Anxiety and stress management Anglesea
photo by suzy hazelwood
Anxiety and Stress support Anglesea
Anxiety is becoming more and more common in our society. It shows up a little differently for everyone. It can range from tightness in the chest to a feeling of dread or impending doom, racing thoughts, a busy mind, increased heart rate, lightheadedness, butterflies in the gut, loss of appetite. It’s uncomfortable and is often worse with stress.
What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a natural response to perceived danger or uncertainty. It’s your body's way of alerting you to potential threats, triggering the well-known "fight-or-flight" response. While this reaction is crucial for survival, anxiety becomes a problem when it’s constant, overwhelming, or disproportionate to the situation at hand.
Why does Anxiety happen?
Anxiety can be triggered by stressful experiences: significant illness, trauma, relationship breakups or divorce, loss of job or financial pressure, and even chronic stress. It can also be learned or patterned if there’s a history of trauma in early childhood. Abuse or overreliance on substances such as caffeine, alcohol, drugs and even dependence on technology can impact on anxiety, while poor sleep and diet are also factors.
It’s important to note than anxiety often occurs because of a number of factors combined.
What can you do for Anxiety?
These days there is a great range of support for anxiety disorders and working with a therapist or psychologist is an option for many.
What simple lifestyle changes may help with anxiety?
Exercise: regular exercise boosts mood-enhancing hormones such as serotonin, even with simple low impact exercise such as daily walking. Things like yoga, pilates, strength training can all be beneficial.
Diet: A local, seasonal wholefoods diet that avoids excess caffeine, sugar, alcohol may help reduce symptoms. The gut plays a huge role in the production of serotonin and dopamine-neurotransmitters that boost mood. A healthy gut means a happier mind.
Sleep: A healthy, regular sleep cycle can help the nervous system regulate whereas poor sleep and anxiety can co-exist and worsen each other in a negative feedback loop.
Mindfulness and relaxation practices: meditation can help break negative thought patterns and along with breathwork, yoga and other mindfulness practices that help regulate the nervous system can help reduce levels of anxiety
The Stress-Anxiety Connection
Stress differs from anxiety in that its a response to an external event-an argument or time pressure-where anxiety can be present even with no external trigger. However stress can definitely worsen and even be a cause of anxiety.
Chronic stress increases levels of cortisol and adrenaline which can disrupt healthy brain function and also increase anxiety sensitivity. Due to your body being in a prolonged and heightened state of stress it can spiral into anxiety or even panic attack.
Stress also is inherently draining of your mental and emotional reserves, impacts on sleep and your body’s capacity to recover and function optimally so that managing anxious thoughts or feelings can become much more challenging.
A large part of relieving anxiety is learning to manage and adapt to stress in a healthy way through things like self-care, learning how to self-soothe, manage boundaries and say no, and cultivate healthy habits and relationships.
Sustainable change
Recovering from anxiety and stress and reducing symptoms takes time, support, and slow and sustainable change. It’s why I’m so passionate about supporting clients regulate their nervous system with a plan that works for them.
To find out more about how I can support you with acupuncture and chinese medicine in anglesea or if you would like to make an appointment follow the links below.
