it’s natural to tense up. The unknown is felt in the body as a kind of question, waiting to be answered.
There are also many factors of contemporary life that trigger the body at the nervous system level to signal possible dangers – sudden loud noises, pollution, chaotic energies, and information overload can all be processed by the body through tension in our stomachs, restricted breathing, and racing hearts.
For some of us, chronic fear becomes a burden of its own. Anxiety is a problem when it seriously disrupts our lives when we are unable to relax fully after the resolution of a situation, and when it starts to create physical and mental health problems for us.
Women are more likely than men to be given a diagnosis of anxiety and are more likely to be prescribed anti-anxiety drugs. This sets us up easily for dependence and eventually addiction, due to the habit-forming properties of these drugs, which can become problematic very quickly.
For those of us struggling with anxiety, there are many good reasons to try working with natural remedies before turning to a prescription. The main concern is that anti-anxiety drugs are not only very quickly addictive but also wane in effectiveness, meaning that they are not a real solution, only a postponement of the inevitable.
On the positive side, anxiety is responsive to many natural interventions, including lifestyle changes like better exercise, sleep, and eating patterns.
What are natural remedies for anxiety?
Anxiety treatments are considered natural if they do not involve prescription medications. Herbs, nutritional supplements, aromatherapy, exercise, and mindfulness practices are examples of natural remedies for anxiety.
From Villa Kali Ma’s point of view, the most important natural remedies for anxiety to know about are exercise, movement, yoga poses, breath work, and parasympathetic nervous system stimulation.
Regular Exercise
Exercise is the most potent natural mental health intervention. This is because when the body is exercised to appropriate levels of physical exhaustion, many beneficial physiological changes take place within the body.
Natural hormones and neurotransmitters that calm and soothe the body are triggered to flow through the entire body system through exercise. Exercise always works in a pinch, and can be used on the spot to avert a panic attack, because it interrupts the body from effectively creating the anxious state.
Release through Movement
The body creates anxious feelings by restricting breath, tensing muscles, and increasing the heart rate. The body is preparing for action because it believes us to be in danger. Once prepared for action, it’s hard to release those energies without actually taking some kind of intense physical action.
We can help ourselves release anxiety by moving the body vigorously. The best way to do it is to let the body do what it’s trying to do, rather than to work against the body. Anxiety is the body’s attempt to create safety through running away or fighting. Therefore quick, very energetic exercises that allow the body to use up the urge to run and fight will release the anxious state most directly.
The trick is to move the body until you feel like you are at your fitness limit, out of breath, warmed up, and heart pounding. You may want to mimic punching or fighting motions, such as those used in martial arts.
Exhaustion can be achieved quickly, depending on your fitness level, by running, doing squats or push-ups, HIIT, jumping jacks, or anything else that quickly spends your excess energy and gets you into a state of full body activation.
Calming Yoga Poses
Other forms of exercise that are helpful for anxiety include calming, regulating poses such as those taught in yoga, which stimulate adrenal glands directly, and other parts of the body, to induce the relax and release stage. Therefore, if vigorous physical activity isn’t available, you may also be able to interrupt an anxiety attack through poses like forward bends and child’s pose, or gentle twists.
Breath Work
The trick to using breathwork for anxiety is to shorten the in-breath and to lengthen the out-breath. During anxiety, we over-oxygenate through hyperventilation, because the body is preparing for a fight or flight situation. As described above, we can help the body by allowing the body to experience vigorous physical exercise, which will give it the opportunity to mimic fight or flight sufficiently, so it can calm down.
If this isn’t an option, we can also support the body to trigger calm down by consciously inducing the relaxation mode, through the breath.
This can be quickly achieved, much more quickly than we might imagine, through following simple breathing patterns, such as box breath.
Box breath goes like this:
Breathe in for a count of 4 full seconds (one Mississippi, two…)
Hold your breath for a count of 4 seconds
Breathe out for a count of 4 seconds
Hold for a count of 4 seconds
Start again with the 4-second inbreath. Do this whole cycle 4 times. At the end of the 4 cycles, pause to check how you’re feeling, and repeat as many times as may be necessary.
Allow the body to shake, tremble, or gasp if it does, this is part of the discharging of energy.
Parasympathetic Nervous System Stimulation
Finally, another powerful tool to know about is parasympathetic nervous system stimulation. There are many tools and techniques that can be relatively quickly and easily applied, such as this hand space which uses the hands, and this one, which is a gentle vagus nerve stimulator.
