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Moving Through Anxiety in the Midst of Difficult Seasons

Are you stressed out? Caught up in anxiety?

Well, yeah! That’s totally normal when uncertainty and change are occurring in ways we haven’t seen in our lifetime. Though some of us enjoy a challenge, this is a big one!

How can we take care of our anxiety, as one means of caring for our overall health?

It helps to understand a few things about anxiety.

At its basis, anxiety is fear. We learn that something might be a threat to us and our primal brain signals us (tells our body) to immediately shut down or flee. We often do neither, immediately. We just go about what we were doing for the time being, stuffing down this command to our bodies. It only takes a couple of days of this to get an anxiety hangover!

Then the urge to shut down or feel restlessness seems unavoidable.

What to do?

First things first – help your body – move! Help it get unstuck, or heed the call to flee by really moving it! Shake it, stretch it, exercise it, dance it! Release the pent-up energy!

Then it can be time to take a look at your stress management toolbox. Think of it as a customized and changing collection of skills, not one or two tools. Look in there for tools you already use that work, tools that have worked in the past, and tools that didn’t work in the past because they weren’t given a fair trial.

Be mindful of an internal “unwilling” part that says “I already know what will help me and I don’t wanna!”

Anxiety itself can make us fitful and unwilling. This could be that primal shutdown. Move through it.

Then consider building a more complete medicine box by thinking of the whole you – body, mind, spirit.

Here is a shortlist of suggestions you can work into a routine: