Anxiety is a physical sensation, not a mental state.

Let’s back up 50,000 years or so. Imagine you’re a Neanderthal taking a leisurely stroll over the fields. Suddenly, in the neighboring bushes, you hear a tiger. In a millisecond, your entire body starts reacting. Your pulse quickens, your breathing becomes shallow, your eyes widen, your body starts creating adrenaline.

Everything going on in your body is wonderful; you’re prepared to survive this tiger encounter. There’s only one minor problem. It wasn’t a tiger. It was a little prehistoric weasel. Now your body is poised for fight-or-flight, your heart is beating, you’re totally jacked up on adrenaline… although there is no danger.

This is your body on anxiety. Replace the (nonexistent) tiger in the bushes with social media, traffic, politics, Covid-19, money, childcare, climate change, work stress, family turmoil, and you can immediately see why anxiety is the most frequent mental disorder in America, affecting roughly 20 percent of the population. Modern-day humans are simply a bunch of freaked-out Neanderthals in fight-or-flight mode 24/7.

Anxiety is an instinct in our body that says, "I'm not safe right now,'” says Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, author of Widen The Window: Training Your Body and Brain to Anxiety, "is an instinct in our body that says, "I'm not safe right now,"" says Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, author of Widen's "The Window Recovering: Recovering Your Brain: Recovering Your Brain: Rexiety. “It’s automatic, incredibly rapid and unconscious.”

Your surviving brain vs. your reasoning brain

In her work, Stanley makes the distinction between the thinking brain, our neocortex, responsible for decision-making, reasoning, ethics, conscious memory, learning, and the survival brain — the limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum — which handles our basic survival, emotions, implicit memory, and stress arousal.

One of the survival brain’s most critical roles, according to Stanley, is neuroception, an unconscious process of rapidly assessing the internal and external environment for safety and threat. When danger is seen, your surviving brain sends an instantaneous stress arousal message to your body by turning on the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in the production of particular hormones that contribute to various bodily sensations associated to our heart, respiration, and digestion. “Whatever’s happening in the survival brain has these massive rippling effects through our body,” Stanley adds.

As Stephen Porges, PhD, a psychologist and the creator of the Polyvagal Theory, explains in an interview with PsychAlive, “These responses are not voluntary. Our nervous system is gathering up information in the surroundings, not on a cognitive level, but on a neurobiological level.”

Importantly, when we’re stuck in a protective response, the thinking brain is the last to be aware that something is wrong.

“The thinking brain isn’t what decides whether we’re worried, whether we’re feeling threatened or challenged, whether we’re going to turn stress on, if we’re going to turn emotions on,” Stanley adds. “Stress arousal and emotions belong to the survival brain.”

So if you want to track your anxiety, your body, not your ideas, will be your most precise map.

The talk therapy trap

Unlike our prehistoric ancestors (who would have dealt with anxiety by sprinting, panting, or shaking like a dog and letting the cortisol flow through their system, according to Stanley), modern anxiety sufferers resort to their trustworthy buddy, their thinking brain. “Most people identify anxiety by their ideas since most people identify with their thinking brain,” she continues.

The trouble is that when it comes to controlling our nervous system after a stress response (read: anxiety), our thinking brain is the very worst instrument for the job. That’s because, according to Porges, even after becoming aware of the physical response, we often don’t know what has provoked that response. For Stanley, a veteran who was diagnosed with PTSD, this realization was a crucial turning point. “Recovery from stress and anxiety is a survival brain job.”

We are a cerebral culture, which makes us very equipped to deal with problems that demand reason and logic — think moral dilemmas — and less equipped to deal with problems where cognitive reasoning can merely make them worse. Having a “fight or flight” response to running late to brunch may seem like an exaggeration, but waiting in traffic, you are biologically experiencing it all the same. We utilize our thinking brain to try and decide if the situation is “worth” being anxious about, and then we try to push our nervous system to comply. “Our consciousness gets separated from our body in such moments,” explains Stanley. Your thinking brain thinks that you have nothing to feel concerned about, so you spend your days wandering about telling yourself that everything is OK while nevertheless feeling the physical symptoms of worry throughout your body. Even worse, your thinking brain may start to condemn and condemn you for continuing to be concerned even after it’s assured you that everything is alright.

