The best antidote for anxiety is curiosity

Anxiety leads to worry and worry leads to more anxiety.

“Great” you may say to yourself “thank you very much! Now I’m worried that I worry too much!”

How do we break this cycle?

Let’s break it down for a moment.

Anxiety is “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome”.

How do we deal with something with an uncertain outcome? We naturally seek ways to control things.

One way that gives us a false sense of control is … worrying. 

 Worrying is an unuseful habit but we keep doing it because we feel like at least we’re doing something about the situation, which in our mind is better than doing nothing.

I don’t know about you but when someone tells me not to worry I worry more. 

We need to find a way to substitute worry for something else. What can we substitute it with?

How about curiosity?

What if instead of letting our minds run off with the worst case scenario we pause to notice how the worry or better yet, the anxiety underlying the worry feels in our body.

If we’re truly able to be present with ourselves and approach whatever arises with the curiosity of an eager scientist we might find that our sensations and feelings take the foreground and the worry dissipates to the background. 

The more we practice this, the less we get caught up in the cycle of worry.

Our bodymind learns that there are other, more effective ways to deal with our anxiety and learns to prioritize those ways rather than revert to worry. 

This is one of the ways we approach working with anxiety in Somatic Therapy.