Stopping Anxiety in its Tracks
Last Tuesday an email dropped:
So Brad woke me up with a coughing fit this morning at 7. I was feeling the adrenaline and I couldn't get back to sleep at all. So I got up and did some ooze for about 2 minutes. Definitely felt better and I could get on with my morning. Thank you so much for the practice and the pdf. I think that these will be super helpful.
I stared at my monitor. Really? Jess? The same Jess who’s been plagued by panic attacks since grad school? The one who’s been medicated for decades for high anxiety, but who’s been experiencing more frequent breakthroughs in recent months as the drugs slowly fail?
Two things happened. Her words sank in. And I let out a huge belly whoop.
She DID THE WORK! And it worked!
These are the moments I live for as a Big Leap coach. If a person can shift their mind state just by changing the way their body moves in space, then everything becomes possible. Because the mind keeps us trapped in endless loops that are brutally hard to reroute just by thought alone.
This is where talk therapy hits its outer limits. It’s predominantly thought-based, and while it offers a lot of value in its approach and intent—certainly in the warm cocoon of safety and support the therapist holds for the client—it just doesn’t get at the root of the problem, which is the fact that it’s hard to let go of a thought pattern by thinking your way out of it.
It is difficult if not impossible to control or mediate thought via the same mechanism that’s responsible for its production.
We all know how hard it is to just “let go” of a story once it’s dug its sharp little hooks in. The longer you let it loop, the farther you find yourself swept down the rabbit hole, into whatever emotional storm presents itself. We tend to be taken down by our strongest emotions—those connecting to anger, sadness or fear. Panic, anxiety, stress, irritability, worry, these are just variants on the three main feeling states.
Trying to redirect your thinking when you’re in the grip is like a sandbagger who’s trying to keep a river from bursting its banks. He’s bagging his ass off, chucking sacks and dripping sweat while the waters rise with irrational speed.
In a perfect world, you’d be able to calmly remind your brain that its stories aren’t real, that you don’t have to believe all the thoughts you think, that emotions are just like clouds in the sky and you can watch them pass.
Meanwhile your neurons are spitting out chemicals faster than photons, giving your body every bit of confirmation that this shit’s real, there’s trouble over thataway, we might die and if we don’t die then we’re at least going to lose something that’s important to us.
Hard to sandbag that, even though we might “know” it’s a story.
Somatic approaches shift attention straight to the body, disrupting the flow of energy to the story and giving your brain a chance to reset its focus.
Once you’re caught in the loop of doom, you’re taken down.
Thoughts travel along pathways in our brain, and the more emotionally intense a thought is, the more that neural loop gets locked in. You can almost picture it like a stream of particles inside a particle accelerator…except your brain’s particle accelerator takes it one step farther, actually intensifying the beam as it travels. As each adjacent neuron along the pathway gets hit, it lights up too, making the stream brighter, stronger and harder to redirect with every loop.
The sooner you can recognize you’re looping, the better. This is what Michael Singer is talking about in The Untethered Soul when he says, “Let go now or fall.”
You’ve got to let go.
If you let that story energy ramp up—which you, as a typical human, do expertly, by putting your attention on the worry thoughts—it takes a long, long, long time to sandbag it back into submission.
Sometimes it can take hours. Even days.
It’s also true that the more often you perseverate with those looping thoughts, the deeper the groove—just like a cow path crossing a meadow. Travel that sucker enough times and it’s good and dug.
But no path is permanent. With practice, you can just as readily make new paths, leaving the old one to grow over.
One of the most effective levers for shifting your mind state is movement.
You can’t talk yourself out of fear, panic, jealousy, anger or whatever emotional state you tend to get embroiled in. And it’s next to impossible to sit down and meditate your way out of it. I find it’s even tricky to try to breathe my way into a better state of mind.
But movement? Now, there we have a power tool.
Large-body movement—movement that involves your core or that crosses your midline—forces your motor cortex to wake up. All the brain cells that were quietly dozing are suddenly called into service, and with an immediacy that only electrochemical circuitry can manage, they’re all of a sudden just there—POOF—standing at the wheel with complete focus.
And once they’re at the wheel, they can steer the ship in a different direction.
The more you move, the more activated those motor neurons become. They’re just as excitable as the neurons lining the loop of doom: the longer you engage in that large-body movement, the more lit up your motor loop becomes. As the stream hits adjacent neurons, they wake up and join the stream, making it stronger and more energized.
This is where our hopelessness at multitasking actually works in our favour.
You probably already know from experience that the brain isn’t so good at doing two things at the same time. It’s a master of prioritization. So fairly quickly, that motor loop you’re giving all your attention to overrides the story loop.
This is good news, and it represents a powerful way to free yourself from panic or doom thoughts.
Resetting your energetic and emotional state takes two minutes.
Clock time is important here. It’s essential to give yourself over to moving for a full two minutes. That’s the minimum time it takes to switch loops and reset your brain.
You know how some lightbulbs or monitors take a little while to actually power down when you turn them off? There’s a ghostlike light that persists for a few moments as the mechanism releases the charge.
Your brain’s pathways work the same way. Once a pathway is lit up and humming, it requires a bit of time and focus to turn on a different set of lights and get that pathway more brightly lit. The idea here is to use movement as the circuit-breaker, almost like a sudden flagger who pops up on the darkened road, her two lighted wands ushering you down a different route.
What you’ll notice after those two full minutes of moving your body:
Your body feels different. If you tune in and turn your attention inward, you’ll notice a sense of openness and space that wasn’t there before.
Your emotional state has shifted. You’re no longer in the grip of fear, anger or sadness. You can acknowledge the emotion (and you should, you should, don’t just shove it under the rug) but it doesn’t have the upper hand anymore.
This is what my client discovered when she wrote about getting on with her day. Before she knew how to move through panic, she was at the mercy of her adrenal glands and whatever doom loop they decided to fire up.
Side note: Jess used “ooze”, one of the Fear Melters™ developed by Katie Hendricks, my mentor and teacher at the Hendricks Institute. We use Fear Melters with our clients all. the. time.
You won’t always recognize when you’re in the grip. But when you do, get moving.
The doom loop is a sneaky little fucker. Most of the time you won’t even notice you’re perseverating on an issue. You’ll just gradually feel more and more terrible until you’re snapping at your partner, digging yourself a shame grave or stuffing your face with cheese popovers.
But there are those rare and lucid moments when you do realize you’re experiencing a shift in energy. Those are the moments when a different possibility presents itself.
Grab those moments. When you recognize you’re in the grip—whether you’re running a loop of fear, grief, blame, feeling sorry for yourself, panic, overwhelm, a silent argument with your judgmental father—get moving.
Use core-body movement. Like you’re a bendy willow in a springtime gale. Like you’re at an ecstatic dance session. Like you’re one of those tall inflatable nylon whippy guys that wave and bounce around outside car dealerships.
I just fed google a really long question, and now I know they’re called air dancers. Who knew?
Use cross-body movement. Like you’re doing the macarena. Like you’re hugging yourself one wide-scooping arm at a time. Like you’re throwing slow tai chi punches through molasses, over and over and over.
Two minutes.
The type of movement doesn’t matter as much as just getting moving. Fire that motor cortex up and run it full-out for a good 120 seconds.
If it’s strong enough to shift an anxious person away from the edge of panic and back into a state of presence and productive engagement with life, then this is your next experiment to try.