Anxiety is a pervasive and often debilitating mental health condition that affects countless individuals worldwide. It can manifest as a constant feeling of unease, fear, and apprehension about future events, and its impact on mental and physical well-being can be profound. In this article, we will explore the notion that safety is a fundamental cure for anxiety and how the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) can effectively calm the nervous system, offering relief and promoting emotional well-being. We will also examine how anxiety keeps individuals stagnant and interferes with their efforts to complete their health and well-being goals.
Understanding Anxiety
Anxiety is a complex emotional and physiological response to stress. When faced with potential threats or perceived danger, our bodies initiate a “fight or flight” response, preparing us to cope with the situation. While this mechanism can be beneficial in genuine moments of peril, chronic anxiety often leaves individuals overwhelmed, with common symptoms including restlessness, irritability, muscle tension, and excessive worry.
Anxiety wants to avoid pain, not solve problems.
Anxiety often seeks to avoid pain or discomfort rather than actively solving problems due to its nature as a self-protective response to perceived threats. Here’s how anxiety tends to avoid pain and hinder problem-solving:
- Hyper-Focus on Threats: Anxiety often magnifies potential threats, making them seem more significant and imminent than they might be in reality. This hyper-focus on perceived dangers can lead individuals to avoid situations or discussions they believe might be painful or distressing.
- Avoidance Behavior: Anxiety-driven avoidance is a common coping mechanism. People with anxiety may avoid situations, conversations, or even thoughts that they associate with pain or discomfort. This avoidance provides temporary relief but doesn’t address the underlying issues or problems.
- Overthinking and Rumination: Anxiety often leads to overthinking and rumination, where individuals replay distressing thoughts and scenarios repeatedly in their minds. While this can feel like problem-solving, it often leads to more worry and anxiety, rather than effective solutions.
- Fear of Uncertainty: Anxiety tends to thrive on certainty and predictability. It often tries to avoid uncertainty, which can lead to discomfort. Consequently, individuals may hesitate to make decisions or engage in activities that involve an element of uncertainty, even when it’s necessary for problem-solving and personal growth.
- Procrastination: Anxiety can lead to procrastination as a way to avoid the discomfort associated with starting or completing tasks. Instead of addressing problems or challenges head-on, individuals may delay action due to fear of potential difficulties or negative outcomes.
- Perfectionism: Some people with anxiety engage in perfectionism as a way to avoid making mistakes or facing criticism. They might postpone decision-making or problem-solving until they believe they can attain a flawless solution, which can hinder progress and create more anxiety.
- Catastrophizing: Anxiety often involves catastrophic thinking, where individuals anticipate the worst possible outcomes. This can lead to avoidance of situations they perceive as leading to painful consequences, even when the likelihood of such consequences is low.
The Role of Safety
Safety plays a pivotal role in alleviating anxiety. By providing a sense of security and reducing perceived threats, both physically and emotionally, it can be a powerful antidote to anxiety. Let’s delve into how safety can calm the nervous system:
- Physical Safety: Ensuring physical safety through protective measures, such as securing your surroundings, wearing seatbelts, and avoiding risky situations, can significantly reduce anxiety. When you know you are physically safe, your body and mind can relax.
- Emotional Safety: Emotional safety involves creating a nurturing and supportive environment. Building healthy relationships, setting clear boundaries, and practicing effective communication can foster emotional well-being. Feeling emotionally secure reduces the anxiety associated with interpersonal conflicts and stress.
The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
EFT, often referred to as “tapping,” is a therapeutic technique that combines elements of traditional Chinese medicine with modern psychology. This technique involves tapping on specific acupressure points on the body while focusing on emotional or physical issues, aiming to balance the body’s energy system and relieve negative emotions.
How EFT Calms the Nervous System
EFT can calm the nervous system by addressing the emotional and physical aspects of anxiety simultaneously.
