Centering Thought: I feel my anxiety in my body, moods and thoughts. It can keep me safe from imminent danger. And when true danger is not present, but only perceived, I can use tools like breathing and grounding to center myself in safety.
Anxiety has physical, emotional and mental components. We can feel it in our bodies (a pounding heart rate, sweaty sensation, shaking hands); our moods (nervousness and other feelings on the fear spectrum); and in our thoughts (worry thoughts like, “What if it doesn’t work out?” or self-critical thoughts like, “I’m not good at this” or “They’ll never like me”). Knowing this can help us get some perspective. But over-intellectualizing our emotions is not often enough to cycle out of them, especially when it comes to those that are higher on the spectrum of the more negative emotions——mad, sad or scared.
If we were to plot all feelings along a continuum of 0 to 10——with 0 being a neutral sensation and 10 being the most extreme version of the feeling, such as rage on the mad spectrum——we would find that any version of the mood that goes beyond that middle number 5 on the scale is shaped by “thought distortions.” Thought distortions are just what they sound like: thinking that is skewed by assumptions we cannot actually know.
One example of a thought distortion that leads to anxiety is: “They’ll never like me.”
First and foremost, we cannot predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy. Secondly, even if there is someone in our lives who seemingly will never like us, we are not solely defined by that person’s beliefs about us. Ultimately, no matter what someone thinks of us, we will likely be okay.
If there is imminent threat, however, we can use our anxiety to help us survive through the truest sense of fight-or-flight survival. And even then, when the real danger has passed, we are safe to be ourselves in the world again.
Many of us have survived traumas——great or small; the size does always not matter——that keep our senses rightfully heightened to other similar threats. The initial threat was real to us; therefore, the perceived threat is also potentially real, and often in ways that others around us who have not experienced our specific trauma can relate to alongside us. But that does not make us wrong when we continually scan our environments for threats.
Such hypervigilance can also be tiring. And this alone can create an unhealthy cycle of anxiety that depletes us, rather than keeping us safe as we would like. When that happens, we can use tools like grounding exercises and breath work to center ourselves in our safest realities.
Anxiety is frequently rooted in unresolved trauma that either we have not expressed or otherwise have not healed from after the fact. The good news is that in our lifetimes, we still have time to identify the root trauma and to also find a way to make our peace with it, whatever that looks like for us.