If you, like me, have spent a few decades (and the equivalent of a house down payment) in talk therapy examining all the reasons you’re nervous, this is undoubtedly a hard pill to take. Not only did all that chatting not do anything to reduce anxiety, but it could also perhaps have made it more intense. “Our survival brain tries to keep us safe, but when we dismiss our body and its signals because we’re so caught up in our thinking brain’s stories and thoughts, the survival brain views that as even more threatening,” explains Stanley. “Like a toddler, it’s going to tantrum louder until its message gets through. And that’s why it has become such a terrible cycle.”

Take, for example, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one of the most frequent forms of talk therapy. According to the Mayo Clinic, “CBT helps you become aware of erroneous or negative thinking so you can view challenging events more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.” Sounds wonderful, right? While this kind of analysis could be profoundly helpful when dealing with family issues or working out an ethical question, when it comes to anxiety, which doesn’t take place in your thinking brain, it places the focus on the thought (“I thought there was a tiger!”) and not the physical response which preceded, and even caused, the thought (“my heart is racing and I’m full of adrenaline and I need tools to calm down”).

“We don’t necessarily want to be conscious of and feel discomfort in our bodies because anxiety in our bodies is painful. Instead, we want to try to fixate it and offer it to this external object,” explains Stanley. But if the external object didn’t create the worry, then fixing it won’t lessen the worried sensation.

A bottom-up remedy for anxiety

While talk therapy and medication are still the predominant remedies offered for chronic anxiety, additional methods exist that offer a body-first approach. And while these modalities are still considered “alternative,” an increased interest in “brain science” and neurobiology along with continued research on mindfulness and mind-body connections are shifting our psychological understanding from focusing only on the mind to seeing the brain and body as a cohesive unit.

Part of the issue, according to Pat Ogden, PhD, the developer of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, is that you need to close the loop that began when your body initially went into a stress response. Ogden offers the example of a customer who is black and routinely stopped by the police without cause. When this happened, the man understandably felt himself getting irritated and his body tightening up: a “fight” response. As part of their work together, Ogden helped him identify and act out the physical de-escalation his body needed in order to return to a regulated state, in this case getting to lash out and protect himself within the safety of a therapy session. “We want to finish that impulse in mindfulness so that his brain is integrated and it’s not held in his body anymore,” explains Ogden.

Ogden points out that part of the limitation of talk therapy is that anxiety is often tied to a dysregulated response tied to an unconscious memory, which then gets mistakenly pinned on a current event or thought. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the current content,” adds Ogden.

Stanley, who offers a mental fitness training course to assist people improve resilience, focuses on mindfulness practices. And while at this point it’s a cliché to encourage anybody with anxiety to take 10 deep breaths, her training has helped thousands of people, including active-duty troops. “The military is very skilled in difficult situations, and they’ve trained themselves to turn on the survival brain but don’t always know how to turn it off,” adds Stanley. Studies supported by the Department of Defense indicated that Stanley’s strategy considerably assisted in improving cognitive performance during stress, reducing perceived stress levels, increasing control, and fostering a faster return to baseline after stress arousal.

When your body is undergoing a stress response, the first step is to become aware of objects that assist the surviving brain to feel safe, such as what you can see and hear. “One of the finest ways to make the surviving brain feel anchored is to call attention to where our body is in contact with our environment,” Stanley explains. She suggests focusing on the contact between your feet with the floor, or your body in your chair. As soon as the surviving brain feels grounded and safe, it automatically starts the recuperation process.

Obviously, when you’re caught in a moment of intense worry, trying to breathe deeply or remain aware might feel practically impossible. In those cases, what you need is to get the adrenaline and cortisol out of your system. Stanley proposes jumping rope or running up and down stairs. After 10 minutes, try mindfulness exercise again.