Anxiety Talking

You don’t need to prove it to a jury.

There are many ways to release anxiety. We might practice yoga, go for a swim, do a breathing practice, or connect with a friend. When we’re jumping out of our skin, we need strong action to down-regulate our nervous system. When we feel a bit uneasy and unsettled, we might choose something less intense, like witnessing our thoughts and taking a few deeper breaths.

Many people release anxiety through talking. It could be a stream of consciousness flow of words about nothing in particular, or show up as compulsive catastrophic thinking where we are drawn into endless possibilities of what could go wrong. These can be internal (mind chatter) or expressed in words to someone else.

It is natural for one layer of the mind to generate thoughts and much of this is driven by the nervous system and our perception of threat. When we entertain “what-if” scenarios, we are trying to prepare for danger so we can keep ourselves safe. Unfortunately, we can imagine this so vividly that our nervous system does not know it is not happening in real life. This creates a feeling of impending doom and heightened hypervigilance.

We feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and complexity of what we’re dealing with. We have the disconnection and core deficiency beliefs of childhood trauma. We have…