Exercises To Calm Your Anxiety - an Intro to Somatic Psychotherapy
Do you ever feel nervous or on edge? Have pervasive worries? Tend to jump to the worst case scenario? Maybe avoid certain situations or places out of fear? Or do you simply feel stuck? You’re not alone. While everyone experiences these things now and then, sometimes, these feelings can become so intense or frequent that they have a negative impact on daily life.
Approximately 1 in 10 Canadians experience anxiety disorders - that’s approximately 100,000 people who experience anxiety in Ottawa. Treatment is helpful, particularly somatic or movement based treatment. In mental health counselling for anxiety, my clients often want tools that they can use in the moment, on their own, to help calm their nervous system and reduce the feelings or impact of anxiety. We’re going to cover a few examples that you can use immediately in this blog post.
Somatic Mental Health
The word “somatic” is derived from the latin and ancient greek word, “soma” meaning “body”. As such, somatic mental health approaches to treat trauma, stress and anxiety involve awareness of body sensations, movements, and breathwork. The general premise is that since anxiety does not just happen within the mind but has profound physical impacts as well, that healing must also involve practices and techniques that involve the body as a whole.
Exercises for Anxiety
Shake it off
This is an exercise that could be done seated or standing. It involves three seamless steps of grounding, shaking, and harvesting. Start with gently and slowly shaking or swaying your shoulders side to side. Try to focus your awareness of your body connecting to the ground (or chair) and continue to shake for a minute or two. If your mind wanders, bring your awareness back to the shaking movement. Once you are feeling the groundedness, the contact between your body and its environment, breath slowly and try to relax into it. This is “harvesting” the strength and stability of the ground around you. After doing this for a couple of minutes, if you’d like you can begin to add shaking or swaying to other parts of your body, such as your head and neck or your knees and legs if standing. Continue for a few more minutes until you feel your body regulate and anxiety lessen.
Spine stacking and unfurling
If you’ve ever tried yoga, you might already be familiar with this technique. Inverted or semi-inverted movements are calming. Begin by standing comfortably and collapse your upper body down, like you feel a big weight on your shoulders and are slumped over. Take a big breath in and out. Slowly and gently, starting from the base of your spine (lower back), bring your body back up, one vertebrae at a time. This should feel as if you’re stacking Lego blocks one on top of each other until your spine is stacked upright and you’re looking ahead. Repeat several times, going slowly. Notice how your breath responds as you become upright. You should feel more empowered and more in control. Unfurling, is the same process but more fluidly and quickly. Experiment with which works best for you. This technique is most helpful when you are feeling like you’re in a freeze state, paralysed or numb.
Crossing the midline
The midline is essentially the centre of the body, from top to bottom, and corresponds to the vagus nerve. Midline movements are found throughout the world in various cultures, throughout history, such as in Qigong and even in prayer. Start by sitting or standing comfortably. You’re then going to start pushing the air with each hand to the opposite side. For example, take your right hand and at chest height, slowly push the air to the left side of your body until your right arm is fully extended. The repeat with the left hand to the right side and so on. You can imagine you’re pushing an invisible ball if that’s helpful. Continue for a few minutes.
In Conclusion
Working with the mind and body is important in helping manage anxiety. Somatic exercises, along with somatic-based psychotherapy and mental health counselling, can help you to get to the root causes of anxiety and provide you with skills that you can use on your own to help you feel like your best self. I hope you found these suggestions helpful. If you give them a try, let me know if they worked for you! If you’re looking for more assistance, please reach out and book a complimentary consult.
