March 2025: Anxiety

Posted on Mar 30, 2025

This month’s blog entry is going to be a little different as it isn’t based upon discovering a theme in my journal entries for the past month. It is actually based upon conversations. I have talked about anxiety a lot this month. And I have never developed a handout exclusively about anxiety. So, I decided this blog entry would be an excellent springboard for both objectives: blog and handout.

Along with depression, I have struggled with anxiety my entire life. However, it was given a name a little further along the healing journey – and even further when it was added to my alphabet soup of diagnoses (GAD – Generalized Anxiety Disorder) and ‘treated’ in some form. Anxiety is somewhat challenging to address as it is many different things to different people; and it serves different purposes in the grand scheme of psychology. It can be both a symptom and a disorder in its own right. It can be a learned behaviour and part of faulty brain circuitry.

For the most part, I have seen anxiety as falling under the umbrella of trapped trauma response – namely the freeze response of flight, fright, or freeze – a way for our brains to ‘play dead’ – spinning our wheels instead of actually dealing with the threat. When we complete the trauma loop (see July 2024), we can help our bodies shake off the perceived threat and rejoin the land of the living, our tribe or community.  But often our brains and bodies get stuck in hyper-vigilance – the facet of anxiety of being on high alert, always on the lookout for danger.

Or we overthink situations – what we said or did, what someone else said or did – looking for the missed cue or message that will get us in trouble or show us in a bad light. This is also a factor in OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) – we get stuck in spiralling thoughts or think we must get something right in order to prevent something bad from happening. In a nutshell, anxiety in any form is a way our brains and bodies are communicating that something isn’t quite right – whether the unfinished business of trapped trauma, learned behaviour from being raised by anxious parents/guardians/systems, or survival mechanisms gone awry.

Regrettably, I have limited my therapeutic approach to anxiety through the lens of trapped trauma – if we complete the trauma loop, the anxiety should abate. It came to my attention this month, that the recovery from anxiety is much more nuanced than that; and I had to dig into my arsenal of personal coping strategies to assist some people. Above all, anxiety is about retraining the brain to recognize and/or manage perceived threats – the brain is in overdrive, and we need to help it downshift – to override the autopilot system. And often this is necessary before we can consider how the anxiety came to be in the first place.

There are a number of ways to downshift our anxious brains depending on the situation at hand. A few coping strategies (versus default mechanisms) will be explored briefly (in no particular order): the 3Rs; slowing the spiral to get to the centre of the cyclone; worry assessment formula; developing a fourth option to the default fight, flight, or freeze when danger is detected; deep breathing.

One of the first ‘tricks’ I learned in managing my anxiety was slowing down the spiralling thoughts and sensations to get to the underlying core belief fuelling the storm. At the centre of my cyclone or bottom of my spiralling thoughts was the belief that “I can’t do this.” The first time I used this trick, I had to ask my professor why he thought I could do the task at hand so that I could counter the flawed belief with “I can do this because…” Or as my counselling supervisor used to say to me: “You can do this – you are doing this” when I had doubts about my effectiveness as a counselling therapist. That belief that I was already doing what terrified me helped immensely.

A client recently shared with me a podcast clip that identified the antidote to anxiety was the statement: “I am capable” which totally fits with this ‘trick.’ The reason we are anxious is because we think we do not have what it takes to deal with the perceived threat (such as a challenging assignment or an intimidating boss or difficult co-worker or getting back into dating). When we switch up the inner dialogue to recognize we are capable to face our fear, it loses some of its fury.

Another approach is to identify the perceived threat: determining what the worst-case scenario is and developing a game plan of how to manage it. This is the worry assessment formula: 1) what is the worst-case scenario; 2) how likely is it to happen; 3) even if it has only a 1% chance of happening, what would I do? I used this formula without knowing about anxiety or coping strategies back when I was living in the Yukon and there was a case of West Nile Virus reported in southern AB (a long way from the Yukon!). While chances were low that I would contact West Nile Virus, if I did, there were two options: I would either die (and I believe in an afterlife, so was that really so terrible?), or I would be taken to hospital, receive treatment, and recover. This helped reduce my anxiety knowing I was capable of handling whatever came my way.

Sometimes, our thoughts spiral so out of control that we can’t think straight. In these moments, we may need to start with deep breathing in order to engage our parasympathetic nervous system (as our sympathetic nervous system is the one in overdrive when we are anxious). This type of breathing is called a few different things such as belly breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, or singer’s breath; but the principle is to inhale through the nose, hold it a moment, then exhale through the mouth. The idea is to breathe deeply past our lungs into our bellies (technically the diaphragm). My personal practise is to take three of these slow, deep breaths followed by checking in to our bodies to see if our parasympathetic nervous system has engaged (such as lower heart rate, regular breathing instead of hyperventilating, decreased shaking or trembling, lessened chest pain, etc.). If still agitated, take three more slow, deep breaths followed by another check-in. Repeat until body is in a normal, regulated state.

Once our brain is back online and functioning reasonably well, we can attempt coping strategies like the ones already mentioned or try practising the 3 Rs: Relabel, Revalue, Redirect. The full version is 4 steps (courtesy of Jeffery M. Schwartz in Brain Lock); but we tend to recall information in groups of three. So reducing it to only three things to remember sets ourselves up for success – and works just as well. When we catch our brains in an anxious mode, we can relabel the thought as intrusive (unwanted), revalue it as unhelpful, and redirect to a helpful or even neutral thought such as practising the mindfulness technique of taking note of your surroundings. If driving, take note of the objects in your car, the people with you, the scenery passing by. In any situation, you can take a moment to pay attention to your surroundings and identify what you see, hear, smell, touch, etc.

The Fourth Option ‘trick’ is usually most helpful when our anxiety is specifically trauma based rather than learned behaviour or a more general condition. The ‘tricks’ already mentioned can act as a ‘fourth option’ when we are trying to reprogram our amygdala to not overreact to perceived dangers based on past experience rather than the present moment. Sometimes our anxiety is actually an emotional flashback to previous trauma; and we need to take note that we are remembering and not reliving – grounding our self in the present moment by the mindful practice of paying attention by what we see, hear, taste, smell, etc. or to our current situation instead the traumatic one (such as no longer a vulnerable child, but an adult with choices).

A broader approach to anxiety is to understand it in terms of unmet attachment needs (see Nov 2023). As this blog is already pretty long, I will condense this last point by noting that when our early attachment needs are not sufficiently met, it hijacks our systems from developing a core sense of safety and security. In the absence of this solid core, the vacuum is filled with anxiety. We are always on high alert trying to ascertain how to keep ourselves safe and secure. In this way, it is a form of trapped trauma that can be addressed by identifying the unmet need(s) and figuring out how to meet that need retrospectively through inner child work and my version of narrative internal family systems (see Nov 2024).

Much of these tricks are what I use myself to manage my anxiety whether it is from trapped trauma, unmet attachment needs, my OCD, GAD, or cPTSD. Please let me know if any of these tricks are helpful for you. And please share any coping strategies that you have found helpful in managing your own anxiety. If you are one of the lucky few who doesn’t struggle with any form of anxiety, hopefully this blog sheds some light on what your friends, family members, peers, and others might be going through and feel free to encourage them to see how they are capable to meet the challenges and perceived threats that they face!