Anxiety doesn't only live in our thoughts. It lives in our body.

Heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, brain fog...

Anxiety doesn't only live in our thoughts. It lives in our body. And directly addressing how it shows up in our body is often the key to overcoming anxiety as a whole

Over the last decade, ground breaking science has revealed something startling about the brain-body connection. When researchers looked at the amount of signals traveling between our body and our brain, this is what they found:

80-90% of the signals are traveling from our body to our brain

10-20% of the signals are traveling from our brain to our body

What does that mean?

Well, there's a long held debate in psychology about whether thoughts give rise to feelings or feelings give rise to thoughts. In other words, do I feel sad because I think sad thoughts, or do I think sad thoughts because I feel sad?

The answer, like most things in life, is both. It's a feedback loop that reinforces itself.

But since there are so many more pathways going from our body to our brain compared with the other way around, it's clear that the feelings in our body are carrying a lot more information up to our brain than our conscious thoughts are sending back to our body.

So many interventions in popular psychology rely on changing our thoughts, while so few focus on dealing directly with the physical symptoms of anxiety

As a result, many of us are carrying around a massive backlog of feelings that keep our nervous system on constant high alert. We need to find safe and stable ways to process this backlog while gradually teaching our brain that the sensations in our body are not a threat.

When our nervous system is able to easily handle the flow of information, it makes it easier to take a step back and get some distance from the flood of sensations that might otherwise overwhelm us. This state is called nervous system regulation

In resilience,
Caitlin