Here’s how it works:
- Acknowledgment: The process begins by acknowledging the specific anxiety or emotional issue you want to address. When you acknowledge what is happening in your body, you are no longer in conflict with what is happening. Dropping the resistance to having the anxiety lets you move out of a defensive posture. You accept what is going on and are open to what is happening now (not agreeing with it). Your ability to solve problems are greatly increased because you are no longer locking all your energy into trying to protect yourself from the feeling of anxiety. The anxiety is there for a reason, to help you avoid pain. An open attitude to listening to what it is trying to tell you instead of trying to force it to go away is needed. Once you accept that the anxiety is trying to send you a message to help you avoid pain in the future, you are naturally letting your emotional guidance system to function as it should. You are making a safe and supportive environment for your own feelings.
- Tapping: You tap on specific acupressure points while repeating statements or affirmations that focus on the issue at hand. The physical act of tapping on these points is theorized to disrupt the usual thought and emotional patterns associated with the neural pathways being activated, allowing for new patterns to be established. Tapping also comforts the nervous system through touch. The same places that are tapped are the places you naturally touch when using self-soothing behaviors to regulate your emotional state like holding your face in your hands when stressed, tapping your chin when confused, embracing yourself in a hug when uncomfortable, or grabbing your head or covering your mouth when you are shocked.
- Calming the Amygdala: The amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for processing emotions, often becomes overactive in individuals with anxiety. EFT helps calm the amygdala’s response, reducing the perception of danger and anxiety.
- Reduces Emotional Intensity Permanently: Memories are very unstable and malleable. Emotions are tightly connected to visual, auditory, ole factory (smell), and tactile memories because the neural pathways all fire together. Each time you recall a memory it is recreated and never the same as the last time it was remembered. When the memory is recalled during EFT the safety created by the removal of inner emotional conflict and the self-soothing tapping replaces the anxiety. The emotional intensity of the event is permanently diminished when recalled in the future.
- Reducing Stress Hormones: EFT has been shown to reduce the levels of stress hormones like cortisol, leading to a significant decrease in anxiety symptoms.
The Stagnation of Anxiety
Anxiety often keeps individuals stagnant, hindering their progress toward health and well-being goals. It can cause a lack of motivation, making it challenging to initiate positive changes in one’s life. The constant feeling of unease and worry can lead to procrastination and avoidance of activities that promote overall well-being. Whether it’s exercising regularly, maintaining a balanced diet, or seeking mental health support, anxiety can act as a significant roadblock.
Change makes us anxious because new things are scary. If you have horrible apprehension to join the gym for the first time, you have a fear of the unknown and are anxious about the uncertainty of it all. Maybe you fear failure or looking stupid in front of other people because you are not familiar with the equipment. These are all common feelings we have as humans because new things are threatening.
Anxiety keeps us procrastinating and continually saying, “I’ll start tomorrow, when I’m ready.” The thing is that you won’t feel ready because that gym is still as new and scary as it was yesterday. When it comes to situations like this, anxiety has great intentions to save our life from danger. Instead of getting us out of a jam, it keeps us in a perpetual state of never being ready.
This battle between safety and freedom is constantly playing out inside of us all as we weigh the pros and cons of every decision, every day. After some time, we operate on auto-pilot, deciding that the most worn path is the best choice because it has worked before and hey, we didn’t die! It might not be the best path, but we are familiar with it and anxiety can make it very uncomfortable to try something else until we absolutely HAVE to. Why take a chance?
As you can see, your nervous system means well. It is a lunatic for safety and would never let you leave the house if you let it. It is wired to keep you safe, not happy. Once it feels safe, it will allow you some freedom.
Key Takeaways
Safety is indeed a potent cure for anxiety. By embracing physical and emotional safety measures, we can reduce anxiety’s grip on our lives. The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a valuable tool that can help calm the nervous system, making it an effective complementary practice to alleviate anxiety. Remember, while EFT can be self-administered, it’s always advisable to consult with a trained EFT practitioner for personalized guidance and support in your journey toward emotional well-being. Safety and the right techniques can provide relief, allowing you to lead a calmer, more balanced life and break free from the stagnation that anxiety can bring to your health and well-being goals.