Are you tired and exhausted?
It’s as if you’re looking for something but don’t know what it is… Your mind is working nonstop… Your mind chatter is torturing… And, there are those heart palpitations and speeding heart beats… Your breathing becomes shallow and your hormones a mess… PMS, pre-menopausal symptoms, thyroid issues… You have low tolerance to people and daily annoyances… Sounds familiar?
In the past month alone I had more than 20 clients and students approaching me regarding their anxiety issues…
Anxiety is very individualized condition. It comes in various shapes and forms, different severity and intensity. It carries different pains and signs and poses varying challenges for its sufferers. The DSM (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) lists more than 30 different disorders under anxiety… Yet, if you dig at the core of it, no one really knows what anxiety is and where it comes from…
New studies link anxiety to autoimmune disease, Hashimoto Thyroiditis being a common one I see in my practice… Yet, is it a cause or an effect of the autoimmune disease? No one really knows. What we know for sure is that anxiety increases inflammation in the body and the inflammation in its turn increases anxiety… A viscous cycle. Turning on the furnace in our cells turns it on in our brain and vice versa.
I see anxiety as a gentle (or may be not so gentle at times) warning sign sent our way to tell us that we’re over doing it… over thinking, over acting, over working… We need to slow down… slow down the pace of our life and the speed of our thoughts… we need to close those pop-up windows that keep surfacing out of no where and jamming our mental screen. We need to slow down this crazy chatter and endless clutter of to-dos, ideas, information, worries, and fears…
My favourite way of slowing down is taking a deep breath, grab my journal and do a “Brain Dump”… Pouring my thoughts onto the pages gives my brain a break… It helps me organize my thoughts and decide on what I need to keep in my mind and what I need to let go of…
Hit reply and let me know, what’s your favourite way of SLOWING DOWN?