Aaaaaand breathe

“Hello! How are you?”

How many times a day does that get asked of you? Do you answer honestly?!

Take a moment and check in with your body. How’s IT doing? Any tight muscles or painful joints? High temperature? Any sensation in the pit of your stomach? Heart rate up at all? How’s your breathing?

With so much going on in the world it’s no wonder many, when considering these questions will feel one or more of them: a myriad of symptoms of stress taking its toll on their body. Yet they plough on regardless and ignore what their body is telling them: you need to calm down/take a break/rest.

NB: there follows descriptions of anxiety and ptsd which may trigger some readers’ emotional responses.

An increasingly higher amount in the past five years will also be experiencing one or more ongoing symptoms ALL day EVERY day. Chronic stress and anxiety is on the rise, yet we live in an age where robots and computers supposedly take the strain for us. What’s going on?

If you live with anxiety you’ll know the feeling of dread that permanently takes it’s seat at your table. A background cocktail of self doubt, criticism and fear which, the more you try and suppress or control, the worse it seems to get. This is a nervous system in deregulation mode. Fight or Flight, to put it in every day parlance. We’re on high alert for the next disaster or attack, ready to swing into action at a moments notice. Which, as I tell my classes, is great if you’re faced with a tiger. Not so much if you’re just trying to do the food shop.

Modern life, for all supposed conveniences, ISNT convenient for our nervous systems. Our nervous system is meant to follow the cycles nature provides: the seasons, the circadian rhythm of sun and moon, the natural cycles of the phases of ageing. As tech does more and more to override nature, we get further and further away from a regulated, balanced nervous system.

In my early twenties I suffered from anxiety. Away from home at university, burning the candle at both ends, no family structure to keep me grounded, I experienced burnout and high levels of stress. The comfort of home and parents who were pragmatic and practical in equal measure helped me navigate these new choppy waters, and I was seemingly ‘ok’. But then a huge life event threw me off course. I was sexually assaulted on my walk home from the bus stop one evening and what followed was a nose dive into despair, confidence crisis and, eventually diagnosed, post traumatic stress disorder. It took seven years to get that diagnosis and that isn’t because of neglect by doctors or failing health systems: ptsd often goes unnoticed as we mask its symptoms and try to ‘pull ourselves together’.

I was lucky: I had a diagnosis, I received counselling and I received EMDR treatment as a part of that- around 6 sessions and I was back to ‘normal’.

But during those seven years ‘in anxiety limbo’, I was active in my search for self soothing techniques and can advocate for each and every one of them ‘working’. Certainly in terms of management of symptoms. In fact, I honestly believe I’d never have received my diagnosis and subsequent support without them. What were they? Yoga, reiki, meditation. The big 3 for me! Did they ‘fix’ me? They certainly helped. Did they make me more self aware and able to ask for help? Definitely. Yoga connects us to our body in profound and subtle ways which gently helps us recognise when we’re deregulated and feeling unnerved. Dissociation is a very clever way our brain masks the fact anything’s wrong, to help us not go through the pain of it, yet it’s not very efficient! Fear and anxiety are still there in the background. What yoga does is carefully dismantle that layer of fog which stops us knowing we’re ’not Ok’ and, what’s even better, it teaches us it’s TRULY ‘ok not to be ok’ that it’s safe to observe ourselves and act according to where we are, as opposed to where we think we are. How? Mainly through the breath. Conscious connection to breath is the heart of yoga and it saved my life!

If any of what I’ve spoken about resonates and you’re not ok at the moment: ask for help. Talk to a friend or family member, or your gp. You don’t have to have a recent traumatic event to have occurred to experience what I did: grief, old beliefs from your past, hormones and undiagnosed conditions can all be root causes. But you’re not alone and there is amazing help available. And, should you start the journey of healing, may I suggest breathwork as a part of it? No need for stretch pants and fancy poses to feel the benefits of yoga on your nervous system! Just slow, deep belly breaths can help take you from fight or flight to rest & digest in as little as a couple of minutes.

Want to learn more?

Join me in this one off, specialist workshop bookable at the TBIS website under ‘events’