Experiment with gentle, easy ways to trigger the vagus nerve. You may want to check out our post on using the Voo Sound, popularized by trauma work pioneer Peter Levine. Further, a quick search on YouTube for “vagus nerve reset” will guide you to many other easy tutorials that demonstrate the principle.
All in all, to quickly encourage the body to release the anxious state, the most important is to go through the body. When the body is appropriately allowed and supported to release the anxious state, the thoughts will gradually calm down.
What does not help is thinking, or mental looping, as this reinforces the tunnel vision and restricted thinking that goes along with anxiety. It is hard to stop thinking during an anxiety attack, therefore going through the body is much easier. Calm the body first, and the mind will follow.
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a very uncomfortable state of being, which has physiological aspects as well as mental and emotional components.
At the physical level, it is experienced as inability to be still, difficulty breathing, rapid heartbeat, sweating, muscle and stomach tension.
At the emotional level, anxiety is felt as a degree of fear, ranging from dread, panic, and terror, to vague unease.
Mentally, anxiety is characterized by worries and obsessions, looping thoughts, and preoccupations with “what ifs…”
What are the signs and symptoms of anxiety?
Chronic anxiety shows up in many ways. Anxiety is strongly correlated with stress and is sometimes indistinguishable. Anxiety generates many health problems, such as stomach and digestion problems, muscle pain, and lowered immunity. Some physical signs that you may have anxiety include high blood pressure, stomach problems, and muscle tension.
Anxiety is most commonly diagnosed because of mental or emotional distress, such as being burdened with worry, tension, and the inability to relax. When you are unable to dismiss worries, especially when you realize that they are out of balance, but you are unable to let them go, that is anxiety. If you are familiar with states of intense dread and panic, you are likely dealing with anxiety.
What are the different types of anxiety?
Anxiety comes in many shapes and forms, with different diagnoses. The most common types of anxiety are generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These conditions are related because they all have to do with fear and maladaptive attempts to cope with intense unease.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder is diagnosed when people experience the symptoms of anxiety to a life-disrupting degree, and when the anxiety appears throughout their lives (is “generalized”).
Panic disorder is diagnosed when a person experiences panic attacks.
Phobias refer to anxiety that is centered around specific topics, such as social phobia when we fear social connection and contact with groups or other people.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a form of anxiety that involves compulsive behavior and obsessive thoughts.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is diagnosed when the anxiety is clearly connected to specific traumas.
When is it best to get help for anxiety?
If anxiety is making your life miserable, we here at Villa Kali Ma extend you our compassion, and we encourage you to get some kind of help. That help doesn’t have to be clinical, though it could be. Anxiety can be helpfully treated through many different paths, including yoga, diet, meditation, even massage and essential oils. You should be able to find a kind of help that fits you and who you are, what you value, and what you really need.
The loneliness of any mental health condition is usually a big component of the suffering and can be greatly lessened by reaching out to someone who will connect with you kindly to help you find a solution.
What treatment programs does Villa Kali Ma have that can assist women with anxiety?
Villa Kali Ma addresses anxiety through our women’s mental health treatment program, and through our dedicated trauma facility. Healing anxiety is also a part of recovery from substance abuse, as most substances disrupt our ability to self-regulate our emotions, so we address it in our addiction treatment programs.
It can be helpful to know that the strong majority of women who turn to substances to cope with their lives have experienced some measure of traumatization, and frequently qualify for an anxiety disorder.
Overall, the interactions between alcohol, drugs, anxiety, trauma, and mental health are complex and require thoughtful, attentive care to unravel and treat. It can be done, though! We know, because we’ve helped many women free themselves already.
Why is holistic treatment most ideal for anxiety?
We at Villa Kali Ma strongly favor holistic treatment for anxiety for one simple reason: the existing mainstream medical solutions, prescription anxiolytic drugs, do not work except as an instant fix. They do not cure the underlying condition, and instead lead to addiction. To us, this is not a solution, but rather a trap.
Holistic treatments sometimes take longer and require that we do hard work to change at deep levels (though that work is not as hard as we may fear). However, changes made through holistic treatment are longer lasting, have no side effects, and have the upside of leading us into greater, kinder contact with ourselves.
That said, we integrate our holistic approaches with the Western medical model for a reason. For us, it is not an either-or, but rather a case of both models working together.
Villa Kali Ma supports natural remedies for anxiety
Villa Kali Ma offers many natural treatment paths for healing anxiety. We treat women’s anxiety with nutrition, yoga, mindfulness, creative arts therapies, outdoor therapies, massage therapy, aromatherapy, and body psychotherapy (somatic therapy), in addition to the most effective psychotherapy approaches available.